Issie and the Christmas Pony (5 page)

After all her fears, rally day had turned out to be one of the best days Issie had ever had.

“Thanks for letting me bring Bert today,” she said to Avery as they untacked him.

“I think Bert enjoyed it as much as you did,” Avery replied.

“Will I see him again before he goes?” Issie asked
as she helped her instructor wrap the floating bandages round the pony's legs. She was trying not to get upset, but already she could feel the tears welling up in her eyes.

Avery shook his head. “I guess not. His new family are coming to the farm to pick him up tomorrow.” He looked at Issie, who was battling bravely not to cry. “Why don't you come home to the farm in the horse truck with me and Bert now? You can give him his hard feed and let him loose in the paddock one last time.”

And so Issie rode home from her first day at the Chevalier Point Pony Club, not with her heart full of joy as she had been expecting, but with a pain in her chest that felt unbearable as she realised that she and Bert were about to part for the very last time. She stood in the paddock at Winterflood Farm as the sun set and snuggled into the strawberry roan's neck, feeding him peppermints out of her pocket and trying not to cry too much. Then she sniffed back her tears and gave Bert one last hug, holding him tight as she said goodbye.

Avery arrived on the morning of the auction with his horse float attached to the Range Rover. When he saw Issie's eyes light up, he shook his head. “Don't get your hopes up,” he told her. “It'll probably be coming home empty. I wouldn't count on finding a horse at this auction. It will probably be full of the problem animals that their owners can't get rid of any other way.” Issie knew that. And she was trying not to get her hopes up. But the harder she tried the worse it got.

Bert had been gone for a week now and Issie really missed him. Being suddenly alone again without a pony was awful. How bad would she feel if she didn't have a pony for the whole of the holidays? This was her last chance to find one before Christmas, and if
she didn't, her chances of making it to pony camp were pretty much non-existent.

As the Range Rover cruised out of town and headed through the rolling farmland of Chevalier Point, Issie was one big ball of nerves. While her mum and Avery chatted away in the front seat she sat in the back feeling positively sick, overwrought with excitement.

As he turned down Lone Pine Road, Avery passed Mrs Brown the road map. “Can you look up the address for me?” he asked.

“Don't you know where it's being held?” asked Mrs Brown.

“Uh-uh. This is the first auction they've held at MacKenzie's Farm,” Avery said. “I've never been here before.”

Mrs Brown took the map from him and checked the address. “According to this, the farm should be about another two kilometres down the road,” she said.

Issie looked out of the window ahead of her and was struck with a sudden sense of
déjà vu
. There was something so familiar about this road, the way the winding snake of grey tarmac cut through the faded hills. Issie felt a strange sense of premonition as she stared out at the bare, pale branches of the slender trees.

Ohmygod!
she thought to herself.
I know this place!

“Pull over up there!” she told Avery. “Ahead of us, where that red barn is, there's a gate that will lead you through to the farm.”

“How do you know that?” asked Avery.

“Because,” Issie said, “I've been here before.”

She had been here. But when? How? Issie's heart skipped a beat.
The dream that she'd had-the grey pony!
She remembered every detail of it so vividly. When she had woken up afterwards it had been so clear in her mind, as if it had really happened. Now here they were-this was the same place she had dreamt about! Everything was as she remembered it: the road, the ghostly trees, the red barn. The only difference was the sign that had been erected by the side of the road
AUCTION TODAY
and the fact that the metal gate was open this time.

Avery drove straight through, nosing the Range Rover down the rutted dirt track towards the barn. “What do you mean you've been here before?” Mrs Brown said, turning around in her seat to look at Issie. “When did you come here?”

“Ummm…school trip…last year…you know?” Issie said. Her mother arched a quizzical eyebrow at
this, but she didn't ask any more questions. Issie hadn't meant to fib to her, but she hadn't known what else to say. “I saw it in my dream” would have sounded a little too kooky. Her mum might freak if Issie told her this was the place that gave her a nightmare the other night.

As they pulled the Range Rover up in the marked parking area next to the barn, Issie stared out of the window at the spot where she had seen the grey horse appear in her dream. She was expecting him to canter round the corner of the barn at any moment and stand before her just as he had done that night. But the grey pony wasn't there and the farm, which had been so eerie in her dream, was no longer quiet and empty. There were horses everywhere, being unloaded from trailers and trucks, with people grooming and fussing over them. Issie's eyes searched frantically through the crowds. How would she find the grey pony in amongst all this lot?

“Do you see one that you like?”

“What?” Avery's question brought Issie back to reality.

“No,” she said. “I was just looking…there are so many beautiful horses here!”

“Well,” Avery opened the car door, “we won't be able
to bid on them if we stay sitting here all day. Let's go!”

Inside, the red barn was a maze of stalls and roped-off pens, each containing a horse ready for the auction ring. Avery looked at the horse in the first pen. It was a brown gelding, about sixteen hands high, with a number 1 stickered on its rump

“These horses here will be the first ones up in the auction ring today,” Avery said, consulting the programme he'd been handed a moment earlier. “There are 122 lots going under the hammer today. The first horse goes up for auction at 10 a.m. so that gives us a bit of time.” He looked round the barn. “I'll check out the horses in here. Issie, why don't you go out the back and see what else is around? If you see anything you like, take down the pony's number and details and come back and report to me, OK?”

Avery turned to Issie's mum. “Mrs B, if you wouldn't mind going to the registration desk in the corner over there and signing up so that we can make a bid? You'll need to give them all your details and get a bidder's number. We need to meet back here again at
nine o'clock with a list of ponies that we want to trial.”

Issie looked at her watch. It was eight o'clock now.

“Are you all right?” Issie felt a hand on her shoulder. It was her mum. “You look a little bewildered,” Mrs Brown said. “Will you be OK by yourself, or do you want to wait for me to do the registration and then I can come with you?”

“No, Mum, I'm fine, honest,” Issie said. She still couldn't shake the feeling that she had been here before. In fact, she was certain of it. And that meant she wasn't just looking for any horse. She was looking for him-the grey pony. He was here somewhere; she could sense it. She had to find him before the auction began.

As her mother headed towards the registration desk, Issie hurried through the barn towards the wide, sliding back doors. As she ran, her eyes scanned the horses in the roped-off stalls. There were chestnuts and palominos, a couple of skewbalds and loads of bays and browns, but she couldn't see a grey pony anywhere. He had to be outside somewhere.

Once she got outside, she realised that finding her pony was going to be more complicated than she had initially thought. The horses and ponies weren't lined up neatly in a row for inspection; they were scattered all
over the place. Some of them, mostly the young colts and yearlings, were being kept all together in the cattle pens near the barn. Others were tethered to trucks and floats or grazing in the roped-off pens that ran in strips between the horse floats. It was like a maze!

Issie began to work her way down the first aisle of trucks and floats where horses and ponies with numbers on their rumps were tethered. Issie noticed that, as well as the number on their rump, each pony had a sheet of paper pinned next to it with the pony's details written up in thick black type. She walked up to the first pony in the aisle, a pretty, creamy coloured horse with a chocolate mane and tail, and read the paper which was plastered to the horse float beside it.
LOT 72
. The description read:

“Hello, Chico!” Issie giggled. The little pony's forelock was so long and thick that Issie couldn't even see Chico's eyes. She was pretty sure that Chico
couldn't see out from beneath all that hair. The mare looked like one of those ponies in a Thelwell book. At only twelve hands high Chico came up to Issie's chest. “You're too little for me,” Issie told the pony gently. “Besides, I'm looking for someone else.”

Over the next hour Issie kept looking. She wound her way down the rows of horse floats and trucks, always expecting to see the grey pony. In fact she saw several grey ponies, but none of them was him. Grey ponies can look fairly alike and yet Issie knew quite definitely that none of them so far was the pony from her dream. She had a snapshot of his face clearly in her mind-his silvery forelock, his deep black eyes and thoughtful expression. She would have known him in an instant if she had seen him again.

By the time she met Avery back at the barn as they had arranged, Issie was feeling deflated. She hadn't found her dream pony.

Avery, meanwhile, had found not one horse, but two. “Well, two that have definite potential anyway,” he told Issie. “One of them is a very nice bay with good, solid conformation. He's thirteen-two hands high which is a good size for you, and he's eight years old with no vices. He's being sold by the owners; the
girl has outgrown him. The other one that I quite like the look of is a palomino. A very striking twelve-year-old mare with loads of pony-club experience. She's won a mountain of ribbons, she's a great jumper and she'd be perfect for you, I think. We could give them both a try now. You could ride them and see what you think, and if you like them then we can bid on both and see which one we get.”

Issie should have been over the moon. The auction had turned up not just one, but two ponies that Avery thought were worth making a bid for.
But
, thought Issie,
they aren't my pony
. They couldn't be. Her pony was a grey and he must be here somewhere; the only problem was she couldn't find him.

Avery's bay was called Juniper. He had a pretty face with ears that pointed in so far when they were pricked forward that they were almost touching at the tips. “That's a sign of Arab blood; this pony has good breeding,” Avery said approvingly, running his hands over the bay, checking his conformation. He picked up all of Juniper's feet and examined the hooves carefully before looking in his mouth to confirm that the pony was indeed eight years old. Then he legged Issie up on to Juniper's back and
they took him over to the arena to try him out.

Juniper proved to be a very well-mannered mount. “Give him a light workout to try his paces,” Avery told Issie. She put her legs on and felt Juniper rise up underneath her. “What's his trot like to ride?” Avery shouted out as she breezed past him.

Issie smiled. “It's lovely! Really bouncy, but lovely!” Despite the fact Issie was still convinced that her grey pony was here somewhere, now that she was actually on Juniper and trying him out, she couldn't help but love the bay pony just a little bit.

“Ask him to canter,” said Avery. Juniper's canter was lovely too. And the pony was a keen jumper. Issie took him back and forth over the trotting poles then tried him over a small jump and Juniper leapt clear with his ears pricked forward, a perfect gentleman.

“He's brilliant, Tom!” Issie beamed from ear to ear. Maybe her obsession with the grey pony from her dream was just silly. There was nothing wrong with Juniper; he was really lovely. “I think we should definitely bid on him,” she told Avery.

If Juniper was good, then Goldie the palomino proved to be even better. Issie loved the golden mare's peppy paces. Goldie's owners showed Issie all the
ribbons the mare had won. There were so many, it looked like Goldie had cleaned up at every gymkhana she'd ever been to. “Plus she's good in traffic and good to float,” Avery said. “A perfect pony-club mount.”

“So which one shall we buy?” Mrs Brown asked Issie and Avery.

“We bid on them both and wait and see what happens,” advised Avery. “Goldie is number 50, so she'll be in the auction ring first. If we miss out on her, we put in a bid on Juniper, OK?” This seemed like a good idea to Issie. With two ponies to bid on, she was bound to have one to bring home in the horse float at the end of the day.

The auction was already under way and Issie stood at the edge of the ring, watching the horses being led in for bidding to begin. The auctioneer stood on a platform to one side of the arena. He spoke very, very quickly, rattling on to the crowd as he asked them to bid more and more for the horse that was being led around in circles in the ring. “How much am I bid for this bay mare, sixteen hands? Who'll give me $200? Do I hear 200? I have 200. Who will give me 300?” he called. Only the way he said it, it was all jumbled in a blur of words:

“How-much-am-I-bid-for-this-mare? Who'll-give-me-two-hundred? Two-hundred!”

Issie watched as horse after horse went under the auctioneer's hammer. Some of them sold for thousands others for just a few hundred dollars. Lot 42, though, a brown mare, was different somehow. When she walked into the ring it was clear that the horse was very old. She had a ewe neck, a straggly mane and tail, and the bones stuck out on her rump from lack of condition.

She looked, Issie thought, like a horse that no one loved. And it turned out to be true. The auctioneer egged everyone on, but no matter what, no one would bid on her. In the end, just one man raised his hand for the mare. He was standing in a row at the back wearing a black jersey and a black hat. He tipped his finger silently to the auctioneer. “I have $50 bid!” shouted the auctioneer. “Going once, going twice…sold!” The auctioneer's gavel came down and the horse was led out of the ring, but the man in the black hat didn't even bother to go and inspect his new purchase. He stood and waited for the next lot to enter the ring so he could start bidding again. Issie stared at the man. There was
something about him that gave her the creeps.

“Who is he?” she asked Avery, pointing across the ring. “Over there. That man who just bought the brown horse.”

Avery looked at the man in the black jumper. “That's Nigel Christie,” he said. “He runs the local knacker's yard.”

Issie had known there would be horse dealers here bidding today, and yet she still wasn't prepared for the rush of emotions she felt at that moment. She was consumed with a burning anger for men like Christie. How could they do a job like that?