We needed a fun day, that much was clear. The two previous times I had gone riding with Twilight it had been a fight, her tugging against my hands and plowing forward, I was tired of raging a war against a one ton animal.
The sky was a deep endless blue, and the sun was fierce and white in the sky. We started in the square arena loose reins slapping gently against her neck as we went through prancing, trotting, cantering and worked on counter-cantering.
This is a fairly new concept for us, it requires balance and will. We start cantering one direction in a small circle, then I urge her with my outside leg into the opposite direction, my outside leg becomes my inside leg, and Twilight picks up speed balancing on the opposite lead as we make a large circle and then return to our original direction.
We watch as a woman, dog and bay in an elaborate western saddle take to the trail, and then Julie a small woman with wiry blonde hair and her large muscular dun Boo also wander out into the silver sage and cropped dry grass.
Suddenly the square arena is to small and the monotony of our work for the past several days is a stone dragging us down, I want to go on the trail, I want a change, and even though its a foolish risk to go out alone there is no hesitation as we walk out the green rusty gate an onto the moist trail. In many places the trail is like clay filled with the perfect prints of dogs, rodent and horse shoes. We can see all that have gone before us, and I don't want that. I want a new unmarred track so we ride up into the grass and sage. Distance is hard to read out on the flat plane, it feels like we've gone forever until I look over my shoulder and see the barn.
There are bones strewn at random over the ground, at the bottom of a telephone pole the fragile skeleton of a crow rest in a jumbled heap like some morbid jigsaw puzzle.
A stealthy breeze creeps down the neck of my jacket, but Twilight's body is warm and the sun is bright, so the cold does not bother me so much. I see Julia and Boo on the horizon before Twilight does, but you can't tell its them. They look large and wraith-like on the trail, a shadow, it is not clear where the rider ends and the horse begins. Twilight is captivated once she sees them, she arches her neck nostrils wide and ear swiveled high and quivering towards them. Does she know it is a horse and rider? Or do they appear as strange to her as they do me?
We avoid them, keeping our distance and continue to ride cracking through sage brush and slipping slightly on the mud patches.
Its a release to be out on the trail, heart pounding with anticipation for Twilight to spoke and buck or take off (which amazingly didn't happen), but its also calming, I feel like we are riding in a cold desert till I look at the snow caped peaks to the north east, a dream world could look like this.
