Ah yes, Fall has arrived. This is my favorite time of the year. The cool breezes, the beautiful yellows, golds, reds and greens in the quickly changing trees, the cranes coming in for winter, seeing the horses breath in the morning. As I was reflecting on the joys of Fall today I thought of a ride I had last year at just about this time…
I was recovering from a yucky cold and then with the weather being so chilly I just had not ridden as much as I know I should…
(go back with me… one year ago…)
I was finally feeling up to a ride yesterday, of course around this time yesterday it was getting cloudy and a bit windy but I got on anyway… I rode my big guy first, Chief is an angel to ride pretty much all of the time so his ride was of course great. Slick, aka “FireBall”, was next… I am thinking, okay this will be a quick, simple ride, right Slick? Man, he is such a red-head sometimes! (no offense meant to those of the chestnut hair color). As soon as we got to the arena he could have sworn that something was flying out of the trees to eat him! We kept going, I was determined he was just going to have to get over it, so around and around we went, just jogging, okay trying to just JOG! But every time we would go around the corner by all the trees he would tense and scoot to the side, sheesh!! “Oh come on! I just need a 20 to 30 minute ride! Don’t be such a chestnut!” I yelled out loud to him. I decided to be the dedicated and trained rider that I think I am and just “work thru it”, we did some suppling exercises in each corner, bend to the right, bend to the left, move the shoulders around, disengage the hindquarters, gait transitions up and down (walk – trot – walk – halt – walk – trot – etc…), Slick would relax at the other end of the arena a bit then we would come around and his head would go up, he would snort, off we would go to one side or the other… ok, that was not working, how about giving him something harder to think about, shoulder-in all the way around the arena… in both directions! Haunches-in, haunches-out, spiral circle in and out, flex the poll, ask for release, give to the bit… you name it I was trying everything I could think of… My head was starting to ache from my intense focus, my cold and the cold biting wind was certainly not helping with my ‘gentle patience’… even after a solid 45 minutes of “working thru it” Slick was still acting the same way. I told myself he was playing his little red-head games and pretending to get scared at shadows just to have some fun at my expense. (even though we all know horses do not reason or plan games to pull one over on their owner… never.) “I am the Alpha here! I am more scary than any thing else out here!” I hissed under my breath to Slick, you know so the neighbors would not think I was some crazy horse person yelling at my horse about the ‘Alpha’. I had my long split western reins on so I gave him a few good pops on the shoulder, and a few even better pops on the behind for good measure, he settled ever so slightly but still would tense up when we would go by the corner… and he still managed a few more good scoots, actually a few leaps sideways across the arena too, well I fussed and cussed and called him all sorts of names, red-head being one of the nicer ones… my ears hurting from the wind, my nose running off my face (I had already used all the kleenex I had brought with me), I decided now was the time to go to the old stand by “keep ‘em moving forward”. As my strength was waning we did manage to get in a lope (sorta more like a run) in each direction for few laps, I then concluded he was doing better, after my expert riding skills of “working thru” the situation and so on, plus it was getting late by now and the sun would be setting soon and I didn’t need him to be too sweaty when the sun went down, so I used my best judgment and decided it was time to just walk around and cool him down… end on a positive note, I am sure I taught him something I thought to myself. With a smug smirk on my face thinking I had finally gotten the better of Slick, I left the arena to walk him out in the hay pasture next to the arena… we made this big circle around the hay field and when we were coming back around, near the end of the arena, where the trees are, something caught my eye…
yep the neighbors kids had hung about a hundred little white ghosts in the trees on their side of the fence for Halloween that were happily flapping all over the place with the nice brisk breeze.
The moral of the story that I learned yesterday… no matter how many clinics we attend, videos of experts we watch, books we read, lessons we take or years in the saddle sometimes our horses judgment is clearer than ours… sometimes there really are things in the trees!
