"It was a well regarded program. Very comprehensive."
"Uh huh." She takes Copper's reins and walks him to the mounting block. She looks at me with the patient steady expression of someone who has accepted what the next hour is going to look like. She has made her peace with it. "Come on then. Let's see what summer camp taught you."
Copper swings his big head around and looks at me as I approach.
I look back at him with all the confidence I have, which is currently less than advertised.
"We're going to be fine," I tell him quietly.
He snorts directly into my face.
Getting into the saddle is fine.
The mounting process goes smoothly, correctly and I settle into the saddle with the proper posture, shoulders back, heels down, hands soft on the reins. Exactly as described in chapter seven of the horsemanship guide. Which I have read four times and can practically recite from memory.
Laney watches from the center of the round pen with her arms crossed, her hat pulled down and an expression of careful neutrality that I don't entirely trust.
"How's that feel?" she asks.
"Good," I say. "Natural."
Copper shifts his weight underneath me and I recalibrate slightly but smoothly. This is fine. I am sixty inches off the ground on a fifteen hundred pound animal, everything is completely under control.
"Okay," Laney says. "Go ahead and ask him to walk."
I know how to ask a horse to walk. I read about it extensively. Gentle pressure from both legs, even and steady, while keeping the reins soft. I apply exactly that. Copper walks. I sit correctly and maintain my posture and we complete half a circle of the round pen at a perfectly respectable walk.
I look at Laney.
She looks back at me.
"Good," she says, with the specific tone of someone complimenting a child on holding a fork correctly.
"I told you," I say.
"You're walking in a circle, Beckett."
"I'm walking in a circle correctly."
From the fence Remy says, "He's not wrong technically."
"Stay out of it Remy," Laney says without looking at him.
We do two more circles at the walk and I'm starting to genuinely relax into it. I'm finding the rhythm of Copper's movement and adjusting naturally, when Laney says, "Okay, ask him to trot."
I know about trot. I read the trot chapter twice specifically. Rising trot, also called posting trot, involves rising out of the saddle on one diagonal and sitting on the other in a rhythm that matches the horse's movement. It's a timing thing. The book made it sound very manageable.
At some point I'm going to need a serious word with whoever wrote that chapter.
Copper moves into the trot and the world becomes an immediate and vigorous disagreement between what I thought I knew and what is actually happening. The rhythm is nothing like I imagined. I post when I should sit and sit when I should post and overcorrect, under correct and grip the saddle with my knees which I know is wrong but cannot seem to stop doing.
Copper, to his enormous credit, keeps trotting patiently around the pen regardless of what is happening in the saddle above him.
I glance at Laney.
She is looking at a point approximately six inches above my head with her lips pressed together very firmly and her shoulders doing something that she is working extremely hard to control.
She is not laughing.
