High Horse (11 page)

Lisa sighed. She loved writing. She loved it almost as much as being in The Saddle Club, but it seemed that every time she wrote something like the articles in
The Willow Creek Gazette
it got her into more trouble than she would have believed possible. Now she wished she’d never been assigned this stupid journal.

On the other hand, Lisa reminded herself, what were Carole and Stevie doing reading her journal? Everyone knows diaries and journals are private.

“Hey, hey, hey.” Stevie popped into the tent. “Has this been a great day or what?”

It wasn’t really a question; or rather, it was a Stevietype
question, which demanded no answer, but Lisa heard herself responding. “I guess,” she said in a flat voice.

“You had a problem with this day?” Stevie said. “Maybe you hate sunshine. And riding. And mountain trails.”

“I said it was okay,” Lisa said. “It was an okay day.”

Carole bustled in. “There’s really something wrong with MTOs.”

“What?” Stevie said.

“They don’t go on forever. And they make everything else look bad.”

“So let’s take off,” Stevie said. “Let’s ride around the world.”

“There’s all that water,” Lisa said glumly.

Stevie and Carole looked at her as if they had noticed her for the first time. Then Stevie spotted the journal in Lisa’s lap, and she knew exactly what was up. Lisa had figured out that Stevie had read it. Maybe this hadn’t been a perfect day after all.

Carole also noticed the journal in Lisa’s lap and realized what had happened right away. Lisa knew that she had read it, and she was angry and hurt, and she was right to be. Carole should never have opened it.

Carole looked down. She felt awkward and wanted
to clear the air, but she couldn’t just come right out and confess, could she?

Suddenly Carole thought of Mrs. Reg, Max’s mother, who ran the office at Pine Hollow Stables, and who always seemed to know what was going on. Mrs. Reg had a way of solving problems without seeming to solve them. She did it through telling stories.

Carole wasn’t a great storyteller—Lisa was the writer here—but Carole knew that she was going to have to do her best.

“I’m thinking of a horse I once knew,” Carole began. A lot of Mrs. Reg’s stories began that way. “This horse’s name was Inky on account of the fact that he was—”

“Black,” Stevie jumped in, instantly catching on.

Carole nodded and continued. “He was a great horse, one of the stable’s best. A new rider came to the stable and was assigned to some of the easy horses, but then one day she was given Inky. This was a real honor, and his new rider wanted to live up to Inky, but she didn’t know exactly how.

“Finally she decided the best way to do it was to study the mistakes of other riders.”

“I do that,” Stevie said, nodding. “I think everybody does. You look at other riders and see that their hands are too low. Or they’re too bossy. Or that they
crowd their horse on jumps. Or that they try too hard.”

“Exactly,” Carole said, glad for the help. “The only thing was that Inky’s rider decided to keep a record of the other rider’s faults, so she kept a log. Every day, after class or Pony Club or whatever, she wrote down every mistake she saw. And all riders make mistakes.”

“Even you,” Stevie said.

“Yes,” Carole said. “The harder you try, the more mistakes you make. Sometimes I think I make more mistakes than anyone. So there was no problem in what Inky’s rider did. The only thing was that one day another rider found her log. It was poking out of her knapsack, though that was no excuse. The other rider read it and got furious. Not that the things in the log were wrong.”

“It’s because they were right,” Stevie said. “If they hadn’t been right, they wouldn’t have hurt so much.”

“Exactly. So that rider showed it to another rider, and pretty soon the whole stable was furious. They were in the wrong—they shouldn’t have read something that was private—but they were furious anyway.”

“What you’re trying to say is that you read my diary,” Lisa blurted out.

“Yes,” Stevie admitted softly. “I can’t hide it.”

“Me, too,” Carole said, sitting down on her bedroll.

Stevie looked at Carole. “
You
read it?”

Carole nodded.

“I thought I was the only one,” Stevie said. “I mean I thought I was the only one who was a big enough rat to do that.”

“No.” Carole giggled. “I’m as big a rat as you.”

“It was a really terrible thing to do,” Lisa said. “And it’s not funny.”

“I wouldn’t have done it,” Stevie burst out, “if it hadn’t been lying there. I mean, it almost seemed like you wanted me to read it.”

“You figured wrong,” Lisa said. “It’s my personal property. Even if I’d been writing a novel that had nothing to do with you, I wouldn’t want you to read it.”

Stevie wrinkled her nose. “Who would write a novel on an MTO?” she said. “That would be completely nuts.”

Lisa looked at her and giggled. “I don’t think even I could do that.”

“I’m really sorry,” Carole said. “I knew I shouldn’t have done it, but once I had, I was ashamed to mention it and I was angry. The worst part was, I couldn’t tell you what had made me mad.”

“It was terrible,” Stevie agreed.

But Lisa wasn’t completely mollified. “How would you like it if I listened in on a phone conversation you had with Phil?”

“You can’t,” Stevie said. “I only talk to him when I’m sitting in my closet with the door open just a crack.”

Lisa grinned. “Well, I’m sorry if you two were hurt—I think you took everything the wrong way. Mr. Haegle said I was supposed to develop my characters’ weaknesses as well as their strengths, so I was concentrating on making you seem vulnerable and human, like he said. You both have plenty of wonderful qualities; I just hadn’t gotten around to them yet,” Lisa quickly added.

“It’s okay, Lisa,” Carole replied. “We get it. And to tell you the truth, I learned something about myself from your journal. I was driving Amie and Jackie crazy. I guess I’m just human, that’s all.”

“Really, Carole?” Stevie chimed in with a serious expression. “Why, I thought you were one hundred percent horse.”

At that all three members of The Saddle Club burst out laughing. At last they were friends again.

B
Y FIVE A.M
. the next morning Stevie decided that she had had enough of lying awake. She inched out of her sleeping bag and reached for her clothes.

“You, too?” Carole whispered.

“Me three,” said Lisa, poking her head out of her sleeping bag.

They couldn’t see each other because it was so dark inside the tent. “Let’s get dressed,” Stevie whispered.

“What’re we whispering for?” Lisa whispered.

“Because tents have ears,” Carole replied.

Lisa opened the tent flap. The pine tree opposite the tent looked like a monster with arms, but the sky behind it had a tinge of gray light.

“We’ve got to get going,” Carole whispered. “We’re almost late. Dawn comes fast.” They tiptoed toward the temporary paddock.

“What about Phil?” Stevie whispered.

“What about him?” A dark shape appeared from behind the pine tree and fell in beside her.

“Did you sleep?” she whispered.

“Yeah, perfectly … for about five minutes.”

They passed Max’s tent, and then the tent where Amie and Jackie were sleeping. There was not a sound. But as they approached the paddock, they could hear the horses tearing clumps of grass and snorting.

“They’re fueling up for a great ride,” Carole whispered.

They got their horses’ bridles and blankets and straps from under an oak tree.

“What’s that?” Stevie jumped because something had just pinged her on the head. They must have been discovered.

“An acorn,” Phil said. “Acorns fall at dawn.”

She beamed at him. He knows everything, she thought contentedly.

In the temporary paddock the horses were suspicious. Topside raised his head from the grass and looked at Stevie as if he had never seen her before.
Stevie was miffed at first, but then she realized that at this hour she probably looked like a large gray monster. She put her hand next to Topside’s nose so he could smell her. Then she strapped the blanket onto Topside’s back and slipped the bridle over his head.

The only problem with riding bareback, Stevie remembered, is mounting the horse. She looked around. Outside the temporary paddock was a large gray rock. She led Topside to the rock, climbed onto it, and then clambered onto his back.

Topside nickered. There was something special about riding bareback. Topside loved it because there was no tight girth around his belly. He had a sense of anything goes. That, as Stevie recalled, was another problem with bareback: You had to remind your horse that you are boss. Pressing with her knees, she made Topside stop dancing.

Phil mounted Teddy from the same rock and rode him in a circle back to her.

“How is he?” she asked.

“Okay,” Phil said. “Totally normal.”

It was funny, Stevie thought; after horses got spooked they were often extra calm for a while, as if they were trying to prove that they weren’t nutcases.

“So where do you want to go?” Carole asked Stevie.

Stevie and Phil grinned at each other. “How about
the top of the meadow?” Phil said. “It should be a good place to catch that sunrise.”

Walking slowly because it was still dark and the grass was wet with dew, they climbed toward the top of the meadow. “Look,” Lisa said.

There were a couple of large gray birds with long scrawny necks, big shoulders, and ugly faces. “What are those?”

“Buzzards,” Phil said.

“I can see why calling someone a ‘buzzard’ is an insult,” Lisa said. “Those are the ugliest birds I ever saw.”

“Not to them,” Phil said. “Buzzards think they’re beautiful.”

They got to the edge of the meadow just as the sky turned silvery pink in the east. There was a movement to the right, nothing big, more like the movement of a leaf, but then Stevie saw that a family of deer was standing at the edge of the woods. The deer watched the horses, alert. The horses looked back, especially Teddy. But then Phil leaned over Teddy’s neck and said something to him, and Teddy shook himself, as if he were shaking fear away.

They reached the spine of the meadow and rode along it to the easternmost point, where they could see a dark, deep valley, filled with hemlock trees. On
the other side was Hawks’ Roost with its lookout point. Beyond were green mountains and sky. Behind the mountains, Stevie knew, were valleys filled with horse farms and the Silverado River. On the other side of the Silverado River was Willow Creek and home.

A flash behind Hawks’ Roost and a sliver of the sun appeared. The bottoms of the clouds turned pink while the tops were still dark gray.

“There they are,” Phil said to Stevie. From far down in the valley two dark shapes were rising. Stevie listened, and she could hear the faint call of hawks, high-pitched and scratchy but beautiful.

The hawks barely moved their wings, tilting themselves into the airstream, rising and circling around each other, and then flying so high their cry couldn’t be heard anymore.

“They’re high hawks,” Lisa said. The hawks seemed to have no fear. They went higher and higher, tracing loops in front of the clouds.

“Do you think they see us?” Carole asked Phil.

“You know the expression ‘eyes like a hawk’?” he said. “They can see us better than we can see them.”

“I’m glad I’m not a rabbit,” Carole said. “I wouldn’t stand a chance!”

The sun burst out from behind Hawks’ Roost across the way, sending slanting light over the horses’ ears.

“How about a canter?” Phil said. “Or maybe even a gallop.”

They took off over the grass. Lisa felt her legs tighten around Comanche. There were no stirrups, riding bareback, no safety; only her and the horse. If someone had told Lisa two years ago that she would be doing this—streaking through a meadow at dawn riding bareback—she’d never have believed it.

Carole on Starlight got to the end of the meadow and turned to wait. When Lisa reached her, she reined in Comanche and stopped.

“Don’t look back,” Carole said.

“How come?”

“Give them a second,” Carole said.

Lisa realized that the sound of Stevie’s and Phil’s horses was getting fainter and fainter. Finally she couldn’t stand it anymore and turned.

Stevie and Phil had disappeared. The meadow was empty.

“What happened?” Lisa said, thinking of how Phil had been thrown the day before. “Maybe Teddy got spooked again.”

“I think Stevie and Phil are okay,” Carole said with a smile. “Maybe even more than okay.”