Yikes, Elk

“you can ride right?” they kept asking and asking. Jill's ride had been arranged by her "big brother" as part of her visit, at a business associate's farm/home outside Calgary. First big brother asked, then the associate himself asked her. She assured them each time, yes, yes, whatever they had for her to ride she would be fine. And she looked forward to going out, guided by a 12 yr old on her brother's horse (who was less of a handful on the trails), so Jill could have her horse.

"You can ride right?" the kid wanted to know as they set out.

Hours later, her chesnut mount started taking a fit on the edge of some trees. The kid's horse started to act up too and it was very dramatic. Jill's heart was in her throat as she spotted the elk and told the kid to lead them out of there "Reverse Course!" she was having real trouble staying seated and staying in control. Paige and she booted it out of the area. When they came back to walk and calmed down again, Jill did not want to acknowledge how scary the episode was for her, or how she could see why they wanted assurances of her riding ability etc. The kid was acting like it was no big deal so she did too.

When they got back to stable the kid started shouting to their entourage "ohmigod you should have seen it this happened and this happened and my horse did that and jill did this and this horse did that i did this and ohmigod it was AWESOME"
*
As they stood chatting, she told Jill about the time she flew her horse to Bermuda for a competition. "Lady, I am not in your league." Jill thought, disappointed because she'd seemed like such a good potential friend.
*
The farrier created quite a traffic jam downtown trying to turn around to park near her place.

They had talked about how they were each dating other people, and when they passed a random stranger on the street, he said “you dating him?” to be funny but she nodded and said hello to her friend.
*
“I know how much you like working with him on the ground”
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Whatever happened to the laurier students?
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Jill reported that the cowboy was too distant.
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"They were separate" she said, indicating the success of the efforts for individual turn out for once. She didn't mention they were both walking the fence and uptight about it, or what a pain it was to bring them BOTH in to use the ring.
"No they weren't" said the blond, when clearly, they were.
*
She and the pony turned left out of the driveway. The pre-set goal was to make it to the gravel concession road to turn around, past 290 even though he was tender footed and it was refreshing out. She could not be bothered to lunge him and hopped right on, with whip. It was garbage day, that oughta make for something! He was pretty good down the driveway between the pond. They had to walk over the orange spray painted word CULVERT between two orange and black striped markers on the road. the neighbours had huge rocky landscapes and flowers and mailboxes and construction vehicles and ponds and driveways and they made it to the turn around point. One car was polite past them and one zoomed rudely by. After they turned around one more polite vehicle came past and nothing too spooky jumped out of the trees at them. Jill loved the zippy 1-2-3-4 sound of his hurried steps on their driveway heading towards the barn.

She wore a watch. It was a 40 minute ride. Obviously, she was getting ready to start actually working up to things.

They jumped all the new little fences, one from a standstill because he'd stopped. All from a trot because she hated cantering fences and trying to judge distances, though she also reasoned he was sore footed and wanted to go easy on him...

She was grateful for the sense she could garner supervision and suggestions from her stablemates. And, she prepared a riding logbook to keep on hand.