Liberty and the Dream Ride. Stacy Gregg

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СКАЧАТЬ time he tried to roll in his box and then he got his head stuck in a feed bucket and couldn’t get it off!”

      Issie grinned, but the quarantine agent appeared unmoved. He looked up briefly from his paperwork, frowned and then typed something else into the computer on his desk before returning to the stack of papers. Issie looked at her watch. How much longer was this going to take? She’d been at the desk for nearly an hour! Finally, the official reached for the large rubber stamp on his desk and brought it down with a thump on top of Comet’s forms.

      “OK. You’ve been approved. It’s all in order,” he told Issie gruffly, pushing the papers back across the desk towards her. “Take these with you and present them at the front gate. They’ll let you enter the compound and pick up your horse.”

      The guard at the stable block was no friendlier. “What’s the name of the horse that you’re collecting?” he asked without looking up as he flicked through the papers.

      “Comet,” Issie said.

      As Issie’s voice echoed down the corridor of the stables, there was a sudden sound of hooves stamping on the straw from inside one of the loose boxes. A moment later a skewbald face appeared over one of the Dutch doors and Comet began whinnying and flicking his head up and down.

      “Your horse?” the guard asked with a raised eyebrow.

      “Uh-huh.” Issie beamed.

      “You can go and collect him out of the loose box if you want,” the guard said.

      Issie didn’t need to be told twice – she raced down the corridor to greet her pony.

      “Hey, boy.” She patted Comet’s broad white stripe. “How are you? Have they been treating you OK in here? Have you made friends with the other horses?”

      Comet was nickering vigorously, telling Issie all about his epic plane journey and the days of boredom in quarantine.

      Issie listened and nodded sympathetically. “I know, I’ve missed you too, but it’s OK now, we’re here to take you with us. We’re going to Kentucky.”

      She clipped the lead shank to the pony’s halter and led him out of his stall. She could hear the other horses in their stalls whinnying their goodbyes as she led the skewbald down the corridor of the stable block. Massive electronic gates swung open to let them out into the bright sunshine of the quarantine yard where Avery and Stella were waiting with the rental horse float hitched up to the back of their Jeep.

      “Ohmygod, we’ve been waiting hours!” Stella said as she helped lower the ramp of the horse float so they could load him onboard.

      “Let’s get moving,” Avery told them. “We want to be on the freeway and out of Los Angeles before the traffic gets heavy.”

      The skewbald was looking around the yard, his ears pricked forward. When he saw the rickety horse float that Avery was towing behind the Jeep, however, his ears went back. He refused to step up the ramp and in the end Avery had to place a lunge rope around his rump to urge him onboard.

      “Poor Comet,” Stella said. “I’m not surprised he doesn’t want to get on – look at the state of it!”

      The horse float they’d hired was an ancient contraption. Issie had been quietly horrified when they picked it up from the rental yards yesterday and she saw the peeling blue paint flaking off the framework exposing the rust underneath. There was black lettering around the front of the float that must once have said Horse Star, but a couple of the letters had rusted away so that the sign read Hose tar.

      “What’s a ‘hose tar’?” Stella had wrinkled her nose up.

      “Umm… Is this thing actually roadworthy?” Issie had asked nervously.

      Avery had clambered about underneath the chassis and pronounced the horse box perfectly sound. “It’s not pretty, but it will get us to Kentucky.”

      Now, with Comet finally loaded onboard, they pulled out on to the Los Angeles freeway, and listened as their satnav gave Avery directions through the complicated spaghetti junctions of the city, until finally they were on the open roads of Route 40, heading towards Kentucky.

      By midday the landscape had changed. The houses had disappeared and been replaced by desert. The view out the car windows was like watching a cowboy movie, nothing but dust and cacti as far as the eye could see.

      “You couldn’t keep a horse here,” Stella observed. “This is terrible grazing!”

      She gazed out the window wistfully. “I can’t wait to get to Kentucky to see the blue grass.”

      “What?” Avery looked at her like she was mad. “Stella, Lexington, Kentucky is called ‘bluegrass country’, but it’s a nickname – it doesn’t mean they really have blue grass.”

      “Well what colour is it then?” Stella said.

      “It’s green, Stella,” Avery rolled his eyes. “Just like ordinary grass.”

      “Well that is majorly disappointing!” Stella flopped back in her seat. “I thought it would be like Smurf-land or something.”

      Issie looked at her watch. “What time is it in New Zealand?” she asked Avery.

      “About five p.m.,” Avery said. “You can call your mother when we stop for lunch if you like.”

      Issie looked around at the alien landscape of the Mojave Desert and felt a sudden pang of homesickness for her old life in Chevalier Point. She felt a bit weepy for a moment, but she knew she was just exhausted because of jetlag. She was still having trouble sleeping at night and kept waking up, sitting bolt upright in bed at three in the morning, unable to get back to sleep. And now, here they were in the middle of the day and she could hardly keep her eyes open.

      “How come I have jetlag and Comet seems to be totally fine?” Issie asked Avery.

      “Horses and humans react entirely differently to long-distance travel,” Avery told her. “For horses, it takes several weeks for the jetlag to set in. Right now, Comet hasn’t got jetlag at all. That’s why we’ve brought him here on such a tight schedule right before the competition. The timing is crucial because we want him in peak condition and jetlag-free when we’re in Kentucky.”

      Issie wished she was jetlag-free. She felt like an ocean tide was washing her in-and-out, in-and-out. Her brain was swimming in a warm pool, making it impossible to think clearly. As Avery drove on towards Flagstaff she was inexplicably gripped by a desperate urge to go to sleep, and so she succumbed.

      It was probably the noise of the trucks whizzing by on the freeway that made her start dreaming. She had flashed back in time five years to that fateful day at Chevalier Point Pony Club. She could see it all so clearly, as if it was real – which of course it was, because this wasn’t actually a dream. It was a memory, an event that had happened long ago, and that had haunted her ever since.

      It was her very first gymkhana at Chevalier Point Pony Club and Issie and her pony Mystic had just left the show ring with a blue ribbon when chaos broke loose.

      Natasha Tucker had stamped out of the arena after losing the showjumping and in misguided fury she had viciously taken a swipe with her СКАЧАТЬ