Show Barn Blues by Natalie Keller Reinert

Author:Natalie Keller Reinert [Reinert, Natalie Keller]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Published: 2015-09-04T19:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER NINETEEN

Half an hour later, I was cantering Ivor down the broad white-sand road through the palmettos, watching the uneven ground warily through his pricked ears. The stallion had his head high and his blood up, his canter rolling through the savannah like a cavalry horse charging the enemy. He felt like a million dollars, and so did I.

That itself was a betrayal of all my values. It was dangerous out here, a feeling I mustn’t forget for a moment. I kept reminding myself of the hazards of the trail, like the terrible footing. The sand was hard from the unusually dry summer and fall, and there were uneven patches of ground where a horse could take one bad step and put himself out of work for months. There were diamondbacks in the palmetto and coral snakes in the oaks and moccasins in the still, dark water beneath the cypress trees. There might be panthers, if you believed some of the good old boys’ stories, and there were definitely bobcats, who were good for a hard spook, a tumble, and a gallop home in the fashion recently demonstrated by Maxine. There were the less-lethal, but certainly unpleasant, banana spiders — yellow and black arachnids as big as your handspan, building thick, entangling webs right across the path in narrow tree-lined sections where it was hard to escape their sticky silken threads and creepy-crawly horror. I ducked alongside Ivor’s neck on more than one occasion, praying one of those creatures wouldn’t end up crawling down my back after I’d crashed through his web. Talk about an opportunity to tumble right off your horse.

It would be a stop, drop, and roll situation, horse or no horse.

I shivered just thinking about it. Ivor flicked an ear back in my direction, then affixed them back on the horizon. Ahead, the shadowy dome of the shell mound was rising against the fading blue sky. It would be dim and cool in the shell mound, up above the hot sunny sand of the scrub, amidst the boughs of the live oaks and the canopy of vines.

We’d stop up there, I decided, and take a rest and a long look around the countryside we’d been cantering through.

Ivor just carried on, as if he could gallop all day and all night, with no destination in mind but the sheer pleasure he felt in moving forward on a track without fences or boundaries.

His muscles bunched beneath him as we rounded the curve before the shell mound, and then I felt his hindquarters hump up beneath him as he plunged up the steep rise, his neck arching as he rounded his back and dug his hooves into the sand. Ivor was a fit horse, all power from our ceaseless sessions in the arena, jumping which had built up his hind end, dressage which had suppled and smoothed those twitching muscles. I felt his athleticism now in a thrilling rush as he plowed his way upwards, grunting with exertion, focus still forever forward, still lost in the pleasure of the run.

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