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louder. She wasn’t screaming, but she did have a loud voice. ‘In the programme it says there will be a jump-off!’ Since I hadn’t read the programme, I didn’t know that this was true, but in some things Ellen was never wrong. I got to her and took Gallant Man’s reins. Jane came hurrying into the arena. Ellen began to scowl, and I started to worry – once in the spring when she saw that she wasn’t going to get her way, she’d thrown herself right off the pony, flat on the ground.
    But then the judge nodded and the announcer said, ‘The judge says that there will be a jump-off between Virginia Cartwright and Ellen Leinsdorf. Girls, please come to the judge’s stand and listen to your course.’ Jane and I exchanged a glance, and then Ginny came over with her trainer, and we all listened.
    The judge was not Peter Finneran, just a man from San Francisco who often did the lower-level classes. He was tall and blond and wore an ascot – this morning it was red – but he seemed pretty nice. He told the girls that since a jump-off was supposed to be shorter and faster than the class, they were to do the first four jumps again, down, around in a loop, then back over the jumps, but this time at the canter rather than the trot. The girls nodded. They would go alphabetically, Ginny first. We all walked out of the ring.
    I gave Ellen a leg-up.
    Ginny entered, trotted, began a little circle, and turned towards the jumps. She kicked the pony and he picked up a nice canter, then went over the two cavalletti. As they came over the second one, I saw that she had lucked out – her pony landed on the left lead, which meant that she only had to make her loop and come back and she would be correct. This is what happened, and they finished jumps three and four very neatly, coming down to a trot circle, and exiting the arena.
    I said to Ellen, ‘Okay. We haven’t talked much about leads, but you know the difference. It doesn’t matter what lead he’s on to begin with, but he has to be on the left lead for that loop, so if he lands on the right lead, trot and fix it, because he doesn’t like the left lead, and he might not take that lead by himself.’
    She nodded. She went in, made a nice circle, picked up the canter, and headed for the jump. I thought his jumps were nicer than the other pony’s. But he did land on the right lead, it did take Ellen a few strides to notice, and when she changed it, Gallant Man looked a little awkward. They ended up with second after all.
    But I had to hand it to Ellen – when I asked her what she’d learned from this whole episode, she said, ‘To get him better on the left lead.’ This made me chuckle for the rest of the morning.
    *
    Dad was brushing Blue. My jacket and my stock were hanging on the bridle hook with my hard hat. In two minutes or so, Blue was tacked up and I was dressed and mounted on him, still thinking about Ellen and Melinda. This was a mistake, since I was too distracted to notice that Blue was tight and nervous, and when we came out of the aisle of the temporary barns and to the railing of the warm-up, he saw one of the tents flutter, and spooked. He almost had me off. I grabbed his mane. Dad came up behind us and said, ‘What was that?’
    I said, ‘Must have been a ghost.’
    But I knew it was the tent. I sat up straight and pushed my heels down, paid attention; he remained nervous. A moment later, Jane showed up. She had a lunge line. All of a sudden I remembered that I had a trainer too – Jane. I was really glad to see her.
    We walked, Jane in front and Dad behind, past all the rings and tents and food places, to the furthest warm-up, where you were allowed to lunge. The fog had lifted and evaporated, and the light on the horses and the tents was bright the way it gets when there is still some moisture in the air that makes everything sparkly. The temperature was about perfect, too – cool enough if you were wearing a black jacket and tall boots, but not