Rodeo Rider (7 page)

It was Stevie’s third try at the barrels. Just as Eli had said, it
was
easy—to be bad at.

“Don’t go so fast around the corners,” Lisa suggested.

“But you have to go fast around the corners,” Kate argued. “The trick isn’t to slow down. It’s to stay on going fast.”

Stevie held Stewball’s reins and walked over to the corral fence where her friends waited. “Your turn,” she told Christine.

“Don’t you want to try again?” Christine asked,
grinning. “I mean, you know about how important it is to get back on the horse and all, don’t you?”

“Yeah, I know it,” Stevie said, rubbing the part of her where she’d landed. “But I think I’ll sit out, or should I say
stand
out for a few minutes—get it?”

“I get it.” Christine climbed onto the blanket on Arrow’s back. She was used to riding bareback. She was sure it would be okay for barrel racing. But it wasn’t. This time, instead of just the rider ending in the dirt, the rider
and
her blanket ended in the dirt.

“You try it, Kate,” Christine said, joining Stevie at the sideline.

Kate was the undisputed best rider of the bunch. Carole thought that if anybody had a chance, Kate did. All the girls watched closely, hoping whatever she did would work and they could learn from it.

“I’m going to approach this scientifically,” Kate told her friends.

“Just the way I did,” Stevie said. “Going ballistic is very scientific!” Everybody laughed. It was good for them to laugh right then because, although nobody wanted to admit it, things were looking pretty bleak for The Bar None Riders.

First Kate walked through the entire course, much the same way a competitor might do before an important jumping event.

“She’s pacing the thing out,” Carole observed. “What a great idea.”

“What do you mean?” Lisa asked.

“It’s always helpful for you and the horse to know how many strides a course is. It’s a way of measuring the distance between jumps so a rider knows how many steps her horse will need between them. Here, though, Kate wants to know when to start signaling for those turns. Those are very sharp turns and the horse is going to have to change leads as he comes out of them. Kate’s not only being scientific, she’s being smart.”

Lisa watched more carefully. At a canter, or a lope, as the western riders called it, a horse could lead, or reach out, with either front leg. As long as the horse was going straight, it didn’t matter which leg he used. But when the horse was circling something, the inside leg had to lead, and support his weight. Otherwise the horse would become unbalanced, the gait would be unsteady, and the rider was more likely to fly off, especially on a sharp turn.

Next, Kate mounted Spot and walked the course with him. What Kate was doing made sense to Lisa, but something bothered her. “Aren’t we going to have to do this at a gallop?” she asked Carole.

“Maybe, one day,” Carole said. “Right now, though, I think we’ll be lucky if one of us gets through this and stays in the saddle!”

Lisa watched even more carefully.

Kate’s horse, Spot, was an Appaloosa, and had been bred for fast starts, stops, and turns, all important qualities in cowboy horses, since they were traditionally used to cut cattle from herds. Once Spot and Kate had been around the course slowly a few times, he
seemed to understand what he was supposed to do. So did she. Each time Kate did the course, she went a little faster. But her progress still seemed so slow!

At first, she and Spot did it at a slow walk. Then they moved through it at a more collected walk, then an extended walk. Lisa hoped very much that one day she would have the ability to control her horse’s gait the way Kate could. For now, as somebody who was still a fairly new rider, she always felt fortunate to have the horse performing the basic gait she wanted at all.

Kate moved up to a trot. It seemed smooth and sleek to Lisa. Certainly, it wasn’t fast enough to win any prizes, but it looked good.

“Now she’s going to canter!” Carole said, the excitement rising in her voice.

Lisa watched while Kate cantered the course three times, each time going progressively faster. It looked great and she stayed on her horse.

“What are you all up to?” Jeannie Sanders asked, joining the watchers at the corral fence.

“We’re watching Kate train to be a championship barrel racer,” Lisa said proudly.

“Yeah, we want to take the prize at the rodeo to show people what a great ranch this is, so we can start taking business away from The Dapper Dude,” Stevie added.

“It’s a nice idea, but you’re not going to take any prizes riding like that!” Jeannie said.

Lisa knew they had a long way to go, but she was annoyed at Jeannie’s tone of voice. “And you think you can do it better?” she asked.

“Yeah, I do,” Jeannie said matter-of-factly.

Kate completed the course, brought Spot over to the fence, and dismounted, obviously pleased with her progress. The Saddle Club members patted her on the back to congratulate her.

“Jeannie thinks she can do better than you,” Lisa said. “So why don’t you lend her your horse, since he’s warmed up.”

“Be my guest,” Kate said, handing her the reins.

Jeannie mounted Spot, turned him to face the triangle and, on a signal from Kate, whacked Spot on the flank and simultaneously spurred him into a gallop. The girls couldn’t believe what they were seeing! Jeannie had Spot at a flat-out gallop through the entire course, only slowing a little bit to circle the barrels. At each turn, Spot nearly brushed the barrel—once, it even tottered a bit—but he didn’t knock one down. Then, almost before the girls knew what was happening, Jeannie drew Spot to a screeching straight-legged halt right in front of them, spraying dirt behind her. She’d completed the course in about one-third of the time Kate had done it at a canter.

“I guess we have a lot of work to do, don’t we?” Kate asked, humbled by the sight she’d just seen.

“Yeah, but I’ll help you,” Jeannie said. “Now, it’s time to rest your horses and, I suspect, your bruised backsides. Come on over to the north corral and watch Eli. He could use some cheering, too.”

“S
TEER
WRESTLING
IS
the roughest event for Eli,”
Jeannie explained on their way over to the corral. “It takes brute strength. He’s got that, all right, but he’s not heavy himself. It doesn’t take much effort on the steer’s part to haul him around a bit. And that costs precious seconds!”

The girls all climbed up onto the split-rail fence to watch. On a signal from Jeannie, Eli and another wrangler, named Jeff, galloped out of the starting gate with a steer just ahead of Eli. Quickly, Eli edged toward the steer, leaned down off his horse, grabbed the steer by its horns with his arms, slid off his horse, and forced the steer onto its side. It was something to watch!

“Yahoo!” Jeannie cried. “That was perfect!” The girls cheered wildly with her. Jeff rounded up the loose steer and brought him back into the barn while Eli came over to talk to his audience.

“That’s the first time I’ve done it right,” Eli said. “I’m telling you, that steer has spent so much time running wild in this corral that I think he just got tuckered out. So, working with a steer that’s got some life in him is just one of my problems.”

“What’s the other?” Carole asked.

“Jeff. He’s a really good hazer, but he’s not going to be in town for the weekend so he can’t haze for me when I’ll need him the most. I’ve got to get to town and find another cowboy to haze for me at the rodeo.”

“What’s so important about hazing?” Stevie wanted to know.

“Your hazer’s your partner,” Eli explained. “If he’s
good at keeping the steer running in a straight line—and he should be—he can be the difference between whether you win or if you let the clock run out just trying to find the darned animal in the corral.”

“I—uh—Eli—” Jeannie began hesitantly. Eli looked at her patiently. “Um, well—you really did a good job. And, and you’ll do fine on Saturday. I’m sure of it.”

Lisa couldn’t help thinking that that wasn’t what Jeannie meant to say when she started talking. But it was clear she wasn’t going to say any more right then. Her face had settled into the look of awed adoration that Eli hadn’t noticed in the first place and didn’t seem about to start noticing right then. He was all business when it came to rodeos.

“Now, I’ve got to try to work on my roping,” he said. “You girls want to be moving targets for me?”

In their most unified act of the day, the girls said “No,” in a single voice.

T
HE
EVENING
WAS
still and quiet. As far as Lisa could see in the twilight desert, all the world was open space, mountains, and sky. There was no wind. It was still, silent.

“When I see a place like this, it always makes me wonder why man invented civilization,” Lisa remarked.

“So somebody would have the opportunity to come up with a recipe for marshmallows, because they are absolutely critical to s’mores,” Stevie informed her.

“So’s a fire and we haven’t had much luck with that,” Lisa countered.

All five of the girls were sitting at a campsite on a hillside near a cave. The horses were bedded down for the night by the creek at the bottom of the hill. It had taken a lot of begging, and not a few phone calls, to get permission to ride to this campsite to spend the night. As far as Lisa was concerned, if absolutely nothing else went right during their whole trip, this, at least, was as it should be.

“Come on, I’ll show you how to get a fire going,” Christine said. She began piling dry wood and brush in the fireplace that had been used by previous campers.

“Is this an old Indian way?” Stevie asked.

“Only if you think using newspapers and a butane lighter constitute tribal customs.”

Stevie laughed. She remembered how she had expected Christine to be like Indians she’d seen in movies, involved with mysterious rituals, hidden treasures, and that sort of thing. That was before the girls had gotten to know each other. Once they’d become friends, Stevie realized how dumb those expectations had been. Christine was a modern American girl, just like Stevie was. Now that she knew better, Stevie and Christine sometimes joked about it. Stevie knew, however, that Christine wouldn’t think the jokes were funny if Stevie didn’t know better. Only close friends could joke about important things. Christine’s Native American heritage was important.

“Here we go,” Christine said, lighting the papers. Soon the fire was glowing brightly and burning well. The large logs on top of the kindling crackled, confirming that the fire was now safely lit.

Stevie speared a marshmallow with a stick and held it toward the campfire.

“Dinner first!” Lisa protested, a little appalled that Stevie would be eating s’mores before hamburgers.

Stevie shook her head in disagreement. “I have a new motto,” she said. “It goes like this: ‘Life is uncertain—eat dessert first!’ ”

“Well,” Lisa said, “if you put it that way—” She, too, took a long stick and pierced a marshmallow. After all, she told herself, they were on a camping trip, not a nutrition trip.

Soon, five marshmallows were toasting in the fire.

“I found an open space where we can practice tomorrow,” Kate said.

Carole leaned forward to look closely to check her marshmallow. “But what are we going to do for barrels?” she asked.

“We don’t need them in this place,” Kate said. “See, it’s completely open except for three big spiny cactus plants. Those big prickles will keep us from riding too close. It’ll be perfect!”

“If only our riding could be!” Lisa groaned. “We have so much work to do. It didn’t seem like we were so bad—until Jeannie showed us how good we’d need to be!”

“Perfect!” Stevie declared, admiring the golden-brown
marshmallow on her stick. Deftly, she slid it off the stick onto the square of chocolate and sandwiched them between two graham crackers.

Christine talked while she assembled her s’more. “You ever hear the one about the guy who arrived in town the day of the big rodeo?” she asked her friends. They shook their heads. “Well, seems he hailed a cab at the airport. He climbed into the backseat and he said to the driver, ‘Can you tell me how to get to the rodeo?’ The cab driver said, ‘Sure. Practice, practice,
practice
!’ ”

Stevie giggled. “That’s not bad. I’ll have to tell that one to Colonel Hanson.”

Carole rolled her eyes. Stevie and her father loved swapping corny jokes.

“Just a minute,” Lisa said sensibly. “This is a sort of Saddle Club meeting. Let’s not talk about jokes. Let’s talk about horses. I wanted to ask you about something I noticed today while I was riding Chocolate.”

“What’s that?” Carole asked. Lisa knew she would be interested. After all, nothing made Carole happier than sharing information about horses and riding.

“Well, she seems like she’s almost a different horse when she’s leading a group from when she’s in the middle or at the end of it. Why is that?”

“It’s true of a lot of horses,” Carole said. “And it’s one of the things that sometimes makes it hard to ride on trails with groups. A horse in the middle of a pack is going to be influenced by the horse right in front of it. That’s partly because it’s likely the horse feels some
sort of competitive spirit with the horse in front. Part of it is that they take signals from the front, too, so if the horse in the lead begins the canter, the ones behind will follow, even before riders ask for it.”