The Hunt Ball
…continued from Part 2

By the time we return to Laura’s house, I’ve come to a serious conclusion: If I’m going to keep Em, I’ve got to be more than a horse spectator. Either I find a way to muscle into that part of her universe or consign myself to Permanent Observer status.

So, when the trailer arrives the next morning with the new horse in back, I’m right on Em’s heels.

“What’s the first step?” I ask, and she looks startled, as though she’s forgotten I’m around. Which only strengthens my determination.

“First I put a blanket on him—that one over there,” she says, pointing out a rough-cut furry thing on a wheelbarrow. I grab it and carry it over. She greets me with a quizzical look. I think I’ve always been helpful, though maybe not quite so eager before.

She climbs the ramp, lays the blanket over the gray and spends several minutes talking to and touching it, running her hands over its neck and mane. Several of her movements look familiar…

It’s fascinating, watching Em build rapport with this new charge. It isn’t that different from a child or a distracted friend—you capture its attention and sooth whatever gets in the way of the behavior you’re seeking. A few minutes later, she’s leading the gray out of the trailer and immediately around the yard in a circle I quickly realize isn’t random.

The Gate Won’t Close…

I grew up in New Jersey, so I’ve seen American horse farms; at least I’ve driven by more than a few. Irish farms are similar, except that everything in sight has been lying around since William the Conqueror. And—it’s like having a basement—once you start letting things lie around, they seem to collect other things lying around. Eventually even things that aren’t lying around— the structural components of farmish efficiency—start to get approximate in their workings.

Which brings us to the gate.

The trailer drivers want to exit out the back gate. Laura’s feeding the other horses at the far end of the property, and Em is walking the gray around the yard, which leaves the gate to me. This is the same iron gate, as far as I can tell, that kept Oliver Cromwell off the property because it wouldn’t open way back then either. It weighs four tons, drags its iron shafts resentfully through the mud and sags so much it’s impossible to raise the tongue back between the two iron lips that are supposed to cradle it once the truck’s gone.

“The gate won’t close,” I announce.

“What happened to the can?” Em asks politely, baiting the trap for the unwary.

“What can?”

“The can that held up that end of the gate,” she answers. Meaning, the can I barely noticed until I almost broke my toe kicking it out of the way.

“Who fills coffee cans with concrete?”

“People who need to keep their gates up,” Em replies pleasantly. She’s now exchanged the lead rope for two long reins, which she uses to steer the gray around the yard from behind. They’re getting acquainted; the gray is going whichever way she wants at the slightest prompt.

A Kerfuffle In The Courtyard

I’ve seen Laura wandering the yard several times followed by several honking geese and a goat on a leash. I’m a city boy—I’m not entirely certain about the difference between a goat and a ram. I meant to ask Laura, but she doesn’t encourage questions.

Now, this becomes an issue.

Now, the geese and the goat (ram) decide spontaneously to migrate from the field into the courtyard. It’s either spontaneous or they held a union meeting. However it happens, all at once they’re waddling, quacking, bleating and pushing at the gate.

I’m not sure at first that there’s anything wrong with this—I did see them all in the yard just yesterday, after all—but Em says, “Ohh no” in a way that doesn’t sound good.

I swing my hands around and make loud noises. “Shush, shush,” I say. If geese were dogs, this would stop them in their tracks. Cats would ignore me, but they do that anyway. The geese, however, seem to just hunker down and honk louder, flapping their wings, which sting close-up!

“They bite!” Em warns as I dance out of the way. She’s glancing over her shoulder nervously but still not making any attempt to move the gray into a stall.

Having failed with the geese, my only opportunity for macho heroism is the goat (ram). He seems to have decided to press forward as though I’m not there. I say “press forward” very precisely—he is applying very determined pressure with his horns to a sensitive part of my anatomy.

“I’ll just push back,” I tell myself—after all, he’s half my height. The flaw in this logic is that he’s made of granite with a center of gravity about half an inch below ground. I’d have as much luck trying to push the stone wall behind him.

Left at an impasse, I take the logical, very foolish next step—I grab him by the horns. Which leaves me hunched over, all out of whack, while he twists and throws his head around until it’s all I can do just to stay upright.

All at once, the gray leaps straight into the air. I mean, he leaps high enough that his hooves are around my eye level. I still see him sometimes when I close my eyes, so don’t tell me he didn’t do it.

The jump is powerful—and wild—enough to rip the reins from Em’s hands and knock her off her feet. She falls into one of the wheelbarrows, which collapses against a concrete mixer I never noticed in any of my 20 trips across the yard.

The gray leaps again straight into the air. I run—straight at Em, grabbing her by the arms and pulling her away. I don’t think the gray would actually have trampled her, but I can feel his breath and the sweat in the air all around him as he comes down.

Em comes up grabbing at her shoulder, but then she dives for the reins and hauls over hard until the horse’s head jerks sideways. Whether this distracts him from his plan or just momentarily subdues him, she manages to muscle him into a stall. I throw the bolt closed behind as she darts out, leaving the gray kicking at the stone wall inside.

When I get her to the doctor’s office under protest, he says she’s cracked her collarbone. “Oh God, what a shame,” I moan, feigning disappointment. “I know how you were looking forward to training him.”

She looks at me like I’ve lost my mind. “I’m still training him,” she says. “It’s just my collarbone.” She pulls on her coat and leads me to the door.

“Shouldn’t you get a second opinion or something?”

She laughs!

“Silly, I’ve broken it more than once—a crack is nothing.” She reaches up with her potentially-broken arm and caresses my cheek. “Nice job pulling me out of the danger zone, by the way,” she adds, glancing at her watch. “We’ve got to get changed—we’re due at Patrick and Moira’s for dinner.”

“Patrick and Moira?”

“Just a little pre-hunt dinner.”

“Pre-hunt?”

“Didn’t I tell you? Foxhunting, tomorrow.”

Oh, foxhunting—I know about that. I’ve seen pictures. “What do you do with the fox when you catch it?”

She shrugs. “I’m not sure anyone really cares about catching it,” she says.

The Hunt Ball

An hour and a half later, we’re walking into the most magnificent house I’ve ever seen that wasn’t also a national historic site. Three stories tall and many-windowed, a wonderful hunter-green with charcoal slate roof tiles and a granite scroll curling outward from both sides of oak double-doors. The wings of the house, each with its own style, wrap around a gravel courtyard like outstretched arms.

The “little pre-hunt dinner” comprises about 50 people, each with glass in hand and gleam in eye already. They’re in wild clusters packed into the five front drawing rooms—there have to be at least eight more lurking in back, considering the size of the place—each group wild with conversation. I grab two glasses of red wine as they go by on a tray and then hope they weren’t intended for someone else. By the time that thought actually registers, we’ve already finished them.

Em immediately finds Patrick and Moira, who look serene considering they’re hosting Barnum and Bailey. Moira gives me the once-over twice. “We’ve heard so much about you,” she says mysteriously. I’m about to ask Em what she’s heard about me when Patrick takes my arm.

“What are you drinking?” he demands and hands me a huge glass, taking another for himself. There are buffet tables in every room but none with any food, just lots of ever-full glasses in addition to the ones walking by on trays.

I sip. Beer! O.K., I know this stuff. Home ground.

“Stout,” he tells me. “It’s the Irish.” He gestures round. “What do you think of the place?”

“You know how to throw a party,” I tell him. It doesn’t seem right to say I just got here.

Every room seems to have a tapestry or a huge painting—or six—of hunters with swords, horse and rider fording streams, hounds jumping tree branches the size of a BMW, etc. “So you’re catching a fox tomorrow, huh?”

He hands me another stout—I wasn’t aware I’d finished the last one but there it is, empty, right in front of me on the table. “Not really,” he says. “Just an excuse to ride around in the open air.”

“Catching the fox isn’t the point?” It seems like an innocent question to me, but heads turn as though I’ve questioned Patrick’s parentage.

“The fox is unpredictable,” Malcolm answers, stepping out of the local traffic. Of course, coming from him, I immediately take it as an excuse. “He has no rules or course to follow. The hounds follow his scent so he’ll run along a streambed to deaden it, jump a fence and double-back on his own tracks to confuse them. Which means we’re not just riding a course but doing something real, something with a little chaos attached.”

“The fox is symbolic,” Patrick adds. “It’s not like France, where you run a stag to exhaustion and then the huntmaster runs him through with a short sword.”

“That doesn’t sound real symbolic—at least not for the stag,” I agree.

Em wades through the crowd, threads her arm through mine and hands me another wine glass. Wasn’t I holding a beer in that hand? Apparently not—there’s another empty on the table, right next to the first—and the second—where did that come from?

I start searching for anything resembling food. There’s bread on the table! I lurch in that direction and grab several pieces. Good Irish brown bread, thick-crusted and warm, and I wouldn’t care if it was Wonder Bread as long as it has a chance of soaking up some of the booze.

As I’m standing there, they start bringing out real food. A beef roast, sliced ham, red potato salad, tomato salad, scones, several kinds of tarts—aren’t tarts dessert? Everything’s arriving at once.

Before I can grab anything, I spot Emily talking to Patrick—and Malcolm standing next to her, his hand cozily in the small of her back. I veer wildly through the crowd and sidle up to them. “Cutting in,” I say—it’s not a question—inserting my hand right where Malcolm had it.

“Just keeping her warm for you,” he says, and Em throws me a laser smile that settles me like she settled the gray. And for just about as long.

These People Are Crazy!

“So you’re riding with us tomorrow, yes?” Patrick says. It takes a moment to realize he’s talking to me.

“The last time I rode a horse, I was pretending to be Roy Rogers,” I answer. By now, the line’s a reflex. “I can’t ride—I’ve got to tend Emily’s shoulder.”

“Then you’ll have to ride next to me,” she says.

“You’re riding?”

“Of course!”

The look on my face brings the group to hysterics.

“Don’t be so solemn,” Moira says. “It’s only a crack.”

“It’s her collarbone!”

“Three times—broken,” Malcolm brags, running his finger between his shoulders, tracing the breaks.

“Twice for me,” Moira agrees.

“I had a horse fall on me last summer,” Patrick adds. “Broke my shoulder and hip. Couldn’t ride again ’til November.” He portrays this as a hardship. I probably wouldn’t have gone near a horse again in my lifetime.

Moira comes around and grabs me by the shoulders. “You’ll love it,” she says. “Just remember to hold the neck strap when the horse jumps.”

Jumps?

To be continued…

Follow Ted’s adventures in Ireland every Wednesday through Dec. 8.
Read Part 1
Read Part 2

Ted Krever went to Woodstock (the GOOD one), spent 20 years in television documentary production, is happily divorced, purports to be a good kisser and knows nothing about horses except you should check the teeth. He was once falsely accused of attempting to blow up Ethel Kennedy with a Super-8 projector.