Read Online Girl and Five Brave Horses, A by Sonora Carver - Free Book Online Page B

named right,” I said. “I hope the person who buys him makes him pull a garbage wagon for the rest of his life.” But Dr. Carver never sold him. When the chips were down, he couldn’t bring himself to put an ad in the paper. Judas remained with us as a kind of pet— an expensive one—and Dr. Carver frequently berated himself for being softhearted. He would stop in front of Judas’ stall and say, “I ought to sell that beggar. He doesn’t do anything but eat.”
    The other horse we had with us that year was a mare named Snow. Her full name was Pure as Snow, which suited her perfectly. She was completely white, without a single colored hair on her whole body, nor was her skin marred by the dark blotches so often found on white horses. Had her weight been normal, her delicately shaped head and finely molded legs would have made a perfect model for a sculptor or painter, but unhappily Snow was a glutton.
    In the beginning her gluttony had been a blessing, since she would do anything for a carrot and was therefore easy to train, but in the end it ruined not only her figure but her disposition.
    In coaxing for bits of food she gradually evolved a routine that often ended in violence if she didn’t get her way. First she would rub her nose on the door of her stall, then she would raise her foot and paw the air. Next she would raise her upper lip, as if smiling or laughing. If this fake cheerful countenance didn’t get results, she would begin to kick her stall angrily and hard. She would have kicked it apart if Al had not reinforced it with extra planking.
    Mealtime was the worst of all. Unless she was fed first she would simply go berserk, and even after she had been fed she would continue to fight savagely, kicking backward while she ate, as if she were afraid every horse in the barn was going to try to take her food away from her. Of course her continual weight gain ruined her for diving and she had to be retired, after which she was used only for breeding purposes.
    The two remaining horses, Lightning and John, were with Al that season and I didn’t ride either of them until the following year.

Six
    We did not go directly into winter quarters my first year, as contracts had been signed for some midwinter fairs in Florida. The first and biggest was at Tampa, and from the time we got there I was all agog. I loved the booths in the lofty buildings with their exhibitions of bright-colored quilts and wine-red preserves and golden jars of honey, and I loved the smell of grain and hay in the stalls and the pen after pen of livestock. All this was magnified a dozen times at the South Florida Fair at Tampa, which was by far the biggest I had ever seen, and I was in a fever of excitement from the moment we arrived. During the morning hours Dr. Carver humored me; we walked aimlessly through the huge buildings crammed with everything from prune cake to pigeons, and one day during our wanderings I spied a litter of small red pigs just as the noonday sun was pouring through the windows, turning them into diminutive bits of animated fire. To my eager questions the attendant replied that they had been born that morning. I thought them cunning, so each day thereafter I insisted on going over for another look. Dr. Carver grumbled about being dragged “all over forty acres just to look at some damn pigs,” but I was convinced then and still am that he enjoyed seeing them as much as I did.
    For me that fair was special for another reason. Throughout the previous park and fair season the diving-horse act had been publicized in the newspapers. There had been pictures of the dive, and my name had appeared in stories on the pages devoted to theatrical news, but none of this had been personal. It had all been stock publicity material. Now at last there were reporters to interview me, and photographers took action pictures which were published in the leading Florida newspaper. Working beside me were people who were famous in the show