Stable Manners (10 page)

Carole hopped out of bed, washed up, tidied her room, and got dressed quickly. Since she hoped to be able to ride with Cam after Horse Wise, she put on her riding clothes. She took an extra amount of time with her hair. She wanted to look her best.

Carole and her father arrived at Pine Hollow right before Cam’s mother dropped him off. Carole felt a delightful little tingle when she saw him. She admitted
to herself that she’d been nervous about meeting him face-to-face again, but once he arrived, she knew there wasn’t anything to be nervous about. She was glad he was there. He was going to enjoy the day as much as she was.

Stevie was waiting for Phil to arrive. She waved cheerfully at Cam and Carole and then Carole took Cam on a tour of the stable.

“I’ve been studying those sheets you mailed me,” Cam said as they walked around. “I hope I’ll do okay.”

“I’m sure you will,” Carole assured him. “You know so much more than I do anyway.”

“You think so?” He seemed genuinely surprised. “It seems to me that you know a lot more than
I
do, not the other way around.”

Carole hadn’t expected that at all. She smiled with pleasure, then said politely, “Well, what matters is to know enough to take good care of the horses.” They both agreed on that.

In another part of the stable, Stevie was quizzing Phil. “What Olympics inspired the first three-day event in England?” she asked.

He grinned at her. There was a twinkle in his eye. “I want you to know that I know the answer to that. But I’m not going to tell you because I think
you don’t
know the answer and you’re just trying to worm it out of me so you’ll know, too.”

Stevie was in a quandary. She did know the answer. But maybe Phil
didn’t
know it and he was just trying to get her to tell him. Then she started laughing. The possibility that Max would ask such a silly question was just about zero. She continued with the game.

“Of course I know,” she said. “But you’re not going to get me to do
your
work.” She looked at him and smiled brightly. One of the things Stevie liked the very most about Phil was that they understood a lot of things about each other without having to explain. Teasing each other was lots of fun.

Stevie took Phil’s hand. “Come on,” she said. “Let’s go to the tack room where we can talk a little bit. I think you could use some brushing up on the three main types of coughing in horses.”

“Oh, wow,” Phil said. “I can hardly wait. Then can we do external parasites?”

“Definitely!”

In another part of the stable, Lisa was by herself. She’d seen Phil and Cam and she’d said hello. Both Carole and Stevie had invited her to come be with them and she knew they’d meant it, but she also knew it was a good time for Stevie and Carole to be with their boyfriends. Besides, she had something she
wanted to do. She wanted to visit with the mare. She’d been so busy studying for the Know-Down that she’d almost forgotten the mare who she’d thought was going to have her foal two weeks before. Lisa shook her head. How little she seemed to know!

The mare raised her head anxiously when Lisa approached. She laid her ears back and then flicked them up again. Her tail swished. She was anxious, just the same way she had been two weeks ago. Lisa held her hand out in greeting. The mare ignored it. That was odd. A horse used to being around people usually wanted to sniff an offered hand, particularly if there was any reason to think that hand might hold some sugar or a carrot.

“It’s okay, girl,” Lisa told the mare. “I don’t have anything for you anyway.” She reached to pat the horse on her neck.

The mare stepped back from the pat.

Lisa looked at her watch. It was five minutes to ten. The Horse Wise meeting was about to start. She said good-bye and left the mare, who seemed as uninterested in Lisa’s departure as she had been in her arrival.

“H
ORSE
W
ISE
,
COME
to order!”

There was a rustle of excitement and then quiet. Max welcomed everybody to the open meeting and then asked all the members to introduce themselves to the visitors. Three other Horse Wise members had invited friends to come to the meeting, so there were almost thirty young riders in the room.

Max explained the rules of the Know-Down.

“There are a lot of different ways you can do this, but here’s how we’re going to do it. I’ve made you into teams. There are seven teams of four members. I’ve tried to balance the teams so that they will all be relatively equal in riding experience.”

That meant that he’d split up The Saddle Club. The girls knew it and were disappointed, but it was sort of a compliment. It meant that Max knew they had a lot of experience and he was pretty sure that they’d been working extra hard to do well to make up for causing him trouble, and he thought that if they were one team it wouldn’t be fair to others. When Max named the teams, they learned that Stevie and Phil were on one team, Carole and Cam were on another, and Lisa was on a team with May. May seemed so happy about that that Lisa couldn’t be upset about the fact that she’d been separated from her best friends. Each team had been named after one of the stable’s horses. Carole’s team was “Barq,” Stevie’s was “Topside,” and Lisa’s was “Comanche.” Within the team, each player was assigned a number and the questions would go from team to team, number by number, so that the number one Barq player would answer a question, then the number one Topside player, then the number one Comanche player, and so on. When all the number ones had answered a question, it would be the number twos’ turns. It seemed complicated, but Lisa was pretty sure she’d get the hang of it.

“All right, here we go,” Max announced. “As I explained to most of you earlier, each question has an
assigned value. You get to choose the level of difficulty—from one to four. If you get it right, you get it all right. If you get any of it wrong, you get it all wrong and the next person up will finish the question, having the benefit of knowing what was right and what was wrong about your answer. The disadvantage there is that the next person has to answer the level of difficulty chosen by the person who got it wrong. Everything clear?” The riders nodded. “Are you ready?”

“Ready!” they called out.

The Know-Down began.

Most of the riders wanted to start with pretty easy questions.

“What is a ‘hand’?”

“Four inches.”

“What side of the horse do you generally mount and dismount on?”

“Left.”

“How do you change diagonals at a rising trot?”

“Sit two beats.”

Then it was Stevie’s turn. She decided to try for more and asked for a three-pointer.

“Where is the Spanish riding school?”

This was a trick question. If it had been a one-point question, it was possible that the answer might be
Spain, but as a three-point question, it couldn’t be an easy answer. Stevie scrunched her eyebrows in thought. Then it came to her.

“Austria,” she said.

“Yes,” said Max.

“Nice,” said Phil, and he clapped her on the back. Stevie actually blushed. Lisa saw it. She looked around to see if anybody else noticed. Nobody else seemed to. There was, however, an odd look on one person’s face and that was Veronica’s. The look was confusion. That was not an emotion Veronica usually either had or showed. Lisa wondered what she was confused about. She didn’t have time to wonder for long, though, because it was her turn.

“Two points, please,” she said, feeling bold.

“What steps should be taken to prevent tetanus?”

“Vaccination,” she said. Then she paused. Was there something else? The question asked for “steps,” not “step.” She decided it needed more answer than she’d given. “There are a lot of things you can do to minimize exposure to tetanus, like cleaning stalls and the stable area, but wherever there are horses, there is tetanus, so horses should be vaccinated regularly, beginning at three or four months of age. Mares should be vaccinated before foaling so that the babies have immunity from her when they are born and any horse
who gets a puncture wound should be vaccinated with an antitoxin. In addition, all riders and anybody who works around horses should be immunized regularly. Is that enough answer?”

There was a moment of quiet. Lisa wondered what she’d done wrong. It turned out she hadn’t done anything wrong.

“It’s enough answer,” Max assured her. “In fact, I think it was a four-point answer to a two-point question, so that’s what I’m going to give you. Nice work, Lisa. And anyone else can earn extra points that way, too.”

Lisa’s teammates gave her high fives.

The next person up was Veronica. “Two points,” she said. That made sense. Veronica was pretty smart about horses. She shouldn’t begin with a one-point question.

“What should be your first action if your horse refuses his feed and appears dull and listless?” Max asked.

Lisa thought that was an easy question and should have been a one-pointer. If a rider suspected a horse was ill—and those were certainly signs of illness—the first thing to do was to check the horse’s temperature.

“Call the vet,” Veronica said. Lisa stifled a snicker. Veronica thought everything having to do with
horses, except the actual riding, was something she had to get somebody else to do. Naturally,
she
would call the vet.

“Wrong,” Max said. The question went to someone else who answered it correctly.

Then it was Cam’s turn. He asked for a two-pointer as well.

“What are three places for feeling a horse’s pulse?”

“Under and inside of the jawbone; in the cheek—that’s above and behind the eye; and on the inside of the foreleg, by the knee.”

“Good,” Max said.

Phil then also asked for a two-point question.

“On a double rein, what are the two reins called and what’s the difference between them?”

Phil had to think for a minute. “The bridoon and the bit reins. The bridoon is wider and longer.”

“Good,” said Max. He was smiling, obviously pleased that his riders and their guests had worked so hard and learned so much.

“You know, I have to say something. You all have obviously been working very hard and you’re probably sitting there thinking that it’s wonderful that you’re doing well in this Know-Down, but the fact is, what you’ve worked on over these last two weeks
isn’t
just
for the Know-Down; it’s for the horses and it’s for life. Good job.”

Everybody seemed proud of what Max was saying, but there were three girls in the group who thought they understood it better than anybody else. It had been their love of horses more than anything that had made them confess their mistake. They had never regretted their honesty. Now they were downright proud of it.

There wasn’t time to think about that much, though, because the questions continued at a rapid pace. Some of the riders made mistakes, of course. Not everybody got everything. Stevie was stumped by a two-pointer that asked what the usual angle was between the wall of a normal foot and the ground. She forgot that it was fifty degrees. Lisa was pleased that
she
remembered, because the question came to her when Stevie missed it and she got it right.

Right after Lisa, Veronica was stumped by a two-pointer.

“To which of the three straps on a saddle should the two buckles of a girth be fastened?”

Veronica had no idea at all and her blank look said everything. In a way, it wasn’t surprising, since she never did her own girth if she could talk somebody else into doing it, but the fact was it was a pretty basic
question and she should have known. In addition to that, it was right on the study sheets.

May took the question and answered it correctly. “The two front or the first and third,” she said.

“Good,” Max praised her.

Carole was puzzled. Veronica’s mistakes didn’t make much sense. Veronica was a pretty good rider and should have picked up some information along the way, although people did have a tendency to forget information they didn’t use. But recently, she’d seen Veronica with study sheets. Also Veronica had seemed confident of her ability to do well in the Know-Down and that could only mean she’d been working on it. Certainly, the girl had known she couldn’t get a stable hand to do this for her! There was something very odd going on with Veronica and Carole didn’t know what it was.

It seemed that Veronica didn’t know either, but what she did to remedy the situation was to start asking for one-point questions.

“What should you do as you approach a horse?”

Veronica thought for a moment. “Speak to him?”

“Yes,” Max said.

Her question the next time around was even easier. “How many beats are there in a canter?”

“Three,” she answered confidently.

“Very good!” Max said. He was being a little sarcastic, which was unlike him, but it was clear now to more than just Carole that Veronica was somehow totally unprepared for this Know-Down and nobody knew why that was. If she was so unprepared, why had she come at all?

The answer to that question came to Carole on the next round. The person before Veronica, Adam Levine, chose a three-point question.