Timothy rides a horse
I tend to wear a cowboy hat. It's actually an Australian style cowboy hat but it usually has the same effect. Sometimes I'll talk with a little bit of a cowboy style accent just to make people curious. It works well enough that I am often asked if I live/lived in Texas, if I am a real cowboy, and if I ride horses and go to rodeos. I currently live in Iowa and have never lived in Texas and the closest thing that I have ever gotten to being a real cowboy was when I went to a horse camp way back around 1982 with very tame horses. Today changed a bit of that however. I was asked to help a friend move a piano. She had been talking about her two horses just a little earlier so I told her that I'd be glad to help but it'd cost her a horse ride. I was joking and fully planned to help her move it anyway but darned if she didn't take me seriously. So after several of us muscled the piano from one house to another she had her daughters try to saddle up the horses.
The horses unofficially belonged to the daughters and they had ridden them on occasion but were generally pretty skittish of them for some reason. The horses hadn't been ridden yet this year and apparently one horse had the reputation of biting and bucking. They got that one bridled and saddled first. My friend mounted that one and started walking it a bit to remind it of the saddle. It seemed to be handling it all right. The second horse had seen the rope however and wasn't eager to be ridden so it kept dancing away. The daughters kept trying to coax it back with corn but didn't feel up to trying to herd it back in. Since the first horse was acting fairly tame, my friend offered to let me ride it while she helped with the second horse. I have always kind of wanted to ride a more spirited horse so gladly accepted.
I mounted the horse perfectly fine and was proud to say that I had no problem leading it in a few wide and slow figure 8's. The horse started tossing its head a little but it was easy to rein it in. The mother managed to coax the second horse back in but the horse I was on was still making the girls nervous so I started riding it around the small fenced in yard. After we rode behind some small brush trees the horse started bucking a bit. It wasn't nearly as bad as I had feared and I just turned it a bit to stop the bucking and start it moving again. When I returned to the others again they were just starting to get the bit and bridle on. Knowing that it'd still take a bit of time for them to get the saddle on and feeling a bit proud of my efforts already I decided to take it on a larger circuit of the yard. This time I was well past the trees when the horse started rearing up on it's hind legs. Wow can those things rear high! I am still proud to say that it did not throw me or toss me. Nope, I rode that thing all the way down! Unfortunately that means that it ended up laying on its side on my right leg and flailing its hooves around wildly. This was made slightly worse by the fact that I had somehow ended up on the side of the horse WITH the hooves flailing wildly! Somehow I managed to grab the most dangerous leg and hold it. I loudly requested assistance. I flatly deny that I screamed for help. I was certainly in better control than that! I could feel that by leg was not broken but was definitely stuck under the horse. It wasn't until the youngest daughter got my foot out of the stirrup that I realized that it was one of the things holding my foot. After someone else took hold of the horses hoof that I was still holding I managed to slide myself out from under the horse. At that point I didn't mind coming back for my shoe that had come off in the process.
I am fine. I skinned up an elbow. I'll have about two or three noteworthy bruises. And will probably have a slight limp tomorrow. I'm not sure if my right ankle is just slightly twisted or simply still recovering from having a really large horse laying on it for several minutes. In short they are all very minor injuries that I plan to brag on as greatly as any battle wound. I am not horse shy and would happily try it again in a week or so. Next time however if I am told that a horse is spirited and tends to buck and bite and hasn't been ridden all fall, winter, or spring and has little girls afraid of it, I think maybe I'll do the sensible thing and request to ride the other one instead.
By the way, if anyone asks me about my bruises I plan to tell them that I was beaten up by a fourteen year old girl's horse.