Emma and the Cutting Horse (2 page)

“I guess,” Emma answered.

She scooted back in her chair and looked
around on the floor beside her for the remains of her soda. Then
she checked her catalog to see how many horses were left to sell.
She didn’t notice her dad raising his hand until the auctioneer
pointed at him and said, “Going once...going twice...SOLD.”

Emma was so astonished she couldn’t speak.
She hadn’t paid any attention to the horse on the runway until it
was all over. Now she looked up just in time to see a small sorrel
horse hurrying out the exit gate. She only got a glimpse, but the
horse looked young, and plain and scared. She wasn’t sure whether
she should feel elated or disappointed. Her parents had their heads
together and were having a whispered conference.

“Her knees look a little crooked, but she’s
guaranteed to be sound, and I really liked the way she moved.”

“Her breeding is the best. Her mother’s sire
is Poco Dell, one of the greatest cutting horses that ever
lived.”

“She sure didn’t bring much, considering how
well she’s bred. Maybe people were afraid of those crooked
knees.”

“She’s worth more than we paid for her, even
if she never does anything but raise colts.”

“What
did
we pay for her?” Emma
interrupted.

“Twelve hundred and fifty dollars,” her dad
answered quietly. “More money than we ought to be spending on a
horse!”

Emma didn’t know what to say to that.

Gathering up jackets and empty soda cans,
they made their way out of the building. Horses were still being
sold, but the crowd trickled out. In the parking lot, they heard a
commotion and turned to see a loose horse, dragging a halter rope,
make a dash for freedom between the trucks and trailers. Emma’s dad
ran to get between the horse and the highway, and waved his arms to
turn him away from the traffic. It was the red roan colt. The white
rims showed around his eyes, a sign of fear. Several men with
lariat ropes pursued him.

Emma and her mom watched while they drove the
colt into a corner of the back fence and captured him again. He
danced excitedly as he was led up to a trailer, but refused to go
inside. This time the men didn’t give him a chance to pull back and
get away. They clasped their arms behind his rump and shoved him
into the trailer. Someone latched the door quickly, but Emma could
hear him jumping around inside and could see the trailer
rocking.

“I hope ours isn’t that wild,” Emma said as
her dad walked up.

“Me, too!” he agreed.

Emma and her mom walked back to the truck
while her father went to get the horse he had bought. He was gone
for quite a while, and the sun shining through the windows warmed
the interior and made Emma drowsy.

“Why is he taking so long?” Emma asked.

“He’ll have to sign a form transferring her
registration papers into our name, and he has to pay for her,”
Emma’s mom explained. “She’s just a two-year-old, so she may be
pretty nervous. We’ll wait to make friends with her ‘til we get
home.”

When she saw her father come out of the stall
area leading the little mare, Emma got out of the truck and opened
the trailer’s gate. Her dad had two other men with him. Emma had
seen them helping to push the red roan colt into the trailer. Her
father walked right inside the open cattle trailer ahead of the
mare, and when she hesitated; the two other men stepped up beside
her, linked arms behind her rump and pushed her in. She didn’t have
time to panic or resist. They closed the gate and then opened it
again to let Emma’s dad squeeze out after he had tied her securely
in the front of the trailer. He thanked them both, shook hands, and
then got into the driver’s seat and started for home. It would be a
long two hours before they got there.

Chapter
Two

The mare didn’t seem to have much trailer
experience and moved around restlessly, calling loudly to the other
horses. On the highway, she shied from trucks passing by and
couldn’t stand still, rocking the pickup and trailer as her weight
shifted. As darkness fell she began to calm down a bit.

The headlights cast spooky shadows on the way
up the long lane that led to the house, and the eyes of the horses
in the pens below the house glowed red. Emma felt sorry for the new
mare, coming to a strange place in the dark. She began nickering
loudly again, and the horses in the pens answered. Emma’s dad
backed the trailer up to the gate of an empty pen. When he swung
the trailer gate open, the mare moved around nervously on her short
rope, trying to get a look at her new surroundings. Ditto was in
the adjoining pen and put his head over the fence to get a look at
the newcomer. Emma’s dad untied the mare and led her to the back of
the trailer, then stopped so she could put her head down and see
how far it was to the ground. She stepped down carefully, and he
patted her neck and took off the halter. Quickly he closed the
gates of the trailer and the pen. Emma and her mom kept an eye on
the mare while he drove up to the equipment shed, unhitched the
trailer, and brought the truck back down so that the headlights
would illuminate the pen. The fences were five feet high and made
of welded pipe, and the mare quickly realized that there was no way
to get out. Scared and excited, she raced around the pen calling to
the other horses. Emma could hear Camaro, the two-year old she
would help to train this year, answering from her pen at the far
end. Finally the new mare slowed down and went over to touch noses
with Ditto. They nickered softly to each other, but then the mare
squealed, flattened her ears against her neck, spun around, and
kicked at Ditto with both hind feet. She made the pipe fence
between them ring when she hit it with her hooves.

“She doesn’t seem very anxious to make
friends,” Emma said, thinking with regret about the beautiful
palomino mare.

“I’ll give her some hay to keep her busy, and
she’ll probably settle down by morning,” her dad said.

When he tossed an armful of fresh hay into
the pen, the mare shied and snorted loudly. He checked to see that
she had a full tub of water; then they climbed wearily into the
truck and drove up to the house. When she got out of the truck,
Emma heard the fence ring again.

* * *

It was after nine when she opened her eyes
the next morning. She could hear her father talking to someone
outside. Emma pulled the curtain back and saw that Kyle had arrived
to help with the chores. Kyle lived just down the road and helped
with feeding and watering livestock, and sometimes with building
fences, although her father said privately that when it came to
fence building, Kyle was only worth about half of what he got paid.
He was sixteen, two years older than Emma, and had sandy blond hair
with cowlicks in his hairline that defied combing. She had known
him so long he was almost like an older brother.

Emma pulled on old jeans and a sweatshirt and
hurried out to see how the new mare had survived the night. Her
parents and Kyle were already down at the horse pens leaning on the
fence. Six welded pipe pens stood in a long row a hundred yards
below the house, each with a small shed built into a back corner
for protection from the sun and inclement weather. The towering old
hay barn, which had once held horse stalls, stood off to the
north.

The mare was standing in the far corner of
her pen watching them suspiciously. When Emma leaned on the fence
beside Kyle, he nudged her with his elbow and said, “Hi, Linda!”
Since Emma was a scrawny ten-year-old, Kyle had teased her by
calling her the wrong name. The first few times she had corrected
him politely, but now she just punched him on the arm when he did
it.

“That sure looks like a high society horse
you brought home,” he said. “Course, I don’t know much about
horses.”

Emma looked at the mare carefully for the
first time. She was a plain red sorrel, with no white markings
anywhere. She had a small, pretty head and finely shaped pointed
ears, but her eyes weren’t soft and friendly like Ditto’s. Her legs
were slender and her feet small, but now Emma could see what her
parents had been saying about the mare’s knees. They were a tiny
bit out of alignment when viewed from the front; although the
defect was so slight it was hardly noticeable. Emma wouldn’t have
seen it if her parents hadn’t mentioned it at the sale.

“Are you going to ride her today?” Emma asked
her father.

“Not today. The man who talked to me about
her at the sale said she had been saddled but not ridden yet. We’ll
give her a few more days to settle down and then we’ll see how she
does when we handle her. She’s not a very big two-year-old. It
wouldn’t hurt her to grow a little more before she carries much
weight.”

“Emma will get on her,” Kyle volunteered.
“She doesn’t weigh much.”

“I don’t know about that,” Emma’s dad
replied. “Whoever gets on her first might need to have a parachute
attached.”

“What are we going to call her?” Emma
asked.

“Her registered name is Miss Dellfene, so I
guess we’ll just call her that unless something else occurs to us.
When we get to know her better, she may earn herself a new name. I
just hope it isn’t profane!”

When Miss Dellfene got close to Ditto, she
still laced her ears back and squealed at him. Ditto had given up
trying to be the welcoming committee and ignored her now for the
most part.

In the thin afternoon sunlight, Emma took
Ditto out of his pen. When she patted him on the shoulder, a puff
of dust rose in the air from his shaggy winter coat. She brushed
him and combed his mane, but he still didn’t achieve the classy
look of the heartbreaking palomino mare at the sale. She put her
arms around his neck and pulled his whiskery head against her. He
might not have a gleaming golden coat, but he was a handsome, good
natured, honest horse. Throwing her saddle on, she cinched it up
and slid the bit in his mouth. Emma’s saddle was worn and stained
by sweat and it lacked the silver ornaments that had decorated
every piece of horse equipment she had seen yesterday at the sale.
When she swung on and started him out into the back pasture, Ditto
walked quickly with his ears pricked forward, reminding her again
of how much she liked his cheerful, willing disposition. Some
horses needed constant correction and were hard work to ride, but
Ditto seemed to know what she wanted before she did. His soft,
floating trot covered the ground, and soon they came to the trail
that led to Emma’s hideout, a place she had discovered years
earlier on one of her first solo rides. It wasn’t a secret, just a
grove of oak trees with a big rock to sit on in the middle of a
clearing in the oaks. Harley, her Sheltie, was buried next to the
rock. It was a quiet place to sit and think. Emma sometimes brought
her diary and wrote in it here, but today she was content to sit on
Ditto soaking up the silence. Tomorrow was Monday and there
wouldn’t be many more peaceful moments once she got back to
school.

* * *

Scanning the crowd of kids in the bleachers
for a glimpse of Hannah and Katie, Emma couldn’t wait to tell them
about the odd little mare her parents bought at the horse sale on
Saturday. Spotting Katie’s curly blonde ponytail near the top of
the 9th grade section, she climbed through the sea of students to
the empty space they had saved for her.

“Was the horse sale as cool as you thought it
was going to be?” Hannah asked.

“Better,” Emma said. “The people at the sale
dripped money. We stood out like a bunch of country singers at the
opera. You should have seen all those brand-new trucks and horse
trailers, and the horses were selling for a fortune.”

“I guess your dad didn’t buy one, then,”
Katie observed.

“Actually, he did, but not for a fortune. I
was so surprised I think my mouth hung open. He bought a plain
little mare with crooked knees. Well, they’re just a little bit
crooked. She sold really cheap right near the end of the sale even
though she has a fancy pedigree.”

The bell rang to go to first period and Emma
stood up and swung her backpack to her shoulder. It bumped against
the knees of the girl sitting in the row behind her.

“Oh, sorry,” Emma said.

“Watch it, Cowgirl!” the girl snapped
angrily, brushing off her knee as if Emma’s backpack had soiled it.
She turned away from Emma and spoke loudly to the boy who sat
beside her on the bleachers.

“She never talks about anything but horses.
What a hayseed.” Her voice dripped with disdain.

A small shock wave twitched up Emma’s spine.
She stood with her backpack hanging from one shoulder as the girl
and her boyfriend got up and tramped noisily down the
bleachers.

“Man...I just barely bumped her. It was an
accident,” Emma protested, staring after them.

“I know,” Hannah said. “She must already have
a bee in her bonnet about something.”

Emma walked down the hall to her locker and
then on to Algebra, her first class. A niggling little worry stayed
with her through most of the morning, eating away at her excitement
about the new horse. At lunch she got in the snack bar line with
Hannah and Katie, bought a burrito and some fruit punch, and tried
to stop thinking about the incident. Winding their way through the
tables toward the corner where they usually sat, Emma saw Katie
scanning the room in an effort to spot Joe, a boy whose charms had
recently captured her attention. Joe sat behind Katie in science,
and her grades plummeted when she decided she adored him. She told
Emma and Hannah that he had only spoken to her twice, but she
remembered every word of the two short conversations.

“Uh, oh,” Katie said softly, nudging Emma
with her elbow. “Someone’s glaring at you. So are her friends at
the snobby table. She may be putting the word out that you attacked
her with your backpack this morning.”