Girl and Five Brave Horses, A (12 page)

But beyond a meaningful look which said more than words, she ignored the remark. I realized then that Arnette had been old enough to remember full well the time I had cut my own hair, and in view of the fact that I could recall clearly how it had looked lying on Mamie Lou’s floor, I could not very well go on scolding her. Besides, I was glad to see her.

I kept her on ground training only a week because she was, as I had hoped, in excellent physical condition. Nevertheless, I was far more nervous than she when I sent her up to the low tower to make her first dive. She proved to me quickly, however, that I needn’t have worried. She came off like a pro and stayed with the horse all the way. We both knew that the real test was still ahead of her but were very encouraged. She continued to make such excellent practice dives that I could not shrug off her pleas when she began to beg to go off the high tower a week later.

Time was creeping up on us, and the sooner I got her up there, the better, but even more persuasive was the memory of my own pleas and how they had been ignored. The week of waiting before making my first dive from the high tower had been a cruel and brutal one and I was determined to spare her that if I could. Therefore, in spite of a warning voice that told me not to rush things, I decided to let her try.

The next morning when she got up on the tower I was literally holding my breath, but, to my great joy and the complete fulfillment of all my expectations, she made a perfect dive. Al and I were both jubilant, and so was Lorena.

We had no sooner begun to congratulate one another, however, than things began to go wrong. One time Arnette’s timing would be off, another time she would lose control of the horse. I realized too late that I had done her an injustice by letting her cut short her training, for lack of technique can be serious. Danger is always increased when a rider is too inexperienced to analyze her faults and figure out how to correct them. Also, a horse is accustomed to having someone on his back who knows what she’s doing, and an unskilled rider can ruin a well-trained horse very quickly. But there was no turning back.

I was diverted from my concern over my sister by our discouragement with Apollo. By now fair time was almost upon us and we had no horse but Klatawah. We couldn’t possibly expect him to make two or three dives a day seven days a week; he had to have some relief. All we could do was cancel some of our contracts.

Al didn’t like this, but his back was to the wall. He wrote to three of his commitments saying we couldn’t come. Instead of replying by return mail, all three fair managers promptly appeared on Lorena’s doorstep. “We’ve been counting on you as our big drawing card,” each said. “There’s not time to get anyone else. We’ve advertised the act. You’ve got to come. You can’t back out.”

Al tried to make them understand the situation, but all three remained adamant. There was nothing to do but agree to fulfill the contracts, which, as Al said later, was the most foolish promise he had ever made in his life. How could he possibly find and train a horse in the space of a few weeks? It always took months. Ridiculous though the search seemed, he had to try. Each morning he filled up the gas tank of the car and drove around the countryside. Within a radius of many miles he looked in every field and pasture for a potential diving horse—a pretty horse, an intelligent horse, a horse that would prove to have courage and pride—and the days passed, and still Al found no horse. Then one day when he was on his way home after another fruitless exploration, he came up over a hill and rolled along beside a pasture, and there, standing apart from a group of horses, was a beautiful paint.

He slammed on the brakes, got out of the car, and walked closer. The paint turned and stared with frosty blue eyes and then kicked up his heels and ran off. Al went back to his car and followed a road that led to a farmhouse in the distance. A man was standing on the porch.

“My name’s Al Carver,” Al said. “I want to buy that paint.”

“Glad to know you, Mr. Carver. You’re not the first one.”

“What will it take to buy him?”

“Wouldn’t sell him to my worst enemy.”

“What do you mean, you wouldn’t sell him to your worst enemy?”

“I mean the fellow’s an outlaw. You can’t ride him, you can’t put him to the plow, you can’t even be nice to him. Little bit more, I tell you, and that horse would be a killer.”

“I still want him,” said Al. “How much will he cost?”

“Sold him three times already. Folks always bring him back.”

“I won’t bring him back,” promised Al. “Come on now. How much?”

“Been using him as a kind of decoy. Put him out there in the pasture. Folks stop to look at him and I end up selling them one of the others.”

“I can’t use any of the others,” Al said. “I’ve got to have that one.”

As Al told us, the argument went on and on, and finally the man agreed to sell the outlaw, but Al had to promise to bring him back if he didn’t work out. “You understand how it is,” the farmer said. “I don’t like to lose my decoy.”

That afternoon I heard Al’s car coming and could tell by the sound of it that it was pulling a loaded trailer. I dashed out to the entrance gate just as he pulled in.

“Oh, Al,” I exclaimed, “he’s beautiful!”

“Yeah,” Al said.

“What do you mean, yeah’? You don’t sound too happy.”

“I’m a little skittish about him. The man I bought him from says he’s an outlaw.”

“Outlaw?” I looked at the horse incredulously. He didn’t look like an outlaw to me.

The groom let him down out of the trailer, and our new horse looked around with the curiosity most animals show in a strange location.

He was, I saw, a stockily built white horse with bay markings, blue eyes, and a black tail. He was beautiful and sleek and, though obviously spirited, did not look like a villain. I walked up to him and patted him on the neck, speaking to him soothingly at the same time, and was pleased when he nudged me gently as if to confirm my belief in him. Then he suddenly caught hold of a ruffle at the neck of my dress and tore the dress off me!

For a moment I stood there in my slip, shocked to my bones. He hadn’t been nudging me out of friendship but in order to get hold of the ruffle! I turned and ran toward the house, feeling a terrible fool.

From such a beginning it might have been expected that Red Lips (as Al’s discovery was named) and I would have our troubles, but the fact was that as time went by I came to love him as I loved no other animal. I discovered that his tearing my dress off had not been done out of animosity. He simply liked to tear things by pulling them to pieces with his teeth. If the groom wasn’t careful to remove his blanket after drying him, he would pull it off his back and, holding it down with his front feet, rip it to shreds. But that was only a minor idiosyncrasy. He was so beautiful and so vital that I got a thrill out of just watching him, and it wasn’t long before I began to refer to him as “mine.”

The new horse showed his true colors on the following morning when Al began his training. Contrary to what we had expected, he did not display the slightest resentment toward the halter or lead rope when they were put on him. What was more, he went up the ramp to the low platform as if he had been doing it all his Me. When he got to the front he stood there for a moment and then, with only the suggestion of a pull on the rope from Al, slid his feet down on the kickoff board and dived.

Very possibly there have never been two more astonished people in the world. Then, in mortal fear that the first dive was a fluke, Al sent him up again. But again he came off as smoothly as a veteran. Furthermore, he had style, grace, fire, and form and worked with the greatest enthusiasm. Within a few weeks’ time he was doing as well as horses that had been diving for months.

Ordinarily it takes about two years to train a horse fully. I do not mean that a horse cannot be diving from the forty-foot tower before that time, but it usually takes that long for him to become a consistently good performer in his particular style. Some horses are never successful, even though they have plenty of nerve, because they can’t get the knack of the take-off. Others seem unable to control their leg movements while in the air, and still others prove to be poor swimmers. (The latter begin to stroke with their forelegs only when they start up from the bottom of the tank, letting their back legs drag as weights. They usually try to overcome this error by stroking harder with their forefeet and, as a consequence, bring themselves up too high out of the water, lose their balance, and roll over.)

Happily, Red had none of these faults. He was not only a graceful diver but a good swimmer and quickly became so proficient that we decided we could put a rider on him well ahead of the customary period in a horse’s training. Thus his training could be speeded up; we would not only be teaching him to dive but to carry a rider as well.

To understand what this meant in relation to Red, it must be remembered that he reportedly had never allowed anyone on his back. We hadn’t the least idea what kind of fit he might throw when I mounted, and Al told me beforehand that if he showed any signs of misbehaving I should get off immediately and let him dive alone. But aside from one frosty look, everything went smoothly. I patted Red on the neck and talked to him in a quiet, reassuring voice, and after a few minutes he went over to the edge of the tower and dived.

From then on I went out every morning and rode him in his training dives until it was time for us to leave for the fairs, the first of which was in upstate New York. There I worked him every morning and also rode him during the afternoon performance to accustom him to the crowd. He continued to behave beautifully from the low tower. We were sufficiently encouraged for Al to instruct our advance man (who went on ahead to supervise the building of the towers at the next three fairs we were to work) to cut down slightly on the height of the tower because we intended to try Red from the top as soon as possible.

When the New York fair closed we left for Canada, and the morning of the opening day we went out to the grounds to practice. I was to have my first ride on Red from the high tower and admittedly was nervous.

After I got up on the tower Al turned him into the runway and he came trotting up the ramp as though he had done it thousands of times. He allowed me to mount him all right and brought up at the head of the platform properly, but he was a little slow in the take-off and, for some unexplained reason, just before he left the board the harness started slipping. I lost my position as he kicked off, and somewhere about mid-air my body lost contact with his. I remained connected to him only by means of my grip on the diving harness, and I lost even that when we hit. He went in on his right shoulder and we came up on opposite sides of the tank. By putting some extra pep into my stroke I managed to swim over and climb on again before he reached the incline.

It was a point of the greatest pride with me that when I did get knocked off I got back on as quickly as possible. I felt it was the only way I could redeem myself.

When we came out of the tank Al said he thought I should let Red try it alone. That way the horse could get used to the height by himself, and it would give me an opportunity to study his action and style.

This time he worked with more speed, but it sent shivers down my spine, for instead of making a plunge dive he went in on his nose! A nose diver is the most difficult of all to ride, and I knew that if Red dived that straight with me on his back and I didn’t turn him over I’d be better than I thought I was. John had thrown in a nose dive now and then, but he was big and powerful enough to handle a rider’s weight with ease; also, he was an accomplished diver who knew how to throw his long neck and head up to balance himself.

That day, the hours until performance time seemed to last forever, but my anxiety was needless. When the time came Red went off like a trouper in a perfect medium plunge. From then on he improved. Some of his dives were bad, of course, but most of them were good. During the last of those memorable three weeks, however, he managed to give me one really big scare.

At a fair in St. John, New Brunswick, the soil was so gravelly that we had had to shore up the sides of the tank. On returning from dinner one evening we found that the posts on the left side had washed loose and the canvas on the left wall was caving in and floating up from the bottom. It was not bad enough to cause damage, provided the horse landed in the exact center of the tank, but unfortunately Red had developed a marked tendency to veer to the left. If he did so that night he would dive directly into the posts and the results would surely be deadly.

Normally in such circumstances we would have gone to the secretary of the fair and explained that we would be unable to give the performance. Our contract covered the possibility of dangerous situations and gave us the right to cancel performances, but in St. John that summer other considerations made cancellation inadvisable.

Some of the acts had not been able to appear at the fair until the middle of the week because of some immigration trouble at the Canadian border. Their tardy appearance, coupled with heavy mists which kept the stage and props so wet that it was hard for the performers to accomplish their tricks properly, had created a feeling of dissatisfaction among the members of the fair association, and there were rumors that these acts would not receive their money. If this were true we felt that our refusal to dive the horse would further jeopardize their position—and perhaps our own.

A grandstand that gradually filled to capacity that night was further proof that we had to devise some means of diving the horse. To put the wall back where it belonged was impossible. We would have had to pump all the water out and then take the canvas out, and there just wasn’t time for all that. Finally I came up with a suggestion.

If we took the long rope used for exercising the horses up to top the tower before performance time and threw one end down to the ground on the right side of the tank, I could snap the other end onto Red Lips’ halter before I mounted him and Al could guide his dive to the right. By pulling in that direction as we came off the tower he could keep the horse from veering left into the piling. It wasn’t a foolproof solution, but it was better than nothing, so we decided to try it.