Snow Ride (7 page)

“Yes?” Phil answered.

“This is Lisa Atwood, you know, Stevie’s friend from Pine Hollow.”

“Lisa, I know who you are,” Phil said. “What’s up? Is something wrong with Stevie?”

“Oh, no, she’s fine,” Lisa assured him. “At least we think she is, but you know Stevie, wherever she is, there’s
trouble. Anyway, that’s not why we’re calling, but I guess it really sort of is.…”

Carole took the phone from Lisa’s hand. She could do this better than that. “Hi, Phil, it’s Carole here,” she began. “Stevie has a friend in Vermont who invited her to something called sugaring off.…”

Very quickly Carole explained to Phil why Stevie wasn’t going to be at his pony club meeting.

“Oh, no,” he said, obviously disappointed.

“She tried to reach you before she left, but you were on that class trip,” Carole reminded him. “That’s why she asked us to call you when we knew you would be back.”

“Thanks for calling,” he said.

Carole could hear the sadness in his voice. She wanted to comfort him. “How’s your riding coming?” she asked.

“Oh, very well,” he said, brightening up. “Some of us went to a horse show on the class trip, and I watched some fancy riding. I think I picked up a couple of techniques. I can’t wait to try them out. I’ll be riding tomorrow.”

Now he was talking Carole’s language.

“What sort of techniques?” she asked eagerly.

“I was watching a hunter jumper class,” he began. “And for the first time, I began to see the connection between the event that takes place in the ring and the actual hunt. In the ring there’s a steady, even pace, and the
style
of successful jumping is emphasized. In the field,
when you have the specific goal of having to trap a fox, it’s important for you to have these skills.”

“I used to ride a great hunter jumper,” Carole said. “It was a wonderful feeling to complete the course on her. Starlight’s great, but he’s not disciplined enough for that kind of class in a show. He’s much more interested in flashy high jumps, and he’s so good at them—”

“I’ve seen you jump him,” Phil reminded her. “He’s a very special horse. He’ll be doing championship jumping one of these days.”

“I think so, too,” Carole said. “The thing is that I believe I can train him so he can do both types of jumps.”

“Well, that’s what I meant about the techniques I was studying,” Phil said.

Carole was never more comfortable than when she was talking about horses, and Phil was easy to talk to. They chatted, swapping hints and hunches, for more than ten minutes.

“Hey, I’ve got an idea,” Phil said. “Since Stevie can’t come to my pony club meeting, why don’t
you
come to it? Can you get your father to bring you over?”

“Me?” Carole asked, suddenly uncomfortable again. “And what about Lisa?”

“Oh, sure, Lisa, too,” Phil said. “It’s an open un-mounted meeting. Anybody can come. I’d be glad to have both of you there—especially you, Carole. We can talk more about jumping.”

“We’ll have to check with our parents,” Carole said. “But it should be okay. I’ll call if there’s a problem.”

“Great, see you then,” he said.

“Okay, bye.”

They hung up.

“What was that all about?” Lisa asked.

“We’re invited to Phil’s pony club meeting instead of Stevie.”

“We are?” Lisa was more than a little surprised. “Carole, Phil is
Stevie’s
boyfriend. What’s she going to think?”

Carole got an uncomfortable sinking feeling. “Oh,” she said. “I hadn’t thought of that. I mean, it’s the farthest thing from my mind. Stevie wouldn’t think we were trying to steal her boyfriend. She even
asked
us to call him!”

“But she didn’t ask us to go in her place,” Lisa reminded her.

“But it’s just a pony club meeting,” Carole said. “Besides, he seemed so disappointed when Stevie couldn’t be there, and so happy again when I said we could. There can’t be anything wrong with that, can there?”

“Of course there can be,” Lisa said. “What it comes down to is that he’s Stevie’s boyfriend, and it’s not up to us to decide whether we can spend time with him when Stevie’s out of town.”

“But there will be two of us,” Carole protested.

“Twice as bad,” Lisa said.

“Girls, can you help me bring Nickel in from the paddock?” It was Mrs. Reg. That was Max’s mother. She was the stable manager and a sort of part-time mother to the riders and their horses when she thought they needed it. She was also somebody who hated to see idle hands. Two girls standing together and talking qualified as four idle hands. Not surprisingly, Mrs. Reg had a way to put those hands to work.

“I’d get him myself,” she said, “but he always runs from me.” The three of them walked through the side door of the stable toward the paddock, where the frisky pony was gamboling around in the early spring morning. “He doesn’t run from anybody else,” Mrs. Reg went on, musing out loud. “He just runs from me. I never saw anything like it.”

The two girls walked toward the pony. Mrs. Reg held back so as not to frighten him away. It was true that Nickel was scared of her. She’d never done anything to hurt him, so there had to be something about her that reminded him of something that
had
hurt him. Almost every horse had at least one thing that frightened him, and it was just about impossible to break those habits.

Lisa clicked a lead rope onto Nickel’s halter and led him back toward the stable. When they reached Mrs.
Reg, the girls found she was still talking about Nickel’s strange fear.

“Never saw anything like it—oh, yes, I did,” she said. “I remember a mare we boarded here once who was afraid of me. She had strong likes and dislikes, that one. It seemed like she only ever liked one person at a time. She was devoted to the man who owned her and gave everybody else a hard time. She was beautiful, and I always wanted her to like me. I asked Max—my husband, your Max’s father—to let me take care of her when her owner wasn’t around, but Max wouldn’t let me because she was so unpredictable. Then one day her owner went away. His mother was sick, and he had to stay with her for a couple of months. We didn’t have any extra stable hands to take care of one more horse, so Max finally gave in. I got to look after the mare.”

“Did she hurt you?” Lisa asked. Immediately she was sorry she’d asked the question. When Mrs. Reg was telling one of her stories—and she seemed to have thousands of them—she wanted to tell it her way without interruptions. Mrs. Reg ignored the question.

“It took a long time for me to change the way the horse felt about me. After a couple of weeks, though, she’d let me into her stall and let me groom her. She really needed it by then, too! By the end of six weeks, we were becoming friends. By the end of two months, I could ride her. I
rode her every day then, and she was just as great to ride as I’d always known she would be.” Mrs. Reg stopped. She had a habit of stopping stories just when they were getting really interesting.

“What happened when the owner came back?” Carole asked.

“Why, she gave him a hard time, of course,” Mrs. Reg said. “Now you two stop all this jabbering and get Nickel back into his stall. Then, if you want to make yourselves useful, there are two stalls that need mucking out, and after that …”

The girls hurried away. If they stood there long enough, Mrs. Reg would load them down with enough work to keep them busy until midnight!

B
Y THE TIME
Stevie and Dinah approached Sugarbush Stables, Dinah had figured out that she could actually ride, sort of. What she did was stand in the stirrups. She wasn’t very comfortable, and she knew she had a lot of scratches and bruises nobody could see under her clothes that she had to do something about, but both she and Stevie were convinced they could get past the gimlet eyes of Mr. Daviet and the Slatterys.

They weren’t good enough to get past Jodi’s eyes, however.

“Oh, no!” she said as they approached the barn.

“Don’t worry,” Stevie assured her. “We’re still not telling. Dinah took a little spill. She’s going to be fine. All
she has is a couple of scratches and bruises. No problem we can’t handle all by ourselves.”

The look on Jodi’s face was clear relief.

“Thanks,” she said. She didn’t seem to want to hear any more about it, so Stevie and Dinah didn’t bother to tell her how it had happened. “Look,” Jodi said. “I’ll take care of the horses for you now. I guess it’s the least I could do. My sister came by earlier and said she was going to be collecting sap. She’s expecting you two to meet her at the Sugar Hut. You go on up and get to work on that. But remember the promise—you can’t tell her, either.”

“We remember, Jodi,” Stevie said, helping Dinah down out of the saddle. “Are you up for collecting sap now?” Stevie asked. The pained look on Dinah’s face was answer enough.

“But it’s got to be done,” Dinah said. “Why don’t you go over to the Sugar Hut and work with Betsy. I’ll go home and take a long soaking bath.”

“Won’t your mother think that’s suspicious?” Stevie asked.

“Not at all,” Dinah assured her. “Even when I’m feeling fine, I like to soak in the tub. My mother won’t suspect a thing.”

“Are you going to be okay walking home?” Stevie asked.

“If I could just ‘ride’ a horse down a mountain, you bet
I can walk home. Trust me,” she said. “This is a piece of cake.”

Dinah waved bravely and walked, unsteadily, down the drive of the stable.

“The Sugar Hut is that way,” Jodi said, pointing along another path into the woods. “About a quarter of a mile. You can’t miss it.”

“I know where the Sugar Hut is,” Stevie said. “But thanks, anyway.”

S
TEVIE LOVED COLLECTING
sap with Betsy, though she didn’t like the fact that she had to tell her a cover-up story about Dinah. She said Dinah had an upset stomach. Betsy was disappointed, but they had work to do. Once again, they had a horse-drawn sleigh, but this time it was a specially fitted flatbed sleigh with an enormous tank on the back of it. The two of them followed the same trail they had used to put out the buckets. As quickly as they could, they returned to each of their buckets, poured the nearly clear fluid that seemed to have miraculously appeared in the buckets into the tank, reset the buckets, and moved on.

Betsy seemed very pleased by the amount of sap they were getting. Stevie told her it was probably because the holes were so well drilled by the novice on the team.

At the end of their rounds, they returned to the Sugar
Hut, where Mr. Daviet siphoned the sap out of the tank and measured it and filtered it before storing it in one of the large tanks outside the Sugar Hut.

“Nice work,” he said, looking at the numbers. “We’re going to begin boiling tonight. Be sure to be here to help,” he said. “That means Dinah, too. Uh, where is she?”

“She’s home,” Stevie said quickly. She wasn’t sure if Mr. Daviet could know that she and Dinah had been at the stable. She decided to duck the question altogether. “She wasn’t feeling very good this morning. Something about an upset stomach.”

“Well, she’d better be here tonight,” he said. “If the teams don’t participate in all the activities, they can’t get credit.”

“I’ll tell her, Mr. Daviet,” Stevie said. “I’m sure she’ll be feeling better by then.”

“Probably will,” he said. “I think there are some miracle cures going on around here. After all, it seems that your leg has gotten a lot better, too.”

“Fresh country air,” Stevie said with conviction. “Best medicine there is.” She made a little jump, as if to assure him that she was, in fact, a lot better. He nodded non-committally. Betsy stifled a laugh.

In a few more minutes, they were all done. Stevie was ready to go back to the Slatterys, and Betsy was headed for her house in the opposite direction. A half an hour
later, Stevie was at the Slatterys’, up in Dinah’s bedroom, sharing the days’ events.

“I tasted the sap,” she said. “It was only slightly sweet. It’s hard to imagine that that’s going to become the wonderful stuff I like to put on pancakes.”

“Do I really have to go tonight?” Dinah asked. She seemed totally unaware of anything Stevie had said after the part about Mr. Daviet’s insistence that she be at the Sugar Hut tonight.

“He said so,” Stevie said. “He sounded like he meant it. Can’t you make it?” That was when Stevie realized that Dinah was in her bed and hadn’t been out of it since she’d gotten home.

“I don’t know,” Dinah said. “I hurt an awful lot. And even if I do make it, I don’t know how I’ll hide all my injuries from my parents and Mr. Daviet. I mean, look at this bruise on my cheek!”

Stevie turned the light around so it pointed at Dinah. Then she saw. Dinah had several bruises, and a deep red scratch on one of her arms. The other was sore, but not bruised yet. On her right cheek, near her ear, there was an abrasion that was red now and would most certainly be black-and-blue by morning, if not before.

“I look like some kind of awful ‘Before’ picture,” Dinah complained. “I’ve told my parents I had a stomachache.”

“Same thing I told Mr. Daviet.”

“That’s all fine and good, but it’s made my mother say I
shouldn’t have anything to eat, and the fact is, the only part of me that’s really working is my stomach!”