Free Champion Horse by Jane Smiley

don’t be at that, Monica. He can hear you, and it just makes him worse.’
    Monica said, ‘Who does he think he is?’
    Lucy said, ‘He thinks he’s an Olympic horseman, and he is.’
    ‘She’s four years old.’
    ‘Well, maybe you shouldn’t have brought her, then, if she’s not ready.’
    Monica sniffled a few more times but didn’t say anything. At the barns, they were stabled pretty far away from me, so we didn’t talk. I untacked Blue and brushed him down, then gave him a couple of carrots and his hay and water and put his sheet on him. Rodney was supposed to look in on him at the evening feeding time. When Mom picked me up and asked me about the clinic, I said it was fine. Fine is a good word, because you are not actually lying and saying that it was fun or good or enjoyable. You might just be saying that you could stand it. Mom didn’t press me. Since Dad was coming to watch the next day, I guess she thought she would find out then.
    When we got home, it was only three-thirty, so I changed into jeans and cowboy boots and took Oh My for a walk down to the creek. It was totally relaxing, and I was reminded how nice it is to ride a horse out for a walk. Rusty came along with us, and I’m sure Rusty had business of some sort, since she kept racing away and then circling back, and looking up into the trees and off towards the horizon. Rusty always felt she had two jobs, one of which was to protect the ranch and the other of which was to keep her eye on Mom in case Mom wanted to pet her. Oh My was a little like Rusty in the sense that she enjoyed getting out and having a look at things. She was one of the few horses I’ve known who wanted to investigate. For example, let’s say you were passing a stump among the trees. Oh My would look at the stump, then she would go over to the stump and stand there sniffing the stump for a while. Every time you passed the stump after that, she would glance at it to see, I suppose, if it was the same as it had been the time before. Dad said that this was a sign of intelligence, and it was no surprise that Oh My had made herself the boss of the mare band in the space of about five minutes when we turned her out in the pasture.
    After I came back with Oh My, I put Jack in the pen and worked him for twenty minutes. He could do all sorts of things, now – walk, trot, canter in both directions for however long you wanted, come, pivot both directions, back up, touch his nose to his side. I had also taught him a trick that I’d taught Blue – to see a treat, but then to turn his head away in order to get it. I’d taught Blue a second trick, which I called ‘Where’s the carrot?’ I would do what grown-ups used to do when we were kids, show him the bit of carrot in one hand, then pass it back and forth and put my hands behind my back. Then I would say, ‘Where’s the carrot?’ and Blue would nudge my right arm and I would give him the carrot. That was because the carrot was always in my right hand, but I played it up by pretending he had picked the proper arm. I hadn’t taught Jack that trick yet. Dad said not to teach them tricks like bowing or rearing, because you could be trotting along out there, give a mistaken command, and suddenly he’d bow.
    I put Jack in with the others and got the wheelbarrow and the hay. Of course, I still had to clean my boots and iron my other shirt. By bedtime, I was actually looking forward to the next day. I’d decided that maybe Peter Finneran hadn’t been that bad. The horses, including Blue, had improved, and the exercises had been fun.
    *
    Since we were the lowest-level group, we were to be on our horses and lined up by nine, but then we would be out of there by ten-thirty, so Mom was planning to take me clothes shopping for the school year – high school would be starting one week after the clinic. I had spent the entire summer not thinking about high school, even though that was all that Gloria and Stella talked about. Gloria had