It is a fantastic day here in Alabama.  The sky is very blue, white puffy clouds pass overhead, a breeze is blowing, the perfect day for a ride.  Kaylee, my daughter, was up with the chickens and waiting by my bed this morning ready to get to the barn and get saddled up.  I don’t see that kind of enthusiasm from her on weekdays at this hour of the day.

We had to make an early ride or none at all.  Our days are so packed with responsibilities its tough to find saddle time.  In recent years I’ve not made enough time for the recharging of  batteries and have decided it’s long past time for that to change.  So, off we went.  It wasn’t a long ride.  Just a two hour treck around the neighborhood and back home.  Sebi and Mick even seemed to enjoy themselves.

You never know what might happen when you take these little rides with horses.  They sometimes have a way of taking a trivial occurence and turning it into a heart-thudding, see-your-life-flash-before-your-eyes, mini-adventure.  At least that’s been the usual experience with Sebi.

Several years ago my husband Mark and I rounded up our horses, joined several of our friends and went on a day ride through several open cotton fields and other scenic spaces.  We were all chatting merrily and enjoying the outdoors.  It was a day very similar to today (made me think of it on our ride earlier) with the whole blue skys and light breeze thing happening.

We came upon a little fenced-in lot housing a little horse and a pig.  Horses are herd animals and do much better with a pasture buddy of some sort, in this case the buddy was a pig.  We all stopped to see the horse, comment briefly on the pig and just take a little break.  Should have been an ordinary moment that would pass quickly from memory, except Sebi was there.

It seems Sebi didn’t appreciate the mundaness of a pig.  He saw the pig, his attention was riveted, he reared straight up, pivoted, landed facing the opposite direction, and launched forward…only there was a fence there.  Fortunately for me, still on his back, he didn’t continue the forward motion.  Instead he wheeled this direction, then that direction, frantically trying to get away from the pig. A pig.  My horse was terrified of a pig.  It wasn’t even a very big pig.

Of course this drew a symphony of laughter from my friends, yes, my dear husband laughed too-maybe the loudest   I like to think they made sure I was okay before they started laughing.  Once I recovered from the shock of going from fully relaxed to that state I mentioned earlier with my life flashing before my eyes I laughed too, a bit of a jittery laugh at first but a laugh never the less.

I really think the perspectives of those with sound mounts who don’t flip out at the most ordinary things are vastly different from those of us with horses like Sebi. Sebi was well seasoned when this little incident took place, he’d seen a pig before, he’d seen other horses before but surprise, he exploded as though it was his first time outside.  Maybe that’s why the Western saddle attachment I mentioned in my earlier post.  Having a lot of places to hold on in case of emergency just seems to make a lot of sense.

I’ve never really ridden any horse but Sebi for any mentionable length of time.  We both have some less than stellar skills and habits because of this.  Nobody there to teach one or the other any different .  Both being beginners when we met, we’ve evolved into a synchronicity that usually works well for us.  I can usually feel the tension, even when it’s subtle, building before he reacts to something and take evasive actions. As we see with the pig story, it doesn’t always work that way.  Maybe he wasn’t paying attention and was just surprised to see a pig.

I don’t think of pigs as scary.  There was a fence between us and the pig.  There were a pretty large number of other horses all around him that didn’t think the pig was scary.  So why did Sebi try to run for his and my lives?  I’ll never know and I don’t think I’ll ever get the opportunity to forget since the story is brought up again every time we see a pig and there’s always laughter.