deadlightsgirl | Hi-yo Silver, away!

Horse post, first one in a while. All I've been doing with Shadow is having a bareback go around the ring once in a while (usually, shot day, when I am stoned on painkillers), but she is happy being cosseted and loved by a zillion little girls. This was the PTB arranging me to help out with a strange freaked horse and actually help save the day. Lemme splain.

I felt so crappy yesterday that I punked out of my two afternoon classes, so I was home, not napping, but trying. Tank top and boxers.
Annette was on her day off and was hanging out with her friend R. They were outside. Rob was down at the pool with Gracie.

The way the trails up here work is, to get to them, you ride up a road which passes my and several staff houses. Behind that is a road which leads to a big field, and across that, the maze of woodland trails begins.

Annette and R. were hanging out on the porch of our house when suddenly M, a member of horseback staff, rides over on a horse they call Gin. With them is another horse called Tonic, with no rider on his back. M tells Annette that a kid fell off Tonic when they were cantering in the field, and can they come pick her up in our golf cart. Annette tells me, we all say sure, and off she goes. Meanwhile, there is M. and Tonic. He is staying around Gin, but she can't catch him because he is way spooked. I ask M if she wants me to get this horse. She says oh would you? I run in the house, throw on my Uggs (only soled shoes I have handy) and my helmet, which I don't wear to ride Shadow, but I don't know this guy and he is freaked and has already launched one person. I think he only hit a pothole, but anyway.

I walk over to Tonic and talk to him, make nice (he was skittish, but so anxious for someone to be his friend and make everything better. Within two seconds of being wooed by a calm person, he was nuzzling my hand), and get M to dismount her horse to hold Tonic while I get up on him. I untangle the stirrup he had got tangled in his reins, and he is much better. Then off we go to check on the kiddies.

Snag, Annette had gotten the golf cart stuck in the mud. I tell her friend R to go get his car and push the golf cart out of the mud. Tonic, however, is not into the notion of walking part two unfamiliar vehicles when he is freaked. He does a nervous little two-step and heads off-road with me. I keep talking to him, telling him all is well, and okay, we'll find another way round, which we did. We finally get past the vehicles and into the field. I keep him at a jog while we locate the other horses and the fallen kid, who is fine at this point. They are still working at getting the vehicles unstuck. One of the other campers offered her horse to the fallen kid (since I was on the horse she fell off, and I felt I ought to stay on his freaked ass for the moment), and said she'd walk back. As it happened, she got driven back in the unstuck golf cart. We rode back without further incident, and I made nice to M, who was even more freaked than Tonic was, this having been her first solo trail ride. I told her she did fine, I was happy to help, and she had done the right thing, though might want to take a backup staff member with her next time. The kid who got launched rode back on a much mellower horse and was joking and laughing with me by the time she got back. She told me I was her knight in shining armour (I stifled the reflex remarks that came to mind), and I suggested she change that to shining Uggs and boxer shorts.

Then I said, "my work here is finished", got a lift from a head counselor with a golf cart to bring me home, and rode off into the sunset. I relayed the story to my husband, making sure to call him Tonto at every opportunity.

Not a huge deal, but go me for keeping a cool head and handling a freaked horse with whom I had absolutely no previous acquaintance. Thus endeth horse story. I should offer to help out there more...a shame Shadow hates the trails up here.