Scribbling #12: On-Lone Ranger

When the horse-type guide looked our group over and asked who had not ridden before, I rather sheepishly put my hand up. He led the first horse out – a rather imposing but magnificent animal – and pointed vaguely in my direction.

‘This one is yours,’ he said.

‘Mine?’ I asked, thinking that I had blagged the horsey equivalent of a Mercedes.

‘No, not you,’ he replied, shaking his head in a rather urgent fashion. ‘Hers,’ he said, pointing to Mrs. C who was standing next to me.

Christina’s eyes lit up like a fairground whose owner had spent way too much on neon.

‘This one is yours,’ our guide said, bringing out a rather reluctant and much smaller tan and white horse. To me, it looked as if it had been used to haul around cannons, around the time of the American Civil war.

The horse looked at me, turning his head one way and then the other, as if he thought he might like me better if he looked full on with only one of his eyes. I stared at this weird looking beast and quickly gathered why a large part of humanity was trying to get away from the ‘let’s go camping and ride horses’ to ‘let’s drive somewhere and go to a nice hotel with a big, comfy bed’.

This is a large animal with a mind of its own, was one of my first thoughts.

I hope it doesn’t kill me, was probably my second.

I hope I don’t look like a complete idiot in front of Christina, followed pretty quickly after that.

The horse – I named him Dave (it’s Dave the horse to you, pal!) – let me come near it, so I gingerly put my left foot in one stirrup, swung the rest of my body over, shoved my right foot into the other stirrup and tried not to look like a sack of potatoes which happened to be on top of a horse while wearing a brightly coloured helmet.

Hey, I’m on a horse! I’m not dead! Where’s everyone else gone?

The rest of our two-man, two-woman group, including Mrs. C, had immediate visions of being just like John Wayne and had ridden off, not bothering to wait for me or Dave. This was the decider - I had to coerce my horse to move.

I clicked my tongue, like they do in the movies. Nothing happened.

The rope I was holding onto for grim death – pulled at it, making the horse’s head move around from side to side. Other than that, no effect.

I kicked him in the sides a bit with my heels. Again, no response.

My horse doesn’t work. Therefore, it is broken. QED.

However, our guide (let’s call him Steve, because for every Dave on the planet, there has to be a Steve) was not as forgiving and decided to go down the route that any good engineer would take when something is not behaving – thump it very hard indeed.

Once I regained some semblance of control and stopped having a mild cardiac arrest, I guided Dave towards where the others were and decided that this, this must have been how the Lone Ranger felt like - just before he upgraded to a bigger horse. A rather relieved Mrs. C was supportive enough to have waited in order to laugh and point, then take the camera off of me and proceeded to take lots of pictures, just before she rode off at a fast trot.

The best thing about this adventure was that we weren’t really being guided as to the trail that we had to take. Our horses knew where to go and we went off the trail every now and again to have a nose about. To have that kind of freedom was rather refreshing, as I’m sure we were breaking several UK health and safety measures by doing so.

Good.

Dave was happy enough just to walk and not expend too much energy. He trotted when he could be bothered and was an otherwise docile animal until Steve decided that we weren’t going fast enough to keep up with the others, so he hit Dave on the backside very hard indeed and cheered.

‘Yee-haa!’

Now here’s the strange thing – although I was holding onto everything for dear life, going at high speed was far more comfortable than just walking or trotting, as you’re not bouncing around on the saddle like some sort of loon. On top of that, I was having immense fun.

We slowed for the trail ahead, and this is when our guide told us to be careful because the trail now gets a bit more wild – full of branches, roots and large rocks that the horses could get caught in and trip over. Then we stopped completely because Steve had seen a group of monkeys off-trail and in the forest. Our intrepid guide took his horse and with a metaphorical hi-ho Silver, ran his horse up the trail wall and into the trees, where everyone followed him except for Dave and myself. With some cajoling, my horse reluctantly moved off the trail and stopped.

I clicked my tongue. No response.

I pulled the bridle and kicked my heels. Still nothing.

Dave had decided that he was far too old for this sort of carry on and had switched into standby mode.

I gave up, mostly because I wasn’t really confident enough after only an hour in the saddle to be really adventurous and go off into the wild. And that, to me, was the smart thing to do – which doesn’t happen very often. On the other hand, Mrs. C was checking out the monkeys, so I figured that she could tell me the full story about it afterward.

‘Didn’t really get a good look at them,’ she told me later.

This was rather anti-climactic after seeing a bunch of horses dramatically run up a hill, kicking up mud and grass and bolt off into the woods.

‘Nothing happened? Are you serious?’

‘Um, yes,’ was the reply. ‘He kept on saying, “look, look, they’re right there” and we sort of squinted and turned our heads a bit, but didn’t really see them.’

I had now decided that Dave was a very intelligent horse to have known not to bother. These young ‘uns, all vim and vigour and nothing to show for it, he had probably thought.

Pointing Dave’s head in the direction of the trail once again, we soon came across some rather impoverished looking cows, which were all minding their own business until a bunch of horses came along. This made them all a bit unsettled, and once an entire herd of them are disturbed all at once, they all got up and started to poop in unison, which sounded like a retarded orchestra playing a mixture of cow noises and dung hitting the floor.

‘Yeah, they do that,’ said one of our fellow group members.

‘Really?’ I said, in the way only the British do, using implied sarcasm and irony at the same time. ‘Amazing.’

Dave took this moment to bend his head down to drink at the water out of a nearby trough, while the humans were all looking at the ugly cows. And then it was time to move off again.

Two hours later, and with lots of pictures taken of beautiful scenery, we were back at the stables, my muscles aching in places that I really thought shouldn’t. That comes, my lovely wife assured me, from not being able to ride a horse properly. If I didn’t just sit on it and instead tried to move with the horse in some sort of rhythm, then I wouldn’t have been in as much pain. I had been well and truly told - I just wished that someone had done that beforehand. Mind you, it was the first time that I had been on a horse, so I was glad that I didn’t die or suffer some sort of serious injury.

We said goodbye to Steve, Dave and the American couple that had joined us in our group. I got in the car, ready to go – my body very glad to be sitting in a soft seat.