“Miss Kline, your word is Trouble.”

“Trouble. One near sixteen-year-old girl and one eighteen-month-old filly. Trouble.”

“That is erm- correct?”



Yep, that was me. Two months till my sixteenth and I now had a baby Appaloosa mare in my care. Call me a hypocrite, but I would have chewed out anyone else who was in my same position. Green horse plus green owner can only lead to one thing, disaster. I was different though; I had something every other owner in the world lacked. I had the best horse on earth; I just didn’t know it yet.

Trouble started on day one. I just didn’t notice it. Cherokee was to be in a quarantine stall for three days, and four nights, away from any other horses on the property. The management told us it was to make sure she didn’t have any diseases that the other horses could get. It was a good theory, but a proper quarantine should be at least two weeks long. The management was simply lazy and wanted a couple extra days before having to prepare a fresh stall in the main barn. She would then spend one day in her new stall to get used to the new smells, and then would finally be released into the herd on the fourth day.

The only exercise she was allowed while in quarantine, was if I came out there and hand walked her in this little tiny area, about fifteen by thirty feet, in front of her stall. I went out there three times a day, and walked her for at least twenty minutes, in the middle of February, with the wind gushing in and swirling around our little three-sided barn. I also would groom her and spoil her, and had bought a big Jolly Apple toy for her. I even cut a hole in the apple and popped treats in for her to knock out.

She started having little fits if Dad were walking her instead of me. On the second day, my riding buddy, Lisa, and her mom came out. Lisa tried to walk her a little, and then asked her to back up, and Cherokee promptly went into her first of many rearing fits. She happened to be standing on concrete and didn’t seem too worried about how fast she came back down. We didn’t know it, but she popped her first splint that day. Neither Lisa nor I were too upset about her rearing. We both just looked at it as a baby’s tantrum, no big deal. She’d probably calm down in a few days and be fine from then on.

Allow me to take a moment to chuckle at that… Ok, I’m done.

We saw more little hissie-fits over the next couple days, but it was all worth it that first day she was in the paddock. The herd was completely excluding her. They were a bunch of older mares who didn’t want anything to do with this baby. When I got out there, she was standing alone in the middle of the paddock; the herd was completely out of site. There was still snow on the ground and you could see that the herd had been doing quite a bit of running that day. I stood at the gate and whistled. Some fifty yards away my filly picked up her little head and looked at me as if to say, “Did you say something?” I whistled again and she raised her head a little more. I whistled a third time and she dropped her head and snorted before raising it again. Then she took a tentative step forward.

The snow was mixed with ice and slush. She looked down at the ground and took another step forward. Then lifted her head and looked at me again. I whistled again and she nickered in reply before taking a few more steps. This went on for about twenty minutes. Every time she stopped it was like she was saying, “I don’t know if it’s safe to walk over there. Are you sure you really want me? I don’t want to walk in this stuff if you’re going to run me off.” She was desperate for a herd and a companion, and so she made her way up to the gate where I stood. I rewarded her with a few treats then slipped her halter on and lead her to the barn and her nice warm stall.

I discovered very quickly that this filly had quite a few opinions of her own and was glad to voice them, weather I wanted to hear them or not. Her first big objection was cross ties. First she pulled out one of the eye screws. When I replaced it with a new screw in a fresh hole, she snapped my brand new nylon cross tie at the buckle. We came to a compromise, I could use just one single tie, and she wouldn’t test it too much. Not at first anyway.

Among this I discovered she was content to be groomed for about thirty seconds, but if I gave her hay I could have ten minutes. She was incapable of standing on three feet when asked, but only because one of those three was at rest. I could do anything with her tail that I wanted, but her mane was only allowed to be brushed, and quickly at that. Above all else, I was under no circumstances to get between her and dinner.

Somewhere around this time, Mom came to her senses about what had happened. Her elder daughter had one ginormous pet. It’s not that she didn’t know what was going on when we were looking and buying and what not, it’s that she was in a bit of a shock. She’s quite afraid of horses, and it’s all because of my Dad.

He took her riding when they were just dating. Mom had never been near a horse let alone on one. When Dad took off with one of his friends for a couple of logs, Mom’s horse didn’t want to be left behind. Now she was only doing a trot, but that just happens to be the bumpiest gait of all. Mom’s butt wasn’t too happy the next day, and Dad was in the doghouse. She would have been happy to never see another horse again.

So my mother, meaning the best talked around and found whom she thought was the best trainer in our area. For the sake of this recollection, we’ll call her Sandy. Sandy had been raised on a Racetrack, and had forty years of horse experience under her belt. I didn’t like her from the moment we met. It had everything to do with the fact that she came in and started verbally attacking my horse.

“She’s too young, too wild, and too short for you. You don’t need a horse to train; you need a horse to ride. Plus she’s also pig-eyed, and her manners are atrocious.”

Granted she was a bit young, a bit shorter than hoped, and she was right on about her manners. As for being pig-eyed, this woman was nuts. Sandy had been at a show in the last month where she saw a girl about my age die because her horse had been too much for her. She wasn’t looking at things the way she should have. Granted, she didn’t want to see the same happened to me, but I didn’t want her around my horse.

Mom scheduled her to come out again, and this time Sandy brought her chain. I hate chains. I don’t believe in using them. In fact, I don’t believe in doing anything to a horse that you wouldn’t do to yourself. If you were not willing to have someone slap a chain over your nose and yank on it, why would you do it to your horse? And while I’m on my little rant, have any of you spur, whip, and crop users ever used those tools on yourself the same way you use them on your horse? The way I’ve seen a lot of people abuse them, they don’t feel good. I’ve raised welts on my own legs from whips, I wouldn’t dream of doing that to an animal.

Sandy ignored my childish wish to not use a chain and strapped on one Cherokee anyway. Before even leaving the stall, she yanked down three times, hard. Cherokee did a small rear in the stall and then came back down. Sandy looked at me with a “I told you she was wild” glare, then took Cherokee into the ring with a lunge line and a lunge whip.

Now mind, I’d been trying to get Cherokee to lunge and found that either she didn’t know how, or she didn’t want to. I assumed she didn’t know how. Sandy on the other hand, just cracked the whip and flicked Cherokee’s tail until she was trotting a circle. When Cherokee would stop, Sandy would crack and flick more.

After about five minutes of this, Cherokee had had enough, and not even a silly little chain was going to hold her back, so she went into a full blown rearing fit. God it was beautiful, all that rage and furry up in the air. Sandy just kept cracking the whip, backing Cherokee into a corner, until she finally charged out, and past Sandy. The resistance of the lunge line made her spin around and go into another fit. This time there was no corner behind her, there were other people riding. For the first time, Sandy did something smart, she stopped and waited for the filly to bring herself back down. She quickly killed her one smart point by walking up to Cherokee, yanking on the chain again, and then practically throwing her back into a circle with the whip. She got about two or three circles and stopped, then proceeded to tell me that I needed a new horse.

There were a couple days where Mom was winning the debate to sell Cherokee back to where we got her from, and get a different horse. In the end, Dad had the final say, and once again, he trusted my horse sense. Cherokee stayed, and Sandy went good-bye.