Oh d'Lear

Barn people can be all kinds of amazing about horses, but the communication with people end sometimes breaks down. Vide last night, when the saddle marked for Lear was an old saddle retrofitted with new padding and finest brown syntho-nauga. We later found out that the fitter had been through and decided Lear's regular saddle was too wide in the withers, so she got him a narrower one instead. Thing one, there's never been any sign of soreness from him, and thing two, somehow she decided to fit him with a single pad instead of the standard (at our barn, anyway) two, which information never got handed along.

So all unaware of these machinations, I saddled him and clambered up, and we started to work. Lear tends to carry his head high at first and to relax after a few minutes, but this whole lesson was marked by stargazing, extra spooking, and, when we tried to canter circles, kicking out. All the warning signs of a horse in pain, basically, though not so severe that I put them together right off. Pat later found out about the saddle backstory and agrees that next time we'll try him with a single pad, but if that still makes him uncomfortable, fitter be damned, the wider withers it is.

Despite his ouches, Lear did a few things extremely well. We worked on leg-yielding away from the wall and toward it (the horse travels forward and sideways, stepping across itself as it goes). Most school horses tend to hug the rail, because they're used to following along the edge of the ring, so getting them off the track is no mean feat. Lear, however, slid right over and right back at the touch of a leg, switching his tail as he changed direction and looking verreh handsome. He also did smashingly with going from a collected halt to a trot, switching between a short- and a long-strided trot, and not dumping me on my ass during any of his spooks, though we had to do an intervention to get him to go past the gate after a cat startled him. He even managed to walk whilst pooping, something the average schoolie will try to convince you is immmmpossible, as they've all learned that they can sneak in a break that way. But the prey animal that can't fling fewmets and flee simultaneously is usually weeded out of the gene pool in a blur of claws and teeth and gore.

One of the other students and I sat around after we'd put the ponies to bed and talked about horse/rider chemistry, and it all got meta because of the amount of projection we do. I think of Doc as an honest hard-working creature who will work hard to figure out what I'm asking, and whose mistakes are easy to forgive. Tell that to the little kid who is suddenly cantering, though; she'll tell you he's unpredictable and scary (and she's been warned that he bites). Lear, who some girls think is all big action and flash, strikes me as a juvenile twerp with significant technical potential but who will never really move me. The other student loves how how Heza bumps her gently with his nose when she's tacking him up: "It's like he's saying, 'Hey. I'm here. Don't start taking me for granted.' And it's funny, so it's like he has a sense of humor, and that makes me happier to be with him. But how much of that is him, and how much of it is me?" That's a question.