One More Then We'll Let It Rest For a While
In my experience with horses in the past, I knew them to have personalities. Some were gentle and forgiving and some were just mean. They aren't dumb, they will show amazing displays of reasoning and understanding at times. I'll tell you about Red some time, he was mean and smart and loved nothing more than to pin your foot to the ground when you tried to saddle him. But until I met Ginger I never knew horses had a sense of humor.
One of the things she loved to do to me was sneak up behind me while I was raking up her "dukes" as the kids called them, time the back stroke on the rake, then catch the back of the rake in her mouth causing me to jerk with surprise when the rake didn't come forward like it should. Then she would snatch it out of my hand a toss it away and laugh (YES SHE DID) at me as I fetched it.
One afternoon in the dead of winter (in winter scooping dukes was easier because they were frozen and scooped up nicely, but they bounced around in the wheel barrow if you tossed them in too hard), I had an odd sensation. I felt like someone very tall was watching me. I turned around and Ginger was about five feet behind me standing on her rear legs, her front legs weren't pawing the air like Silver or Trigger, they were down at her side. Her head was swaying back and forth...I swear she was making fun of me. When I turned and saw her she did a little double hop, some kind of happy horse dance or something, then went to all fours and bounced around the corral laughing at me (YES SHE DID).
Several times she waited for the wheel barrow to get almost full, then she gently nosed it over with a chuckle. She would occasionally get out of the corral and wander around visiting the other horses in the saddle club. She would tease me with the old run- when -you -get -close routine. Unless I had the grain bucket.
In the worst of winter, no matter how cold or icy or snowy it got, she would NOT stay in her stall. She would stand in the middle of the corral with her butt to the wind and hunch down into as small a horses as she could be and just stand there...not twenty feet from a covered, windproof stall. When I put her hay in the stall she would look at me pointedly and toss it back outside. I used to feel bad about this until old Claude, who ran the riding academy, told me that when she heard my car coming she would dance and bounce around all excited until I started down the alley by our stall, then she went into her "pity me" act.
On the summer Saturdays when the Riding Academy was busy, sometimes members of the Saddle Club would take out trail rides to give Claude a hand. Ginger loved trail rides but the rent-a-horses from the academy didn't like her to lead, she set too hot a pace for them and they got all sweated up. She would tease them, too. Walking along side one hanging her head down and acting all worn out.
One area where she didn't clown was with my kids. Mamielady was ten and when she got on Ginger's back and went through the things she had learned in her riding lessons, Ginger was a perfect lady, no goofing or acting up. And sometimes I put my youngest, a five year old elf, on her back, you could see Ginger tensing up to be super careful. Boogie would ride her bare back with no bridle around the corral and Ginger resonded to knee nudges and mane pulls with out a complaint.
We were lucky to find a good horse who was smarter than us and patient enough to wait for us to catch up.