Learning to Be the Next Horse Up

Learning to Be the Next Horse Up Jo Carson I am in my middle years; I have my first horse. I was one of those girl children who grew up horse hungry, with all the romance and not much opportunity to turn it into reality. I had an imaginary horse, Great Gray. He came when I whistled and did anything else I wanted him to. So much for my experience. When I found myself financially able, I began looking for a horse by announcing I was going to buy one. My father's brother said his brother-in-law, Lou, had two horses and he wanted to get rid of one. It was assumed I would take one of Lou's horses if I really wanted a horse. This was a relative with a need. I went out to look at Lou's horses. He had a ten-year-old quarter horse mare and her four-year-old daughter by an unknown stallion. "Unknown?" I asked, "How did you manage that?" Lou didn't know. They were quite a pair, mother and daughter, the one you wanted to ride wouldn't go; the one that was left behind kicked down the barn. They were tame enough—they liked to be groomed and handled—they just couldn't be separated without fireworks. No, I thought, except for one thing. The four-year-old was beautiful, a little buckskin with a burnished gold coat. Maybe, once I got her away from her mother .... "Five hundred dollars," I said, "for the four-year-old and the saddle." I don't know why I said it. It was against all the advice in the horse books. It was against my better judgment. "Done," said Lou, before I had a chance to change my mind. I gave him $250, he gave me the saddle. When I went back to pay the rest, he said, "Just take the horse." Just take the horse. It wasn't easy. She put dents in a stock trailer, fell, got up again and kicked some more; her mother kicked holes in the barn. Jo Carson lives in Johnson City, Tennessee. An actress, a published playwright and poet, she is best known for her "people poems." 40 The horse I now owned had been trained at two years but had not been ridden since. I took her back to the man who trained her. He had a whole barn full of horses he needed to work. "Look," he said, "she can be rode .... You got to learn to be the next horse up in the pecking order. Until you do that, she's not going to do what you want." So began a year and a half of hard work. Once we learned to go forward, there was everything else. At first, Kate saw horse boogers behind every fence post and in every leaf that blew by. A horse booger is capable of eating a horse, and humans, particularly riders, can't seem to see them. Just ask Kate. I tried to understand. A horse is an animal of prey, they are fearful by nature, and the first response to fear is to turn and run. Horse boogers generate fear. But how come (I tried asking Kate, she said a lot I didn't understand) she was so much more fearful when I was on her back. Two things: she's not in control when I'm on her back and the bit is in her mouth and she didn't trust my judgment, and I wasn't yet the next one up in the pecking order. The first thing we learned to do was stand and look at horse boogers instead of turning and running. Then we'd try to go by them. If I couldn't make her go and there were times when, even with the spurs, I couldn't without fear of being thrown, I opted for something easier on my bones. I'd get off and lead her past the booger, lead her back again, and we'd look at the problem for the second time with me on her back. I did not give up...