Pony Jumpers- Special Edition 1- Jonty Read online

  Anyway, that first day I was relieved to finally get Tani haltered. I tied the rope to either side of his tatty web halter, vaulted onto his back, then headed off for a ride around the perimeter of the paddock. Tani took about six strides, put his head between his knees and bucked me off. Murray stood by the gate, leaning on his stick and watching without comment. Out of necessity I’d developed a knack for holding onto the reins no matter what, and I managed not to let go of Taniwha. I scrambled back to my feet, embarrassed, and scrambled back on. This time we made it halfway across the paddock before I got dumped again when Taniwha dropped his shoulder and swerved. I clung onto the reins and got dragged for a few strides, right under Tani’s newly trimmed hooves, one of which caught me in the ribs. I gritted my teeth and clung on, managing at last to get Tani to stop so I could stand up.

  “You know what the definition of stupid is, boy?”

  I looked over at Murray, who was shuffling through the long grass in my direction.

  “My pony?”

  “Doing the same thing over and over, and expecting a different result.”

  “I’m not trying to fall off,” I told him. “If I knew how to stop doing it, I would.”

  “You could start by sitting up straight and not gripping with your knees,” he grumbled.

  I immediately scrambled onto Taniwha’s bony back again, desperate to learn whatever he could teach me.

  “Sit up straight, you look like a pile of pudding up there.”

  I straightened my back, ignoring the throbbing pain in my ribs where Tani’s hoof had clipped me.

  “I told you to stop gripping with your knees,” Murray continued. “Relax your legs, let ‘em hang down.”

  “How do I stay on if I’m not gripping?”

  Murray nudged my thigh with his twisted knuckles. “You grip here, if you need to, but only when you need to.” He tapped my calf. “This down here tells him to go forward. Don’t mix them up or you’ll confuse him. And stretch your leg down longer.”

  He stepped back and looked at me, then gave a short nod of approval. Taniwha yanked at the rope reins, trying to get his head down to graze, but for the first time I didn’t pitch forward onto his neck.

  I grinned at Murray, but he didn’t look impressed.

  “Is that how you hold the reins?”

  I looked down at my hands, then back at him. “Is it wrong?”

  Murray sighed, then slowly and carefully explained to me how to hold the reins correctly. His own hands were so twisted with arthritis that he could barely hold his own walking stick, but he had been a good horseman in his day. He showed me I should be holding the reins, and how to keep them short enough to keep a feel on Tani’s halter.

  “You should have light, even tension through both reins,” he muttered. “If you lose tension on one side, chances are he’s about to swerve that way. So you use that rein to bring his head back around straight, and you bloody sit up while you’re at it. Got it? Ride a circle around me.”

  I nodded, keen to try this new riding style. Murray stepped back and I nudged Tani into his shuffling walk, concentrating hard on sitting up straight and not gripping with my knees. Taniwha made a wobbly circle around Murray, trying constantly to veer off to the right. I pulled on the left rein, but Tani just set his neck against me and kept going right.

  “Use your legs!”

  I kicked Tani, and he bucked, sending me straight off over his head into the grass. I gripped the reins tight and scrambled back to my feet.

  “If you’re gonna fall off that much, you should really be wearing a helmet.”

  “I don’t have one.”

  “That’s what I figured.” Murray glared at me a moment longer. “You gonna get back on?”

  Once I had remounted my pony for the third time in less than ten minutes, Murray explained that he’d meant for me to nudge Tani over with my right leg. When I looked at him blankly, he gave another martyred sigh and explained the basics of submission, including how to teach Tani to move away from leg pressure.

  “Never be able to open a bloody gate on a horse that you can’t shift off the leg,” he explained. “And a horse you can’t open a gate from is no use to anyone. Now sit up straight and walk him on.”

  MUCKING IN

  That day marked the beginning of a new chapter in my life with Taniwha. The following weekend I turned up early, ready to spend the whole day riding, but when I got there, Taniwha was grazing on the far side of the paddock, and a shovel and rickety wheelbarrow were sitting in front of the gate. I didn’t need to be told what they were for, and I sighed as I got started on the mucking out.

  It didn’t take long to fill up the wheelbarrow, but Murray hadn’t come out of the house yet. He usually came outside when I arrived, so I went up and knocked on the door. After a long pause, a woman in scrubs opened it.

  “Who’re you?” I asked.

  “I’m Cheryl, Mr Paget’s caregiver. I’d ask who you are, but I think I know,” she said. “You’re the boy with the pony.”

  “Yeah. Is Murray – er, Mr Paget – there?”

  “He’s not having a good day,” she told me seriously.

  “Is he okay?”

  “He’ll be fine. I’ve given him some new medication for the pain, and he’s sleeping it off right now. I’ll tell him you stopped by.”

  “That’s okay. He’ll know,” I told her. “Um, do you know where I should dump the poo?”

  She raised her eyebrows, looking scandalised. “Excuse me?”

  “The poo out of the paddock. From my pony.”

  “Oh. I’ve got no idea. You’ll have to ask Mr Paget. He’s asleep right now,” she added, as though I would have forgotten in the last thirty seconds.

  “Okay. Well, I guess I’ll ask him when he wakes up.”

  She just nodded and shut the door in my face. I walked slowly across the lawn and back to the paddock, where I leaned on the gate and watched Tani graze, selfishly thinking that it would be just my luck if something happened to the old man and I had to find somewhere else to keep my pony.

  I went into the paddock to catch him, digging the handful of carrot tops out of my pocket that had been left over from dinner last night and holding them out in front of me. Taniwha eyed me suspiciously as I approached. I don’t think he minded being ridden, since he had things almost entirely his own way and could get me off whenever he liked, but keeping himself fed was also his number one priority, and time spent being ridden was time spent not eating, in his view.

  Still, he let me catch him that day. I rode him around the paddock a few times, then practiced opening and closing the gate into the next paddock, diligently asking Taniwha to move off pressure from my leg, because I was determined that my pony wasn’t going to be ‘no use to anyone’. The neighbouring paddock was on a gentle slope, and I decided that the best thing to do would be to ride down to the bottom of it, then turn around and canter back up to the top. It took a lot of kicking and persuading to get Taniwha to go all the way down, and we’d only made it halfway when I turned my head to see how far we’d come. Feeling my weight shift, the black pony spun on his hocks and took off, faster than he’d ever moved before. I grabbed a handful of his mane and dug my knees into his sides, then remembered what Murray had been trying to teach me and forced myself to loosen them. The difference was incredible, and it was the first time I felt that magic sensation of being completely in tune and at one with the horse beneath me. All at once, I truly was Alec on The Black, and I let go of Tani’s scraggly mane and held my skinny arms out to the sides, racing bareback up the hill with the wind in my hair and without a care in the world.

  Tani skidded to a stop at the gate and dumped me, of course, but he didn’t run away, so I just got back on and went and did it again and again until he got tired and planted his feet, refusing to go back downhill. That was another one of the countless lessons that pony taught me – that you could have too much of a good thing, and you had to know when to quit while you were stil
l both having fun.

  I let Tani go in the paddock, watching him as he rolled, rubbing his sweaty coat dry on the grass before getting up and eating again. Behind me, Murray’s curtains were still closed, but the caregiver’s car was gone from the driveway. I wondered if Murray was still asleep. I didn’t want to disturb him, so after a moment of uncertainty, I pushed the heavy wheelbarrow over to the rose garden. Horse manure was good for roses, right?

  But when I got close, I realised that the rose beds were overgrown with weeds and long grass, and even I knew I couldn’t just dump manure on top of all that. It was almost midday, and my stomach was rumbling, but I wanted to do something helpful for Murray, since he was being so good about letting Tani stay in his paddocks, and I knew I had no chance of being able to pay him. So I got down on my knees and started weeding.

  It was hard work, made harder by the fact that the roses were straggly and overgrown, and I scratched the hell out of my ungloved hands. But after an hour or so, I’d managed to get half of the rose bed cleared. I shovelled Tani’s manure onto the dirt as I went, then went looking for a garden hose to water it all in. We had a vege garden out the back of our place, and Mum always said nothing grows without water, so I figured it couldn’t hurt to damp it all down. I was dragging the long yellow hose across the lawn when I heard Murray’s gruff voice.

  “What in blazes are you doing, boy?”

  I squinted at him through the bright sunlight. He was wearing his dressing gown and slippers, despite the warm day, and he looked even more frail than usual.

  “Watering your roses,” I told him, pointing towards the rose bed.

  He shuffled slowly down the garden path towards me. I stood still and waited for him to get to me, trying not to fidget too much. He stopped in front of the roses and looked at the bed, then at me.

  “Huh.”

  “What d’you think?” I asked him, feeling pretty proud of myself for such a good deed.

  “You haven’t finished yet.”

  Trust the old devil to find something to complain about. I was a bit wounded, but I did my best to shrug off the criticism.

  “I’m gonna come back and do the rest after lunch,” I promised him, and my stomach rumbled as I spoke to back me up. “I’m just a bit hungry right now.”

  “You’re as skinny as that pony,” he muttered. “If you go home, you’ll find something else to do and you won’t come back and finish the job.” I opened my mouth to object, but he spoke before I could. “Get inside and make yourself a sandwich, then you can carry on.”

  I made sandwiches for both of us, though Murray barely touched his, and he grumbled at me for not washing my hands properly before I started. I looked around the house as I munched. He had lots of faded photos in frames on the wall, including some with horses in them, and on my way back out I stopped to look at them. Black and white and sepia-toned photographs of solid farm horses, big Clydesdales pulling a traditional plough, a sleek hunter trotting across the turf with a pack of hounds at its heels, and an almost unrecognisable younger version of Murray in the saddle.

  “Get a move on, boy. Stop standing around like a stunned mullet with your mouth open.” I shut my mouth and turned to look at him. “Go on, you’ve still got work to do outside.”

  While I weeded, Murray got out his secateurs and slowly pruned the roses. Each snip looked like it was painful for him, but he wouldn’t accept my help.

  “You think I trust your butcher hands to chop my roses?” he demanded. “Besides, you’ve got enough to do right in front of you, so quit your talking and keep working.”

  A few days later, when Murray’s rose beds were looking as well-tended as anyone else’s on his street, I arrived to find an old leather bridle hanging from the gate post of Tani’s paddock. The thick leather was like cardboard and covered in mould, but it had two things that made it infinitely superior to my halter and course rope – soft webbing reins, and a small metal bit.

  “It’s called a Tom Thumb,” Murray explained to me as he showed me how to get it into Taniwha’s mouth. “It’ll give you a bit more control over that pony. He’s just having you on right now, but with a bit in his mouth, he’ll be a different character.”

  Taniwha’s character didn’t change much, but my control over him sure did. Although the black pony hated the bit to begin with, especially since it took me a while to refine my aids from the exaggerated yanking and hauling I’d had to do to get him to respond to the halter, he soon learned to accept it. I found a rusty tin of dried-up saddle soap in Murray’s garage alongside a bottle of neatsfoot oil, and I cleaned the bridle until the leather was soft and supple. It was still too big for Taniwha, but we punched new holes into the cheekpieces with a hammer and nail, and Murray declared that it would do the job well enough for the time being.

  The days turned into weeks, and weeks into months. Taniwha slowly grew fatter until his ribs disappeared from view, and his coat started to shine. I got a paper run, and saved up enough money to buy some brushes and a hoof pick from the saddlery in town. I used to spend hours walking around the shop, looking at all the stuff I wanted to buy, dreaming about having enough money to kit Taniwha out like a pony in one of their catalogues. I pored over those catalogues in the evenings, circling everything I wanted to buy, which was pretty much everything except a few things that I had no idea what they were for, and anything that was pink or sparkly, which was an unfortunate amount of it. But the page I went back to time and time again was the one showcasing the item I wanted more than anything else – a saddle.

  Murray reckoned that I didn’t need a saddle to be able to ride, and that it was giving me a good foundation to learn to ride bareback. He was probably right, but it didn’t stop me from wanting one, and never more so than the first time I took Taniwha to Pony Club.

  PONY CLUB

  In my ignorance, I figured that I had a pony, so I could go to Pony Club. Right?

  Wrong.

  I’d sussed out when and where the local Pony Club rallies were held, so one bright Saturday morning, I gave Taniwha a good brush, put on his freshly oiled bridle, and rode off down the road towards the rally grounds. I’d brushed all of the tangles out of Taniwha’s tail, tearing half of the hairs out in the process, and brushed his coat until it started to shine. As far as I was concerned, I was as prepared as I could possibly be.

  As far as the parents and kids at Pony Club were concerned, I was a joke. I rode onto the grounds, looking around at ponies and riders of all shapes and sizes, trotting and cantering across the green grass. I sat up tall on my pony’s back and felt like I was about to be a part of something – until someone shouted at me that I couldn’t ride without a helmet. I’d been riding every day for weeks without one, so I knew that she was wrong, but I chose not to point that out to her. Before long, however, I was surrounded by a swarm of mothers, all of them demanding that I get off my pony, insisting that I wasn’t allowed to ride without a helmet, that it was unsafe and I could be killed and what were my parents thinking and where was my saddle?

  I reluctantly dismounted and told them I didn’t have a helmet, but I did have a pony and I wanted to join Pony Club.

  “Have you filled in a membership form? Have you paid your subs?” demanded the tallest of the women. “You need a uniform, and you can’t ride in shorts.”

  I looked down at my bare legs, then back at them. “Why not?”

  “Because it’s not safe. What if you fall off and scrape your knee?”

  I looked down again at the scabs on my knees, then grinned back up at her. “Bit late for that, isn’t it?”

  “Don’t you get smart with me,” the woman snapped, which is what adults always say if you point out anything obvious to them.

  I never could work out why adults were always telling me not to be so stupid, then in the next breath telling me not to get smart with them. I wanted to tell them to pick one! Took me years to work out that Don’t you get smart with me means Don’t challenge my authority, and that t
he correct response is always Sorry – even when you don’t mean it.

  So I stood there with my pony, literally surrounded by brisk Pony Club mothers who were adamant that a scruffy kid like me – who didn’t even have a saddle! – couldn’t possibly be allowed to join in. At the very least, they said, I needed a helmet. Most kids would’ve given up and gone home, but I was always a slow learner.

  “Has anyone got a spare helmet then, that I can borrow?” I asked, and to my relief, a large blonde women stepped forward and smiled at me.

  “We’ve got one in the float. Come with me and we’ll see if it fits. What’s your name?”

  Her name was Joy, and she had two fat little daughters with shaggy ponies that didn’t quite fit in at Pony Club either. She rummaged through the back of her car, unearthing buckets and brushes and girths and saddle blankets and all sorts of other things before dusting off a shabby old plastic helmet. It was white with a black horse on the front, and the plastic clip-on visor was hanging off at one end. Joy frowned at it, tried and failed to reattach it, then pulled it off with a shrug and threw it back into the car.

  “Here,” she said, holding out the helmet to me.

  I shoved it onto my head, not caring that it was full of hay and horse hair, or that the lining looked like a mouse had been chewing it. I didn’t even care that it made me look like a mushroom. They’d said I couldn’t ride without a helmet, but now I had one, so now I was going to be allowed to join in.

  “Thanks!”

  Joy made me shake my head from side-to-side, then nod vigorously, before declaring the helmet a satisfactory fit. I turned around and vaulted back onto Taniwha, then rode over to the group of kids and ponies, who were now being yelled at to gather round and get into their groups.

  I didn’t know which group I was supposed to be in, so I just rode over to some kids that looked about my age. A girl with curly blonde hair turned and stared at me as I approached. She was immaculately turned out on a pretty strawberry roan pony, which not only had both a saddle and a bridle, but a whole bunch of other tack – which I could tell you now was a running martingale and grackle noseband, but at the time just looked like a lot of extra fancy equipment.