Rai K. The Kit behind the Rai.

I haven’t used this in a long time. Now I feel bad. T_T

Anyway - been helping out at the stable during camp. Most afternoons we go on a trail ride, and we did today as well. My friend and I left before the campers because we wanted to get to this place we call the triangle so that we could do some cantering and jumping. We got out there and had a great time going around. We figured out that this one small log was messing up our stride count in a line of three jumps (which my horse can now go over - victory!) and my friend was nice enough to hop off and move it. I hurt my knee recently and wouldn’t have been able to get back on if I’d gotten off.

So, shortly after my friend moved the log the others show up. My friend got over the logs once more at trot just to check out the placement and they seem okay. We’ll be going back out tomorrow morning, so we’ll check it then. Anyway, after that we fell in line behind the instructor and the three campers, me first and my friend behind me.

A little explanation first - the triangle, like the name suggests, is three-sided. There’s the side that’s slightly downhill that you come in on, the mostly flat side at the bottom, and the slightly uphill side on which you can continue on the trail or take the jumps. If you don’t take the jumps you can canter up the uphill side, at the top of which is a choice of two ways - continue on the main trail to the right or take the short and narrow way to the left that gets you right back on the downhill side of the triangle.

My friend and I had been doing this a lot, either taking the jumps or going up the side and coming back around. Because of this we never went down the main trail to the right. This is the path we went on after we fell in line behind the campers. Maybe fifteen feet up the trail, we stopped. I hadn’t really been paying attention to the front of the line, but now I looked up. The instructor was turning her horse’s head back and forth like she does when he acts up sometimes - he’s a youngster and sometimes has moments. I figured he just doing one of his things and didn’t really think much of it. Then I looked down the line and saw the horse two horses in front of me doing the angry sumo - stomping her back feet and swishing her tail like crazy. Then all of a sudden the horse behind her was pawing the ground and the horse in front of her was acting up as well.

Then I hear the instructor say “everyone get off your horses!” I took a second to make sure I had heard correctly and then hopped off. My horse hadn’t been acting up - at most he’d taken a few skittish steps backwards when the other horses started being weird - and he was perfectly fine once I was on the ground. My friend’s horse hadn’t seemed to even realize something was wrong. The camper directly in front of me managed to hop off of her horse (though she forgot to hold on to the reins and her horse ran off) but the two further up weren’t quite brave enough to do an emergency dismount - one’s five and it was the other’s very first day of riding. The five-year-old is actually a pretty good rider and she managed to keep her seat almost all the way back to the barn. She fell off just after her horse crossed the creek, which was probably a really bumpy section because it’s got some pretty deep mud. I don’t know when the other girl fell off, all I know is that she fell off before she reached the creek. The instructor had to take care of the five-year-old and chase down the three loose horses, so she told the other two girls to go back to me and my friend.

While all this was happening I was standing with my horse thinking that I should run up and help. Luckily I looked at the ground before I went anywhere. The ground was absolutely swarming with ground bees. I turned around to my friend and said “we need to go the other way.” She didn’t say anything, just turned her horse around and both of us walked back to the small section of trail at the top of the triangle at which point we proceeded to walk the trail backwards. Neither of us got back on.

It’s really hard to get lost on our trail - it’s mostly one big circle. The two branches of the trail leading to and from the triangle actually meet each other just after where the bees were. I told my friend to keep an eye out for the bees so that we wouldn’t walk through them. Luckily they were far enough down the other trail that, though we could see them, they did not bother us. We went down the big hill and met up with the two campers that the instructor had sent back to us. The older girl had been the one that fell off and I made sure that she was alright before we proceeded to walk back to the barn.

We got back and the instructor put all of the kids back on their horses and had them walk around for a bit. While they did that I took care of my horse, my friend’s horse, and the instructor’s horse. Afterwards I just untacked my horse in the arena, put his flymask on, grabbed a treat for him (as I always do), and let him out. He didn’t seem any worse for wear, but when the instructor put out the five-year-old’s horse (the one that had been stung the worst) she freaked a bit when a bug flew in her face. That horse did not want anything to do with any more bugs.

So, an eventful afternoon, but everyone got back alright and we know to avoid that area until the bees are taken care of.