“Dad, the rope-” I was cut off by my horse’s near vertical buck. Before his hindquarters even returned to the ground, he lunged his body forward and shoved my father down. I fell on the back of my head and blacked out on impact. I got back on. A week later, my mother held the rope in the riding ring. When he spooked, he ran right into her and in his panic, he threw me to the ground. I got back on. My horse is a mustang, a feral horse from the west. Although he untrained and uneasy around people, I had decided to train him and I was not going to let a few hospital visits be in my way. At the Mustang Adoption, there was a diminutive horse one of the paddocks who stood with his head hanging near to the ground. There was an adorable white crescent on his forehead. He had a red coat under a layer of dust still caked on from his desert home. “Which one do you like?” my mother asked quietly. When I pointed at him, he looked up and he stared at us through thick eyelashes. …show more content…
I was teaching him to move laterally across the ring. With the lead rope in one hand and the whip in the other, I stood in front of him and tapped his shoulder with the whip. He walked back and forward in confusion. My jaw clenched tighter each time he came close enough to me that his shoulder brushed my chest. When I asked him to cross over again, he flung his head in the air and pushed forward. He shoved me with his broad head and nearly knocked me over. I made him back away. Sjoeka stared at me with his face screwed up tightly and his ears pinned straight back in anger. Although I understood that any impertinence he showed was only a reflection of my own frustration, applying this knowledge to working with a rather mutinous seven-hundred-pound animal was seeming more and more