The Eighty-Dollar Champion - Elizabeth Letts [39]
As he forked fresh straw into the wheelbarrow and pushed it through the barn aisle, he knew that the desire to compete was still there, a slow-burning ambition that never left him. Harry planned to keep his eye out for the right candidate, one that needed some training, a diamond in the rough. And each time he made a profit on a workaday mount like Snowman, it would get him one step closer to finding that horse.
By the time the round of barn chores was finished, Harry had gotten himself used to Snowman’s absence. He took a last look around, satisfied. Everything was in order, and all was quiet except for the sounds of horses chewing their morning feed. The sun was rising, and Harry heard the kitchen door bang: the children were up. Quiet time was over. On to his day. From the look of the sky, it would be fine weather for riding.
After a few days, the horses settled down, and Harry wasn’t thinking about the big gray gelding quite so much. But one afternoon, Harry got a call from Snowman’s new owner—who was not happy. Dr. Rugen complained that the horse had escaped his pasture and trampled his neighbor’s fields. Was Harry sure that the horse wasn’t a chronic runaway? Harry reassured the man. Horses are not prone to jumping out of their pastures. Usually, if they’re given enough food and water, they’re inclined to stay put. Was it possible that the doctor had forgotten to double-latch the gate? A clever horse can nuzzle open a gate with his lip if the latch isn’t closed tight.
Certainly not, was the doctor’s indignant answer. Of course he had latched the gate. The horse had jumped out of the pasture. Harry repeated his advice to make sure to keep the gate firmly latched shut. He hung up with a chuckle, expecting that he would not hear from the owner again.
For those who don’t know equines well, it is always a surprise that horses are normally content to stay inside paddocks constructed of post-and-rail fences. It’s surprising because those same horses, when entered in jumping competitions, will willingly leap these same fences with a rider aboard. Unlike, for example, deer, which must be restrained by fences fourteen feet high, horses will happily stay inside pastures fenced at three and a half or four feet.
Horses are born with the ability to jump—the skill helps them leap small obstacles when they are headed across open terrain at a gallop. The sport of horse jumping developed relatively recently, growing out of the European tradition of hunting on horseback. In eighteenth-century France, riders would follow hounds on staghunts across miles of countryside, which sometimes obliged the riders to jump natural obstacles along the way: ditches, banks, low stone walls, and small creeks. The tradition moved to England, where it evolved into foxhunting. Here, too, riders followed the hounds across country on horseback, clearing small hedgerows, ditches, and water obstacles along their way. By the late eighteenth century, however, the British government had begun to pass enclosure laws, and areas that had traditionally been common land for sheep grazing were fenced off. Private ownership of land became the norm. English foxhunting enthusiasts, mostly wealthy landowners, thus had to jump those pasture fences as they crossed from one estate to another. Eventually, people realized that the thrilling sight of a horse leaping a fence could attract spectators, and artificial “fences” were constructed inside the confines of riding arenas. Even today, the names and shapes of jumps reflect their history as natural obstacles found in the field: brush, chicken coop, ditch, water jump, and post-and-rail fence are now the names of common obstacles in the horse show ring.
But horses, which generally weigh over one thousand pounds each, do not often jump fences on their own. Galloping across a pasture, they will leap playfully over a small ditch or log, but will stop when they reach their paddock fence. Even a show jumper, trained to sail over elaborate obstacles five or six feet high, will, when turned out to