Page 31 of Wild About You
“She’s just mad we’re behind,” Zeke whispers. He’s sitting on the two bales he’s stacked beside mine, one over another. “Which wouldn’t be the case if she’d shoveled shit around and let me throw the horseshoes. I’m, like, really good at it. At my school, I’ve won the championship in intramural cornhole for two years running. I even told her that, but she was all, ‘Cornhole and horseshoes are not the same, and my skin is sensitive to hay.’ ”
As he goes on, I make the appropriately sympathetic noises at the right times and try to disguise how gleeful this rant is actually making me. Another team having conflict can only be good news for Finn and me, right? Please, someone, anyone else, take the interpersonal drama torch from Team Finnatalie. My arms are tired of holding it.
“Hell yeah!” Finn’s cheer tears my attention from Zeke as Finn rings another horseshoe. I hop down and rush over to grab the last hay bale I think—hope—I’ll need to reach the tack shelf.
I haul it up there as Finn keeps cautioning me to go slow, and be careful, and watch my step. I’m beginning to wonder if I should’ve claimed a hay sensitivity when, finally, I wrestle it into place and climb up….
And I’m just high enough to reach the tack shelf.
From there, it’s a blur as I single-mindedly focus on keeping our lead, carrying armfuls of bridles and blankets and saddles down, load after load, to where Finn now waits warily by Daisy and a second horse, Donald. They’ve been tied to a fence, their coats already brushed down and their shoes cleaned by stable hands. Finn is now tasked with using all the stuff I bring over to ready them for riding. He even has a list of instructions, to make it easier.
It quickly becomes clear that no part of this is easy for him.
“How do I know they’re not going to kick me when I put stuff on their backs?”
“They won’t!” I call back, climbing the hay stairs for what I think will be my last load. “Forget I ever said the word kick! You can do this, Finn, so get started!”
By the time I’m back, he’s only gotten the saddle blankets on Donald’s and Daisy’s backs, and Zeke and Enemi are starting this leg with their two horses a ways down the fence from us.
“Finn, I’m gonna need you to channel your inner cowboy,” I whisper urgently, mustering Finn levels of sternness.
“I don’t think I have one of those.”
“I think you do. He’s just been trampled on your whole life by the unlikely pairing of your inner uptight professor and inner off-grid-granola-barefoot-naturalist…guy.”
He stares at me in silence for a moment, until I give him a push toward the gear I’ve been draping over the fence. “Whatever, you know what I mean. Let’s go! I’ll talk you through it!”
And so I do, watching his ease with the animals grow, slowly but steadily, as he layers each new item onto the horses. I direct him to move that saddle back a little, tighten that buckle by one notch, make sure the bit goes in just right, and the reins don’t get twisted up there. Finally, it’s time to mount. I haven’t seen anyone pass us on horseback to head down the field toward the finish line, so we still have a shot at winning this one.
I demonstrate for Finn how to mount a horse—foot in stirrup, swing your other leg up and over, basically—before he tries it himself. He gets it right away, only remembering once he’s up on Donald’s back that he is absolutely terrified.
“This is very much not like riding a bike,” his shaky voice calls from behind me as we walk our horses into the open field, a teeny tiny orange flag a speck in the far distance. Donald is making a lot of snuffling noises back there, and his rider has yet to buy into my assertion that he’s not going to die.
“It totally is!” I chirp back, winking into one of the cameras that are rigged to both the fronts and backs of our saddles, likely capturing all my least flattering angles.
“My bike doesn’t have free will,” he grumbles. “Or weigh a thousand pounds and have the ability to trample me.”
Fair points, but not the time to agree.
Even as we’re still racing—or fast-walking, which is all Finn can really manage—to the checkpoint, this is the least anxious I’ve felt since coming to Wild Adventures. These animals calm me like little else. My cousin Liv is actually a therapist who uses horses in her practice, helping kids work through trauma by letting them bond with the animals. It’s only just occurred to me to wonder if that kind of therapy exists for adults.
You know, if I had time or money for such a thing.
For the time being, I’m trying to manage Finn’s mental state more than my own, distracting him from his fear.
“Did you know there are almost five hundred horse farms in Kentucky?” I say, projecting my voice to the back of my outdoor theater.
“No,” he says, valiantly trying to hide the waver in his voice. “Why is that?”
“It’s the horse capital of the world,” I say, but as I think about that, I tilt my head to the side. Is that really the “why”? “Or it might be the horse capital of the world because there are that many farms. Kind of a chicken-or-the-egg thing, I guess.”
It isn’t even especially clever or funny. Not my best work by far. But the throwaway comment prompts one of the most magical things that’s happened in this experience.
Finn laughs.
I almost fall off Daisy when I hear it. I turn my head, my jaw dropping as I find that it is indeed Finn back there, laughing.
“What?” he asks as his chuckling tapers off.