Courage (The Eventing Series Book 3) by Natalie Keller Reinert

Author:Natalie Keller Reinert [Reinert, Natalie Keller]
Language: eng
Format: epub, azw3
Tags: Equestrian, Horseback Riding, Three Day Eventing
Publisher: Natalie Keller Reinert
Published: 2017-02-21T05:00:00+00:00

THE BABY DAYS of jogging around the pasture came to an end as October mornings dawned, as warm and golden as September’s had been, if every day a little later, over the Ocala hillsides. I was mildly disappointed and a little apprehensive on Tuesday morning, when Alexander announced we’d be going to the track instead of the pasture. I’d been riding the same four or five horses each morning, and we’d gotten into a pleasant little rhythm. I’d been amazed at my uncustomary good luck in coming to Cotswold, and getting paid for what were essentially daily trail rides around a dew-glazed meadow. It wasn’t exactly what I’d imagined when I was told I had to go out and get a tough racehorse-training job in order to pay the bills. I supposed it was inevitable the happy mornings had to end. Reality was always stalking me from down the shed-row.

Alex had put Lovely Lily’s stall number next to my name first, so I went down to the chestnut filly’s stall to tack her up. A groom had already clipped her by the halter to the short tie hanging in one back corner of the stall, and she was standing with her head turned around, looking like an inquisitive young owl, watching the action pass by in the shed-row. She nickered when I ducked under the stall webbing with a hoof pick in one hand and a dandy brush in the other.

“Morning, princess,” I told her, giving her a quick rub on the stripe between her eyes before I knocked the shavings off her back and cleaned her hooves. That was all the grooming she’d get—she was still a yearling, and her winter coat was starting to sprout, so there was no reason to polish her up too much. She’d go back outside for the day after work, anyway.

By the time I had the saddle towel folded over the thick foam pad and was slipping the saddle on her back, I’d forgotten all the drama waiting at home—Amanda’s lunch today and the renters moving into the house and a late-day phone call from the lawyer yesterday which had essentially boiled down to “no progress, need more money.” Trouble has a way of drifting away when you’re grooming a horse.

Instead, I was thinking about the filly—the way she felt through my seat and hands when she jogged and galloped, the way she put up her nose and gaped her mouth when I asked her to slow down or halt, which might be a problem out on the racetrack, with no one’s hindquarters in front to run her into—and I was thinking about the tasks of grooming and tacking. Some people might have thought an equestrian performed these rituals like a machine. But tacking a horse took on a meditative quality as our fingers ran through the familiar buckles and straps in their beautiful, unchanging order. I took a subtle comfort in knowing I could have been dropped into any stable with English saddles in the tack room for the past five hundred years, and I would have known exactly what to do.

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