Free Gee Whiz by Jane Smiley Page A

the fence, then I got on from there. I could stand with one foot on the post and one on the rail, and slip down onto the young fella.”
    Ellen said, “I don’t believe you.”
    Rodney shrugged, then he said, “I practiced walking the fence rails after I saw the tightrope walkers in a traveling circus. For years, I planned to join the circus.”
    This shut Ellen up for at least half an hour—she did everything I asked as well as she could, and did not praise herself. When it came time to jump, I went over to the pony and put my hand on his neck. I said, “Did you believe what Rodney told you?”
    She looked at me, then said, “I’m nine! That’s old. I should have started as a child.”
    I said, “Well, you’ve made a good start, though.”
    She said, “Yes, I have, but still …”
    I let her jump her little course five times, and she felt better.
    The afternoon was cloudy and gray, but we had to get the horses ridden in case rain came and they were idle for days at a stretch. I went back and forth all afternoon fetching horses, putting them in the arena or the training pen, carrying tack, riding here and there, especially up along the hillside and on the trail to the Jordan Ranch, and I found that my eye was drawn to Gee Whiz time and again.
    He certainly was a striking sight. We had put him with the other four geldings Friday morning, and he wasn’t bad with them. It was more like he couldn’t or didn’t want to relate. He kept to his own pile of hay, kept to his own area of the pasture. Jack the Pest was no longer there, and the others saw the pinned ears and the raised hoof and understood their instructions—“Leave me alone.” He did stand by the fenceand watch the mares sometimes, his ears forward and his nostrils wide. Otherwise, when he wasn’t eating, he was wandering around the pasture as if, actually, he was exploring it. He walked along the back fence line, sniffed the fence posts, nibbled the grass, looked up the hillside. He stood in the farthest corner, where no horse ever went, and stared off toward the Jordan Ranch. When birds landed on the fence or in the trees, he looked at them. He watched Rusty.
    The other thing he did was roll. Every horse loves to roll, and every horse does so several times a day, but Gee Whiz rolled frequently, and always back and forth, from one side to the other, flailing his legs like a dog. As a result, he was dirty—his favorite rolling spots were the wettest ones. After two days, he was dirty from nose to tail. I pretended that this was not my business—this was not my horse, and no one was riding him, and so he didn’t need to be cleaned up—but the fact was, I was like Dad. I preferred a clean horse, and there is no horse that shows the dirt more than a white one.
    By suppertime, it was really gloomy, and then Dad said that he had heard on the radio that there would be snow.
    Mom shivered and made herself a cup of tea. I wondered if I should suggest putting at least a few of the horses in for the night. I finally said, “That horse Gee Whiz doesn’t have much of a coat.”
    “That’s probably why they didn’t clip him at the track. Good thing, or we would be blanketing him and unblanketing him all winter.”
    “But maybe he should go in a stall for the night.”
    Dad gave me that look that said, “How many times do wehave to talk about this?” then said, “It’s not his hair that keeps him warm. It’s his body and the soles of his hooves. If you went out there with just a little coat on, you would freeze to death, but that’s because your surface area is very large compared to your weight. A horse is like a big football. His volume is huge compared to his surface area, and when he gets cold, he trots around. The trotting makes the soles of his feet vibrate, and they push the blood back up his legs and to his heart. If he’s getting plenty to eat, and our horses are, he’s warmer if he can move around than if he’s stuck in a stall. That one