A Pony Excellent Adventure
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Nearing the end of the day, I was in the mood for an adventure. I had scouted the location a few days before, and the stars all seemed correctly aligned for the adventure to turn out well. I went to get my Fell Pony mare Madie and her daughter Aimee. It was time for Aimee to cross water for the first time.
When we lived in Colorado, the ponies crossed water regularly because the Michigan River ran through their summer pasture. Here, we have wonderful hills but no live water, so I had to create the opportunity to cross water, hence the adventure. I couldn’t have been more thrilled with my two homebred girls.
The first step was to load the girls in the horse trailer. Again, back in Colorado, taking rides in trailers was a regular part of life because summer pasture was four miles from home, so all my ponies get excited when I have the trailer hitched, thinking that there will be abundant green grass at the other end of the ride. But here, there is no reason to trailer the ponies because the hill pasture is right outside our door. Aimee and Madie, then, hadn’t been in a trailer in three months, and back then Aimee was just a month old, so it was still a novel experience for her. Nonetheless, our adventure got off to a good start when Aimee followed her mom right into the trailer.
The trip to the river took 25 minutes, and was quite varied, from highway speed to corduroyed gravel to rough two-track. When we got to the river, I put on my rubber boots and unloaded the girls, neither of whom had ever been to the Cheyenne River before. I opted to lead rather than ride Madie across the river to be as sure of success as I could be. I hadn’t ever ridden Madie across a river before, though she’d crossed it on her own, and this one was new to me, too, so I felt leading her was the best strategy. This lesson was for Aimee, after all, not Madie!
When I had scouted the river a few days before, I had decided on a particular crossing point that was wide and shallow (about seven inches at its deepest.) Madie followed me through the coarse grass on the bank and down into the river and across without hesitating. Aimee hesitated for a moment at the bank and then followed her mom. Success! I had a foal once who would not follow his mom across the river until several days of opportunities had passed, so I was ecstatic that Aimee was as confident with this adventure on the first try as she has been with everything else.
We went back and forth a few times before the failing light of the day dictated an end to our adventure. The girls loaded up without hesitation, another success, and we returned home without incident. I will repeat the water-crossing experience for Aimee when the stars align again. The access road is not passable if it is wet, and the river is low right now because the region it drains hasn’t had much rain in the past month. The river can easily become swollen and too high for safe crossing if a rainstorm hits northeastern Wyoming or southwestern South Dakota. For now, though, I will savor the excellent adventure I shared with Madie and Aimee and my canine companions.
© Jenifer Morrissey, 2020
You can read more stories like this one in my book What an Honor, available internationally by clicking here or on the book cover.
