The Ridge Trail I Opened Up

She did not have a horse. The way she had access to one was that Kim let her ride an old paint pony named Biscuit that belonged to the club.

A safe slow pony that had carried a generation of beginners and knew more than any of them.

I had watched Rhoda at the fairgrounds that summer. She was careful with that pony the way careful children are, checking his feet and his cinch twice, talking to him low.

She had come in last in every class because Biscuit would not trot faster than a man walks, and she had not minded.

She had come out of the ring beaming because she had stayed on and remembered her pattern.

Kim told me on the phone that Rhoda had asked three times if she was really allowed to come. If it really did not cost anything. If she was sure.

“Tell her,” I said, and my voice did something I did not plan, “tell her she can ride up front with me.”

Opening Saturday

I did not sleep much Friday night. I was up at five doing the thing you do, going out to the barn in the dark just to stand with the horses.

The frost was on everything and the stars were still out. I could hear, far off on the ridge, nothing at all, which was how I wanted it.

Dale hauled the first load of club horses down to the hollow at eight. We had marked the new trailhead with nothing fancier than a hand-lettered sign on a stake that said Color Ride, and an arrow.

We had raked a parking area in the creek-bottom field and set out hay bales for people to sit on. A card table of our own with cider and paper cups, free, and a coffee urn.

The first truck and trailer turned in at eight twenty. Then two more.

By a quarter to nine the field was full of rigs and the air was full of the sound horses make in a crowd. The nickering and the stamping and the ring of a shod foot on a trailer floor.

Forty riders of the Prairie Hollow club were cinching up in the frost.

Up the road, I knew, Lane was sitting behind his card table with his cash box and his space heater, waiting at a gate nobody was coming to.

I did not go look. I had decided that the day before.

I was not going to drive up and watch my cousin sit alone with his money. There is a kind of winning that curdles if you stand there and gloat over it.

Ruth was right about that, and so was my grandfather.

But I will tell you what I heard later, from Carl, who did drive past.

He said the gate was shut and the sign was up and the cash box was on the table. Lane was standing out in the gravel with his hands in his coat pockets.

He was watching the dust come up off the hollow road a half mile off, watching the trucks turn into my field one after another.

He did not wave the one car that slowed down into his lot. He just watched it go on by toward the hollow, and then he sat down in his folding chair.