Conversations With A Prince (1 of 2 free samples)

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COPYRIGHT
Conversations With A Prince by Helen Husher. Copyright 2005 by Helen Husher
All Rights Reserved. Sharing not permitted.

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CONVERSATIONS WITH A PRINCE

by Helen Husher

TO CAROLINE good with horses

ONE

EVER SINCE MY EARLY TEENS, MY OFF-THE-RACK ANXIETY dream has always been that I have left my horse standing forgotten in the cross ties. While not a felony, this is definitely a crime, and when I mentioned this to Kathie she responded with a little laugh, maybe because she recognized the dream or maybe because other people's worries often seem faintly ridiculous. "If you left Prince in the cross ties," she said, "I think somebody would notice and put him up for you."

Kathie Moulton is a co-owner and teacher at East Hill Farm, a thirty-horse boarding and lesson barn set into the shoulder of a ridge in Plainfield, Vermont. Despite the name, the farm actually faces west, and if you stand at the main entrance to the barn you can see the ragged blue profile of the Worcester Range of the Green Mountains--Burnt Mountain, White Rock Mountain, Hunger Mountain. These plain, honest names seem part of the reality that no one at East Hill has the leisure to admire this view, what with all the work that must be done.
For long stretches of the day, East Hill is a moving scrum of working students, regular students, staff, owners, boarders, 4-Hers, adult amateur riders, disabled riders, parents, siblings, spouses, and hangers-on; stalls are being cleaned and horses are being turned out, brought in, groomed, and spoken to; the indoor arena is full of movement, and the chalkboard near the doorway is covered with scribbled instructions about feeding, vets, and cell phones; the aisles are festooned with animals, wheelbarrows, grooming kits, horse rugs, tack, and radios. The horses who are not being worked press their long noses against the bars of their box stalls, sniff, and keep detailed minutes of the proceedings. Kathie's quite right--if I really did drive off and leave Prince standing in the cross ties, he wouldn't be allowed to stay there for long. Someone would move him just to get him out of the way.

But there is a tidal quality to the activity in a horse barn, which means there are also times at East Hill when the place is utterly still except for the sigh of horses, the rustle of bedding, and the occasional bang of a bored inhabitant kicking the wall. The effect is a little eerie: It is as if the entire cast has been vaporized by space rays or sent en masse on some urgent errand in a neighboring state. Even the bony tortoiseshell barn cat, who spends his waking hours supervising from the hayloft, is mysteriously missing; a different cat, plumper and less managerial, sleeps in a tight spiral on the heater in the tack room, and the entire barn lapses into a ghostly and peaceful deadness. You can browse in silence, visiting with each animal, and stand in the doorway and look at the mountains. The aisle is swept and some of the horses are snoozing, their noses on their folded forelegs and their leaflike ears at half-mast.
The depth of this silence, and the fact that the animals all know how to make use of it, tells me that East Hill is a well-run place.

It was on one of these quiet days in midwinter that I was sent to get Prince out of the paddock for my lesson. East Hill Farm, as an institution, believes firmly in regular turnout--it keeps horses socialized and calm--and this means that the animals are often inconveniently spaced and slightly grubby. I wasn't wearing my glasses, but I'd been told Prince was the one wearing a green rug and that he was a buckskin, and even in a blurry world this should have been plenty of identification. As I crunched through the snow toward the gate, though, all I could see were two leggy balls of mud, one large and one small, who hung together like a pair of adolescents sneaking cigarettes at the far end of the fence line. The larger ball looked at me, snorted a little, and told the smaller ball a disrespectful joke, and then they both turned to see what I would do.
The two of them looked like the aftermath of the worst kind of fraternity gathering--the smaller ball didn't really even have a rug on anymore, since it had slipped across his back and down, and it dragged on the ground like a mammoth bib. The larger one was mostly just caked, but he'd done a good job of it, and there seemed to be a blob of topsoil drying in a knob on the top of his head. They both looked dissolute and dirty and vaguely delinquent. I hoped, fervently, that the larger horse was Prince, mostly because there was something about the level of alert scrutiny coming off the smaller horse that told me he probably had a pony temperament. Ponies are fine for small people who don't mind jokes being made at their expense, but I'm big and sometimes take things personally. The larger horse looked far more normal; he'd managed to remain properly dressed and had a generically pretty outline.
Chipping off the mud to find the hair color underneath, I discovered that Prince was of course the little one. The larger horse noted my disappointment and stuck up for his friend by inserting himself between us.

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