Дорин Тови: The Coming Of Saska

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The Coming of Saska As always I rode Mio, the Number Two horse of the remuda. Merlin was still there – 20 years old now, the grand old man of the stables and still the best bet on which to mount beginners: carrying them carefully as babies until he knew they had their balance, then cantering with them regardless – though still gently – just to prove to them that they could go. So was Cobnut, the fast little dark chestnut gelding beloved of my friend Tina, who was a nurse. So were Gusto who, with me clinging to his neck, had once given a Wild West bucking demonstration, and Kelly, the eternally doleful Irish horse, and Alex, the big chestnut hunter.

Of the others. Halberdier was now retired, Zaboine had been bought by his favourite rider and gone to live with him on Exmoor – and Jasper, the tall black thoroughbred, was dead.

Tragedy had struck once more, as it can so easily with thoroughbreds. Jasper had developed leg trouble, which had been diagnosed as chronic arthritis. He’d had supports, injections, lengthy, expensive treatment... Lynn Hutchings, who’d trained him from a yearling, had nursed him like a baby. It was no use. At first there were intervals when his leg appeared to be normal – and then, for no apparent reason, he would be limping, in pain again. If he was kept in his box, his leg improved to a degree but he became bad-tempered with frustration. If he was put out to grass, even on his own, he would try to gallop because that, for him, was what life was for – and his leg would go again. Towards the end, while the Vet tried a last desperate treatment to save him, he lived permanently in his box. It was heartbreaking to see him watching as the other horses went out on a ride.

Gusto, who’d been his grazing companion in happier days 22

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on the hill. Mio, with whom he’d loved to race. And then Jasper, whose joy it had been to skim across the Downs as if on wings, would come out for his own exercise and limp painfully around the yard.

The treatment failed. There was nothing more to be done, said the Vet... and sadly the Hutchings agreed. There was no question of retiring him like Halberdier. He would have been in pain for the rest of his life. So now Jasper was gone, at only seven years old, and in his place was Kestrel: a fine-tempered chestnut thoroughbred who looked very like Zaboine. There was also, which complicated things considerably, another newcomer called Barbary.

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Three

‘YOU’LL LIKE HIM – HE’S just your cup of tea,’ said Mrs Hutchings when she told me they’d bought Barbary. What she meant by that I wasn’t sure. Mio, to me, was my cup of tea – the horse I would have owned had it been possible.

A three-quarter Arab, beautiful, fast, with the gracefully swaying hindquarters of the pedigree. Hindquarters which he’d used on countless occasions to cart me off, gathering them beneath him for his famous leap and we’d be away up the track as if he were Pegasus.

I’d improved mind you. He didn’t get away quite so often and when he did I didn’t, these days, grab the saddle.

(‘Pulling leather’ they call it on the Western range, where it is regarded as the hallmark of the dude.) No. These days I sat there, hands down, and battled every inch of the way. We went sideways, in circles, up on his hind legs ... it surprised me sometimes to realise I was doing it. ‘Splendid,’ Mrs Hutchings would call. ‘Now let him out gently... make 24

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him trot before you canter.’ I hadn’t got that part of it yet.

The moment I let Mio out he went like an arrow with a jet engine attached. But at least I sat the arrow now with a modicum of direction: not with my eyes shut, holding the saddle and praying.

Why then did Mrs Hutchings think I’d like Barbary? He was another one in Mio’s class, she said. Fast, eager... easy to control so long as one sat him properly. And it would be good for me to occasionally ride another horse, particularly as we were going out to Canada where I’d probably ride a variety anyway.

I tried Barbary. I didn’t think he was like Mio. His trot was jerkier. He didn’t leap into a canter. He was fast, admittedly, but he didn’t fight control or throw his head about, or gallop with it turned sideways, as Mio did. Mio was better practice for prancing about on the range – besides which, he and I had rapport. If our land at the cottage had been flat enough and if the Hutchings would have parted with him... in spite of what I’d said about never owning horses, Mio would have been living with us.

So I went back to riding Mio and Tina tried out Barbary, and said she didn’t like him as much as Nutty either. His trot wasn’t so smooth, she said... admittedly he cantered well... but there wasn’t that sense of competition .

I knew what she meant. Tina had recently achieved a spectacular in which, holding open the gate to the Downs while the rest of the party went through, she’d asked the last rider to wait, not to canter until she herself had come through – and the other rider, taking no notice, had gone belting after the others. Tina, on the wrong side of the wall, had gone up in the air on the excited Nutty and had come down back to front. Thinking she’d then got him under 25

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The Coming of Saska control she’d turned him towards the gate – and up he’d gone again, all four feet in the air, and whirled a complete circle in the opposite direction.

Tina had fallen off. Nutty had bolted through the gate and they’d had quite a job to catch him. It was because he thought he was being left behind, of course. There was nothing vicious about Nutty. But, said Tina, she shouldn’t have come off. So now she was insisting on opening all the gates, deliberately going through last and making him wait till she was ready. He still whipped round at every gate like a spinning top, but he’d never again managed to unseat her.

That, and trying to hold him when he raced with Mio, was what Tina regarded as competition. Not going along on Barbary, fast though he was, as uneventfully as if he were on tramlines.

For a while that was, and then Barbary began to get his bearings. He hadn’t been unfit when he came – it was just that for a while before he was sold he hadn’t been used much. Now his muscles were hard and he’d sized up the other horses... he could lick any of that lot, he said.

He proceeded to do it every time they took him out, and the excursions became progressively devastating. First it was on the other rides that we heard he’d run away with someone... or stampeded the entire outfit, charging past it from the rear. Then it was on our ride that we would hear a warning yell from Tina and pull over to one side as Barbary came flashing through. He was getting stronger, said Tina...

it was practically impossible to hold him. Nonsense, said Mrs Hutchings. Tina didn’t sit down hard enough.

I didn’t either, of course. That was a well-known fact. So it was hardly surprising, the one time in that period when 26

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I did ride Barbary, that I met with little success. Mio and Nutty were on holiday – all the horses had a fortnight’s rest in turn in the summer and the two of them were out at grass together. Tina was away too, on holiday in North Africa, from which she returned quite overcome at having cantered on a camel.

Normally people only trotted on them, it seemed, held on a leading rein by an accompanying camel boy, but she’d explained that she rode in England and asked if they could go fast... and at the exact time that she was careering over the desert on a camel keeping up the reputation of the British for being mad, I, on her darned Barbary, was in danger of breaking my neck.