Hide & Seek - Alyssa Brugman [17]
Blue pricked his ears forward and a moment later Shelby thought she heard a buzzing sound. She wondered if it was a trail bike. It might be Chad. Or it could be someone using a chainsaw to cut up all those branches that had come down in the storm.
'Come on, woolly bear,' she said, steering him straight ahead towards the sound.
Shelby pushed him into an easy, ground-covering canter. Blue was much rougher to ride than other horses, but she trusted him, and so she sat back, pushing her weight into her heels, and relaxed into the cadence of his hoof beats.
Every now and then she would hear the blurting, buzzing sound of the engine, but when she reached the steeper, zigzagging trail on the far side of the Gully the sound stopped, and Shelby started to wonder if she had imagined it.
Looming above she could see the grey, cone-shaped water tower. Chad had said the horse circus was near here. According to his description it should be just beyond these bends. She came to the corner with the old lounge suite, faded and disintegrating now, and littered with old beer bottles, but arranged in an L-shape, as it would be if it was in a house.
There was a new fence along the left-hand side of the straight, just the way Chad had described. On the other side of the fence, parked haphazardly in the dirt paddock ribboned with tyre tracks, were six mighty semitrailers, splashed in bright colours, and each sign-written in scrolled font – Equus Caballus.
'The circus!' Shelby whispered. She stopped Blue in the trees and hopped off, peeking through the branches to get a closer look.
Next to the trucks there was a wooden round yard with a sand base. The man standing in the middle wore dirty black jodhpurs, top boots and a blue singlet top. He had long black hair tied in a ponytail and fierce dark eyebrows. He held a bright red lunge whip in one hand.
Inside the round yard, three grey ponies trotted around in a circle in single file, and then, when the man held up his lunge whip, the first horse peeled away across the middle and rejoined the others at the back. Shelby was astounded to see that they were completely without any sort of harness. Nothing. Not even a halter. She had read about liberty work before, but she had never seen it in real life.
One after the other the ponies slipped around, taking it in turns to be at the front. The man stepped forward and raised his whip slightly, and all at once the three ponies turned around and trotted in the opposite direction.
Behind the round yard a temporary paddock had been constructed with an electric fence. About half a dozen horses of different sizes stood in the middle of the yard picking from a round bale of hay. One was a Clydesdale. As she watched, a miniature pony – pied like Blue – wandered, head-down and oblivious, straight under the Clydie's belly on its way to the water trough. Shelby covered her mouth to stifle a giggle.
There was a flat sandy space on which two ladies rode matching black horses, thick-haired and cresty – Shelby guessed they were Friesian. The ladies were riding side by side, going through a routine not dis-similar to the pairs workouts that Shelby had done with Erin at Pony Club. She admired the way the lady on the outside was able to lengthen her horse's stride around the corners, without looking like she was rushing. Then they performed a piaffe in time and Shelby whispered, 'Wow!' She had read in her horse encyclopaedia that the piaffe – jogging on the spot – was originally designed to keep horses warm in battle.
In the middle of it all there was a red-brick house with aluminium windows, a cement veranda at the front and a garage with a roller door. It was the most ordinary-looking house in the whole world and it seemed to Shelby to be the odd one out, like a kazoo in an orchestra. It was mundane and ridiculous, where everything else was mesmerising.
Two women sat on the front steps talking. Shelby