Yet Another Leaf

I was spending the weekend with one of my high school friends. I believe we were in about 9th grade at the time. She was a fellow horse owner and we were planning a weekend of riding.

Preferring my own horse, Comanche, I rode the 9 or so miles to her house. She met me half way and was riding a tall, lanky Thoroughbred. He was a retired racehorse and without a doubt one of the gentlest I’d ever met. My very limited experience with racehorses was from fairs and most of them seemed to like to try and bite you, but this one didn’t have that nasty little attitude at all. I liked him.

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The racehorse towered over my little Comanche, making him look more like a pony. For whatever reason, we decided to switch horses for a little while. We were both riding bareback and while I had recently learned to vault onto Comanche, I wasn’t ready to vault onto such a big horse.

My friend led him up beside a small dirt hill, but the racehorse still looked impossibly huge. I did a couple runs up to him and touched his side so that he wouldn’t be startled when I launched up onto him. He took the trial runs pretty well, so I ran up the hill to his side and leaped towards up, effectively doing a belly flop onto his back.

Now I only weighed about 120 pounds at the time and this huge horse must have been in the range of 2000 pounds, but he was used to people either being lifted up into the saddle or, as my friend did, led over to a truck or some other object so that they could just slide on.

When my weight hit his back, all four of his long legs completely buckled! I thought we were going down. Luckily, he caught himself before we ended up in a pile on the ground. I finished climbing on and the racehorse was looking at me. His stunned expression was saying, “Holy Crap!! What was THAT!?!”

It’s a wonder I didn’t fall back off, I was laughing so hard. I’m certain that this horse was really glad that it was the last time I ever rode him.