Horses and Manners Revisited

Remember Rusty, my friend's horse who needed to learn some manners? (See "Learning Manners with Mr. Stud Chain" and "Shoving Horses")

Yesterday evening my friend and I set off for a two-hour ride through orchard roads. It didn't start out as a two hour ride, but we were curious as to why one block of orchard was being taken out, so we rode off down that stretch of road, and then we realized that we hadn't been in that neighborhood for almost a year and so decided to check it out, but after traveling down that road a ways, spotted some heavy machinery spraying fungicide/insecticide/fertilizer (stuff I didn't care to breathe) and had to take a detour ... we were wandering, mostly.

And we could, because Rusty was The Perfect Gentleman. The gentle bit, the tie-down to keep him from throwing his head in the air, the ground work -- all those things convinced him that he didn't have to make the decisions for him and his rider. Relieved of the burden of decision-making, he relaxed, and became once again the fantastic trail horse he used to be.

The ride was wonderful. We were out a bit later than I cared to be, but it wasn't quite dark when we got back to the ranch. We saw big hawks and little hawks, big dogs and little dogs, and talked about Life, the Universe, and Horses. We felt the sun's heat as we started and the chill at dusk when the fog began to rise.

Well mannered horses, and a big open sky.