IF THERE HAD BEEN A BOOBY PRIZE WE WOULD HAVE WON IT!
This is coming to you thanks to my new four-hoofed keyboard. Has your rider ever decided to take you on an AMERICAN COMPETITIVE TRAIL HORSE ASSOCIATION ride???
Now you should know, I’m a hunter, and a good lookin,’ fat and sassy, ornery one if I do say so myself; so what was my rider doing signing us up for this? Don’t you thinks she might have noticed that no one from our hunt rode on it – they were all helping out as judges instead?
NOPE, she just took me up to the big ring a week before the ride to practice some of the “challenges.” I didn’t worry too much about it, because it wasn’t a windy day (that always gets me revved) and we had all the time we wanted to practice silly things like my rider grabbing one end of a stick off a barrel and then persuading me to walk a perfect full circle around the barrel without the other end of the stick falling off.
Now, I ask you, when in the hunt field would you EVER need to do this? Anyway, I humored her and did it O.K., even as I began to think less of her intelligence.
I also agreed to walk across a sheet; and for another challenge my rider had to pick up a sunhat on the ground with a hockey stick and put it on her head. In the hunt field that trick might come in handy one day, but they’d have to use a crop with a handle because you don’t just find a hockey stick laying upside of a tree when you need it.
So I guess I gave my rider a sense of false confidence going into the actual ride. At the first challenge we had to walk into a narrow “L” made of poles, and then back out. I’m good at backing, but maneuvering my large rear end around the turn when I couldn’t see back there, for crying out loud – maybe she thought I had one of those rear end cameras like new cars. So we stepped on a few poles, and believe it or not they were TIMING us – can you imagine? How picky can you get??
Next stop was a mailbox we had to sashay towards (they have some fancy eventing term for it) and stop. My rider opened it up, got the mail out, and handed it to the judge. Well I mean, durrrr, any moron can do that.
After these two challenges things went downhill fast. I won’t bore you with all the details, but I have to say all those poles were a pain in the tush. When you step on them they roll; it was all I could do not to fall down.
I did get a chance, though, to show those judges how fast I can go backwards. It happened when we rode up to a rope hanging on a jump standard. My rider was supposed to pick it up and pull on it. But when I noticed it was over a tree limb, and was attached to an empty water jug on the ground I got out of town, Brown, and took off backwards at a trot. We never got near that rope. Oh, did I mention, I’m a redhead?
As it turned out we weren’t the worst in our division, we were second to the worst. My blacksmith must have felt sorry for us because he and his horse did worser!! My rider said she wouldn’t give me an apple I’d been so bad; but she forgot and and gave it to me anyway.