by Maggie Dana
TIMBER RIDGE RIDERS
Kate and Holly: The Beginning
Maggie Dana
Copyright 2014 Maggie Dana
http://www.timberridgeriders.com
~ Kate ~
Loudspeakers blare, dogs bark, and instructors yell at their students as I wait my turn to jump. It’s the final phase of this weekend’s combined training event, and I’m trying hard not to let my nerves travel down the reins to Black Magic’s sensitive mouth.
He flicks his ears. I’m cool. Are you?
I love this horse. We’re totally in tune, like best friends who understand each other—no words needed. Not that I actually know much about best friends. I don’t have any. Well, except for Jessica, and she’s not really a best friend, even though I’d like her to be. We just hang out at the barn together. She loves Black Magic as much as I do.
“Are you ready?” says my trainer.
We lock eyes as she wipes a cloth over my highly polished boots. I’ve worked with Renata Mueller—Mrs. Mueller to us kids because we’d never dare call her by her first name—for seven years. Half my life, in fact. I just turned fourteen.
“Yes,” I say.
And I cross my fingers that Magic is ready, too. He’s already carried me through an awesome dressage test and a grueling cross-country course where he didn’t put a foot wrong, despite fences with names like “Tiger’s Trap” and “The Coffin.” Mrs. Mueller thinks we have a chance at qualifying for Young Riders this year.
A long shot, but I’m all over it.
My head itches, so I take off my riding helmet and shake out my thick brown hair. Then I stuff it back into the helmet and hope it doesn’t come tumbling out. I should’ve used a hairnet. There’s a whole pack of them buried somewhere in my tack trunk, along with bobby pins and braiding elastics, but who knows where they all went.
Mrs. Mueller doesn’t have this problem.
I’ve never seen her with messy hair. It’s always glued to her head in a blond bun so tight that it lifts her eyebrows higher than they need to be. But it suits her rigid personality.
The bell rings, and I enter the arena.
Vaguely, I hear the announcer—“Kate McGregor riding Black Magic, owned by Sandpiper Stables”—while my horse arches his neck and dances sideways, knowing that all eyes are on him.
What a show-off.
I rub my hand along Magic’s black mane, still wavy from yesterday’s dressage braids.
“Let’s go, buddy,” I whisper.
We canter through the start gate and head for the first fence, a red-and-white vertical, followed by an easy brush jump. No problem. Hanging a sharp left, we clear an ascending oxer, take three strides at an awkward angle, then leap over the hogsback. Magic clips the top rail, but it doesn’t fall.
“Ahhh,” goes the crowd.
Next up is the Liverpool—a water jump—which is always a challenge because your horse has to really stretch to get over it. But if your horse loves to paddle, you run the risk of him splashing about like a toddler. Or even worse, if he hates water, he stops dead in front of the jump, leaving you to fly off and take an unexpected dip.
Magic aces the Liverpool.
Right now, we’re in fifth place. A clean round will put us in line for second or third for the whole competition. I can almost feel Mrs. Mueller gritting her teeth. Black Magic is going to be her superstar horse, the one that puts her and Sandpiper Stables on the three-day-eventing map. There’s a lot riding on my back … and Magic’s.
As we turn toward the next jump, I risk a quick glance at my trainer, hoping to see Dad standing beside her. He rarely comes to my events, but maybe this time—
I swallow my disappointment.
This isn’t about Dad. It’s about me and Magic. We’ve been a team from the beginning, when I helped Mrs. Mueller bring him along from a gangly colt to a promising three-day-event horse with a boatload of attitude.
While the other girls at school obsessed over makeup and boyfriends, I focused on Black Magic. I taught him to pick up his feet without fussing. I groomed every inch of him and found all of his secret tickly spots. On foot, I took him for long walks on the trails and he learned that rocks and tree stumps wouldn’t jump out and eat him. Mrs. Mueller taught me to lunge and long-line him. And when the time was right, she put a saddle on his back and let me be the first one to ride him.
It wasn’t easy.
I got dumped. I landed in the dirt more times than I can count. But I dusted myself off, learned from my mistakes, and moved beyond them. And now, every spare minute I have that’s not involved with barn chores or schoolwork, I spend with Magic. He’s young and ambitious, and he knows when I’m not paying attention.
Like right now.
Despite my idiot mind being somewhere else, Magic jumps the parallel bars and heads for the in-and-out. I hardly remember telling him to do this, but he does. Up and over we go.
All clear, so far.
Then comes the wall. I know it’s not solid—the bricks are fake wood—but it looks forbidding. I think of the YouTube videos I’ve seen of my idols jumping walls like this at Badminton and Rolex Kentucky. Magic lifts up, tucks his front legs, and suddenly we’re on the other side.
He’s a total rock star.
The moment we finish, Mrs. Mueller throws a cooler over Magic’s hindquarters. He’s hardly worked up a sweat, but I walk him out anyway and give him lots of carrots and kisses.
After all the other riders are finished and we’re at the nail-biting stage waiting for results, Magic and I end up in third place and I am so proud of that yellow ribbon I could burst wide open.
Magic couldn’t care less.
All he wants is more treats. So I spoil him rotten.
* * *
The other students at Sandpiper Stables look down their noses at me because I have to work for my riding lessons. In return for Mrs. Mueller’s instruction, I muck stalls, scrub water buckets, clean tack, and groom horses for rich girls who care more about their French manicures than they do about their European warmbloods.
Patrice and Blair are the worst.
Wearing designer breeches tucked into Ariat boots, they lean against the tack room wall pretending not to be in my way as I sweep the aisle. They whisper and giggle. Blair drops a gum wrapper on the ground.
“Oh, sorry,” she says but makes no move to pick it up.
So I do, because Mrs. Mueller gets seriously ticked off when trash ends up on the manure pile. Last week, I retrieved a plastic bag filled with soda cans and shoved it into recycling before Mrs. Mueller got on my case about it.
In Germany she was a promising Olympic star until a bad fall ended her career. So now she teaches, and she’s good at it, but every once in a while I catch her looking wistful, or maybe it’s bitter. It must be hard, really hard, watching your students do the exciting stuff that you once did.
As I pass Magic’s stall, he whickers.
Yesterday’s yellow ribbon is tacked to his door, but the barn princesses don’t care. They don’t give a fig about dressage and cross-country. For them, it’s all about hunters and jumpers and winning a big medal.
And that is totally cool.
I go to their shows. I groom for them, I pamper their horses, and I cheer like mad when they win ribbons and even when they don’t. They never come to my events. I guess it’s beneath them.
Magic whickers again.
It’s a deep-throated rumble that never fails to make me smile no matter how distracted I am. Hanging up my broom, I grab a grooming box, then release both bolts on Magic’s door and slip into his stall. He’d been out
side earlier, rolling in the mud and now it’s time to clean him up.
“You’ve got to look gorgeous,” I say.
His ears twitch as if asking, Why?
“Because you’re gonna be in a movie.”
Jessica will be here soon with her mom’s video camera. We’re pretty sure that Magic knows how to get out of his stall—hence the lower bolt on his door—but nobody’s ever seen him do it. I already asked Mrs. Mueller’s permission to film it.
She said, “A watched pot never boils.”
I think she means that Magic won’t do his Houdini act if he knows we’re spying on him. Of course, for the movie, we won’t fasten the bottom bolt—just the top one.
“Sorry I’m late,” Jessica says.
She dumps a bulging knapsack on Magic’s tack trunk and bounces into his stall. With her strawberry blond curls and enormous brown eyes, Jessica reminds me of Tigger in Winnie the Pooh.
Bounce, bounce, bounce.
But it doesn’t bother Magic. He loves Jessica. In fact, he loves everyone, even Patrice and Blair, especially if they’ve got his favorite snacks—watermelon rinds—which Jessica now tips into his feed bucket. All my barn clothes have pink watermelon stains on them. After he’s through stuffing himself, Magic nuzzles my pockets for more.
“Greedy boy,” I say.
He’s all black—there’s not a speck of white anywhere, not even a couple of white hairs in the center of his forehead or curving around an elegant black hoof. It’s April, and he’s started to shed out. As I brush his ebony coat, clumps of winter hair land at my feet. Dust motes swirl in a shaft of light from the stall’s back window.
Finally, Magic is clean—or as clean as you can make a muddy horse in the middle of shedding season. Across the aisle, Jessica is setting up her mom’s camera on a tripod in the tack room doorway. We could use our cell phones for this, but then we’d have to be up close and personal with Magic, and he’d probably get suspicious and stay meekly inside his stall. This way, we can hide behind the video camera and turn it to follow Magic wherever he goes. It’s got a powerful zoom lens, Jessica tells me. We won’t miss a thing.
If Magic cooperates.
I close his stall door and slide the top bolt, but not the lower one. Then I join Jessica in the tack room.
And we wait.
* * *
I don’t think I’d make a good spy. I could never lie perfectly still in the undergrowth for hours and hours the way my father does when he’s in the jungle photographing butterflies.
He’s going back to the Amazon in June.
While he’s gone, I’m supposed to stay in Vermont with Aunt Marion, Dad’s elder sister. She’s really cool and grows prize-winning roses, but she knows nothing about horses. Instead, I’m hoping that Jessica will invite me to bunk in with her for the summer. She has a big house with a pool—there might even be parties—and we’d get to ride every day. Besides, I can’t be away from the barn. I’ll be competing with Magic, and Mrs. Mueller is depending on me.
Dad doesn’t understand.
He tries, I’ll give him that, but to him horses are merely animals that attract all sorts of interesting insects—like the botflies that lay tiny orange eggs on their legs that my Dad promptly examines with a magnifying glass. Jessica brings me back to earth.
“Look, he’s doing it.”
Magic uses his upper lip—so wiggly and versatile it reminds me of an elephant’s trunk—to slide back the upper bolt. He hesitates a moment, then noses the door sideways. He sticks his head out, looks left and right like a kid about to cross the road, and pushes his way into the aisle.
Jessica gives me a thumbs-up. Yes!
Holding my breath, I watch Magic clatter down the aisle and unlatch his best friend’s door. Webster is the barn’s sweetest pony. He has taught everyone to ride—including me—and now his fuzzy brown face peers around the door, eyes wide with surprise, as if he can’t quite believe this is happening.
Is it okay for me to do this?
He emerges from his stall—a ten-hand bundle of adorableness—and I remember our first show together when I was nine and competing in walk-trot classes. Webbie got loose and stole hay from the pony tied up to the trailer parked next to ours. Within moments, the other pony’s rider smacked Webbie.
So I smacked her.
Our parents made us apologize, and I learned a big lesson that day: Don’t use your fists to solve problems; use your words and your brain.
I double-check the barn’s main doors.
They’re closed. It wouldn’t be good to have Magic and Webbie wandering about outside. There is a gate at the entrance to Sandpiper Stables but it’s never closed. Too many students coming and going. We’re on a quiet road in the back end of nowhere, but still—
Magic turns.
Ears pricked he heads for the feed room. Jessica abandons the tripod and follows him with her mom’s camera, and I follow Jessica.
Behind us comes Webbie.
Like a determined Thelwell pony, he shoves us out of the way. So we stand back—two rookie reporters on a hot story—as Magic jailbreaks the feed room’s double bolts and plunges into paradise as if he hadn’t been fed in weeks. He lifts the grain bin’s metal lid with his nose, shoves his head inside, and—
“Okay, that’s enough,” I say.
I pull Magic’s head from the sweet feed and block Webbie from getting in there, too. He gives me a baleful look.
Horses have no shut-off valve. They don’t know when to stop eating, and their one-way digestive system doesn’t allow for U-turns. In other words, when horses overeat, they can’t barf. Instead, they get a very nasty tummy ache.
Worst case?
Their gut turns into a gigantic pretzel; they colic and die. I can’t help shuddering because it’s too awful to think about.
“Well done,” says Mrs. Mueller.
She strides toward us, smiling, and I guess it means she’s kind of glad that Jessica and I did this, even though she didn’t think it would work.
There are days when Mrs. Mueller runs hot and cold, and you can never predict her moods. One moment, she’s giving you a tongue-lashing; the next, she’s patting you on the back. We lead the escapees into their stalls. I feed Magic the last watermelon rind.
“You did good,” I whisper.
We show Mrs. Mueller our video.
“Perfect,” she declares. “We’ll share it with the others at Wednesday’s meeting.”
* * *
Who knows if it makes an impact? Patrice and Blair sprawl across Mrs. Mueller’s family room couch and giggle, too busy with their iPods to watch our video. Two of the younger kids pay attention, but mostly they ooh and ahh over how cute Webbie is. A new girl, Janet, sits by herself and stares at the screen as if mesmerized. I watched her ride the other day, and she’s good. She’ll give Patrice and Blair a run for their money on the hunter circuit this season.
After playing the video three times, Mrs. Mueller snaps it off and delivers a stern lecture about a horse’s delicate digestive system and how vigilant we must all be about recognizing signs of colic and making sure the stall doors are bolted tight—top and bottom.
Mostly, it falls on deaf ears.
Why should the rich girls bother about stuff like this when they don’t have to take care of their own horses? That’s what Mrs. Mueller—and me—are for. I ride my bike home in the dark and find a note from Dad on the kitchen table.
Don’t forget your homework. Dinner’s in the fridge.
It makes me smile. I always do my homework—always—and Dad’s idea of dinner is leftover pizza or a can of chicken soup. After mom died, neither Dad nor I knew how to boil water, let alone boil an egg, but I figured one of us had to learn.
Dad tried, but he was so hopeless in the kitchen that I took over. I can now whip up mac ’n cheese from a box, hot dogs and beans, and fish sticks. Dad says my peanut-butter-and-jelly sandwiches aren’t bad, either.
Beneath a pile of take-out menus
I find a not-quite-stale loaf of French bread. I slice off a hunk and slather it with butter, then add a wedge of Cheddar and two slices of apple. I take a couple of messy bites and dive into my math textbook. Quadratic equations are much easier to figure out than people.
* * *
Mom’s the one who started me riding. While Dad squirreled himself away at his university, lecturing grad students about butterflies and moths, my mother found a perfect stable and an almost perfect instructor.
Mrs. Mueller’s a demanding teacher.
Her small barn boasts some of the top junior riders—including Patrice and Blair—in our part of Connecticut. I’m the only student at Sandpiper Stables who doesn’t ride in hunter-jumper shows. It’s three-day eventing for me, and luckily Magic feels the same way. He’s brilliant at dressage and even more brilliant over fences.
A bit too brilliant, actually.
He’s jumped out of every field and paddock at the barn. He doesn’t go far—just to the nearest patch of grass—and sometimes he even jumps back in again. So now, when Magic’s turned out, he’s confined to the round pen because it has a six-foot fence.
We let him have Webster for company. They’ve become so inseparable that we have to take Webbie with us when we go to shows and clinics, otherwise Magic won’t load onto the trailer.
“A horse and his pony,” Mrs. Mueller says.
* * *
I’m already in bed when Dad gets home. I hear him thumping about downstairs, opening cupboards and rummaging in the fridge. He’ll probably finish off the French bread and leave crumbs all over the kitchen table that I wiped clean before I loaded the dishwasher.
He taps on my door. “Good ride tonight?”
“Yes,” I say, even though I didn’t ride.
I mucked stalls, helped Mrs. Mueller teach a beginner lesson, and watched Jess’s video of Magic’s escape act with kids who didn’t give a hoot about it. But there’s no point in explaining that to Dad. He rarely pays attention, and I doubt that my crazy, off-the-wall hope to spend the summer with Jessica will even register on Dad’s radar. But I have to run it past him, even though she hasn’t invited me.
