Running Down Hill
Sue Weymouth Wimberly, all rights reserved.
He crested the narrow, steep rise at a slow, pulling canter. Thrusting his shoulders up the rocky incline, hooves clattering over loose stones, slipping briefly on the floor of autumn foliage, the horse reached out for the final stride that would pull them over the top of the hollow, and down, down to the road - and home.
The narrow trail plunged abruptly downward, but the horse did not brace himself with his hips and rear hooves to slow his descent. Instead he used the gentle mounded peak to push off into space, into increasingly longer, faster strides. The great, roaring gallop of a race horse, neck stretched flat, ears forward, oblivious to its rider, conscious only of his own overwhelming need to run.
The rider atop, technically in charge, ignored by her sprinting steed, realized within ten strides that she had erred seriously by letting him go for the instant it took to exit the hollow for the path back down the mountain. A dangerous mistake that might cost her life. Too late, she tried futilely to gain the horse’s attention, standing in the stirrups, legs clenched tightly around the barrel of his ribs, and pushing forward against the saddle blocks. She hauled mightily at the reins until she was certain her hands and arms would break. Nothing. Horse in charge, and in full flight home.
This mountain road had tired the horse on the way up, his sides heaving in an effort to maintain a steady training pace across the face of the mile long hill. But the trail had ended in a rocky outcrop littered with “No Trespassing” signs in front of one of the local summer residences. So, she had turned him back. It was too late in the day to continue into uncharted territory anyway, and she did not relish the prospect of attempting to control her increasingly nervous horse as the shadows drew rapidly toward dusk.
And, in turning him back, she had miscalculated completely the effects of letting the horse get just a little bit out of hand, to put his nose into the wind, and his mind toward home. Now there was no way to slow him or to stop him without risking her own neck. The narrow chip-and-tar jeep trail was confined by impenetrable brush, timber, and barbed wire on the uphill side, and by a sheer drop off the downhill side.
The primitive track was covered in loose gravel, chipped stone and a thick layer of brilliant gold and orange leaves. The violence of the last rain storm left deeply eroded scars at random intervals, ruts deepened by the passage of a four-wheel-drive jeep or truck; now hidden hazards littered with the glorious remnants of autumn’s tracery.
As they raced the mile down the trail, she had only time to think, and little else to occupy her time. The horse certainly was of no mind to yield to her hands, and to make matters worse, her mongrel dog leapt and danced just ahead of the racing horse, just out of range of its hooves, mouth open, grinning a wolfy laugh for the excitement of a race through the woods.
God. These idiots. And they’re running the show.
Her thoughts were as blurred as the landscape which slipped across her peripheral vision. God damn you, horse. A hairpin curve - their first. She thought it strange that she had absolutely no memory of this particular turn. Having loafed mentally on the way up, she regretted not paying closer attention to the contours of the trail. Now, she felt a panic coming on…the anticipation of not knowing how tight the next turn would be, or what would be required of her to stay with the flight.
Don’t pull him off balance whatever you do. Let him run it out to the road, then find a place to turn him. At thirty miles per hour, and forty-feet per stride, you’ll need all the space you can find to turn him. Turn him now, and he’ll fall and roll, probably over you, crushing your spine, your hips, your skull. Even if you bail off to the rear or the side, at this speed you will likely break something very important.
She did not think about dying in this place, but concentrated only on keeping the inner line of her legs and butt glued to her saddle as the horse’s feet skittered across the leaves. Hunched fetally over his withers, she dropped the reins and buried her hands in the horse’s mane. She was determined that they would not die together in this remote place, and for the longest three minutes in the history of the modern world, or at least her forty years on watch, their lives became a fleeting, precarious and precious union.
Finally it ended. A small flat spot, the intersection of farm roads, and a hard-right hand turn down hill on to the oiled gravel farm road. The horse was still running hard, and sweating, stinking with exhaustion. Another fifty yards down the road, and she found an earthen bank to put him into. Then he did stop, having been run to earth quite literally, sides matted with dust and sweat, lungs straining and heaving to pull in every ounce of air in the valley.
She screamed her rage and frustration at the exhausted horse who could not hear her voice for his own ragged breathing, and the blood racing through his body. The noise meant nothing to him at all, for he had completely tuned out her existence and her presence in their equation.
Her fury unabated, she raised her right hand and lashed his head, neck and shoulder with a short nylon crop intending to draw blood and succeeding in scoring his hide through his thick winter hair coat. She stopped quite suddenly after a half-dozen blows, when the sharp, white hot fire shot from her right hand into the wrist, through her elbow up into her shoulder and neck. She dropped the crop, unable to flex her fingers further, and she realized that the ring finger on her right hand was broken, a stress fracture from pulling so hard against the racing horse’s head.
The horse, still attempting to recover its wind, turned his head away from the whip strokes, rolling his eyes in fear at the sound of the whip against his own skin, and rounding his back against the blows.
In pain, out of patience, numb with cold and shock, she legged the horse to a shaky walk down the farm road to their home, silently defying him to attempt to flee her anger, and praying that he would not for she knew that she would be unable to control him at all with only one working hand. The dog trailed them home, its tail between its legs, head hung low. The dog feared only two things in its existence: the sound of its human’s voice in anger, and the whip. Secretly, the dog thanked the horse for taking on the whip and voice, and silently cheered for its own good fortune in winning the race, or so it thought.
