The Eighty-Dollar Champion - Elizabeth Letts [38]
As they heard the heavy shoes clump down the lane, the horses started to whinny and stamp. Harry still half-expected to hear Snowy’s familiar nicker among the chorus.
Ach, he had a sentimental streak—not the best trait for a horse trader. He’d never be ruthless—never drug up his lame horses with painkillers to make them pass for sound, never wrap poles with barbed wire and then bang the horses’ legs to make them jump clean. He believed you should treat a horse the way you would want to be treated. Simple enough. That rule, learned from his father, had served him well.
And there was the other rule inculcated by his father: that on a working farm, every horse must earn his keep. Snowman had taught his pupils well; they had been eager to move on to quicker mounts. At the doctor’s house, Snowman could spend his days as a pleasure horse—a role he was well suited to. A happy horse to a happy home. It was a rule Harry could live by. Like the horses, Harry would get used to the new order in the barn; it would just take him a few days.
Sure enough, the horses were restless. They stamped and rustled inside their stalls, weaving back and forth as he went down the line, tossing flakes of hay and pouring oats into rubber buckets. Slants of early morning light poured through the barn windows, lighting up the dust motes that hung in the air. Snowman’s stall stood empty, an ordinary school-horse halter hung on a hook next to the open door. There had been no painted name tag on his stall to remove, no personalized tack box like the private boarders had. The empty stall looked like any of the others.
As Harry went down the line, calling each horse by its nickname, an air of calm settled over the barn. A couple of German shepherds trotted at his heels as he worked; a few stable cats sashayed in the aisle or licked their paws and watched the goings-on from perches up in the straw loft. Harry was the only two-legged critter in the barn, but he looked as much at home there as any of the others.
He loved his quiet early mornings, before the family was up. It was a good time to think. This morning, he was thinking about the big hole Snowman had left in the stable, which felt to Harry almost like losing a member of the family. But then he chuckled to himself—Johanna was expecting again; if the four-legged family had shrunk by one, the two-legged family was still growing. That helped him to keep things in perspective. He had doubled his investment in the horse, and though it might not be much, it was money in the bank.
And money was what Harry needed. Some of the biggest horse shows in the country were within a stone’s throw of the Knox School. Harry had seen the incredibly athletic animals that competed in the big shows—mostly thoroughbreds whose generations of fine breeding showed in every move and in every one of their refined features. With the right horse, Harry believed, he could compete in these shows. He was willing to put in the time to train a novice with potential. But even an untrained thoroughbred fresh from the racetrack could cost thousands—plus the board and feed needed for several years of schooling. It was hard enough to earn his living by teaching riding at the school; training a champion jumper himself—it just didn’t seem possible. Harry had an old photo album with pictures of himself parading through Amsterdam aboard Petra carrying his equestrian club’s flag. In those days, he seemed a good bet to make the Dutch Olympic team. But nowadays that album was kept high up on a shelf and rarely looked at. That world was long gone, and Harry always