Dusty Gal

My sister has a wonderful tribute to her horse Eve. Do go over - but take a tissue, because it made me cry, and while I am not a barometer to trust on all things teary (I cry at ads, folks) you would have to be stonelike not to be twanged by the amazingly wonderful story of a love between a girl and her horse.

I had a horse too. Only - I won't make you cry, I promise.

My horse wasn't one I pined for and woke at daylight each morning to see if she was born. She has no lore apart from the fact that she was a pony and lived up to her name.


Alluded to in BB's post was a breaking-in school. She makes it sound like a rite of passage for the love affair that was between her and Eve - and obviously different people get different versions of events.

I am two years younger than BB (and 1 month and 5 days, she just wears it better) and have always been. I cannot recall whether it was a whinge from me ("she always gets to do great stuff") or a wonderful idea of my father's ("can we get a bulk deal?"), but I also got to be a student at that school.

And, as a metaphor for equine/human love lives, her experience of the long shot with misty hills and melodious backdrops is one for the romantics. My experience? Well, did you read my poem in the last post? Yep, cue rock music, quick-cut montage and the agony and ecstasy of what many confuse with passion.

Dusty Gal was actually never my horse - she belonged to my uncle as my uncle owned her mother. Her mother was called Dusty because that is how she left her riders - and the apple did not fall far from the tree.

She was given to me as my experiment because she was a squirt of a thing - like me - and as she would eventually have to be broken, I was the sucker small enough to attempt it.

BB has a great shot of her coming adrift from Eve at this event due to the lack of full girth tightening. And by the way - despite her fears to the contrary, ALL of those teenage boys were definitely checking out the cute chick graciously arcing through the atmosphere.

(I know this because I was the younger sister who was the target of these teenage gods approaches to find out more about my big sister.)

When people viewed my interaction with Dusty Gal, they had emotional responses also. Think - the youngest, cutest (what good is memory if you cannot enhance?) shortest person at the breaking-in school on the shortest horse most of the time. It was definitely a hoot worth taking your popcorn along to.

The good news is, Dusty Gal never bucked. She had such an arsenal at her disposal in terms of removing riders from her back that she would not deign to such foolishness.

She would bolt, prop, duck sideways, backwards and overboard.

Other students of the school stood in wonderchortled in paroxysms of laughter at her lithe ability to not be beneath her rider, whether it be in the paddock where we took long rides (and I took long walks), in the big yard where we cantered figure eights (and I found the fence, the sand and my hat all too often) or even in the small yard where we were to "take the buck out" (ha ha ha - who needs to do that?).

Oh, I did love Dusty Gal - I admired her grit (as I spat it from my teeth), her wit (untangling myself from wire rope) and her determination (as she repeated such offences with any grown man who tried to show me how I should be taking control).

The best thing about Dusty Gal was that she was sneaky - an no-one was more relieved than I when she snuck into close enough proximity to the stallions paddock that she became a teenage pregnancy statistic and I was off the hook.

And I realise that I also got to find many metaphors for Dusty Gal in my earlier love life.

Too fast, too unreliable and dangerous - and I somehow believed I could break them.

But then - I would always pick myself up, shake off the dust, swear a few times, scream a few more - and move on.

(I would not count V as a Dusty Gal allusion - you do eventually get over such stupidity lessons and move on. He is far more a Statesman allegory. Now, Statesman I truly loved because that big bay gave me confidence again.)