My horse Arthur and I occasionally have a problem with refusals, especially at the beginning of a hunt season after a summer of not enough riding. I blame it on both of us forgetting too much over the summer, although acknowledging that pilot error is probably the major factor.
Early in the fall of 2001, as we started into another season, Arthur decided it was time to prove to me and many witnesses that he still remembered how to jump, even if I didn't. It was towards the end of October, and due to laziness, weather, and other complications, it was only our second hunt of the season. (The older I get, the less enthused I am about getting up at 4:00 AM for those 7:30 autumn hunts, although when I do manage to drag my butt out of bed that early, I always appreciate the Marine slogan: "We have more fun before breakfast than most people do all day.") This was a beautiful (almost too warm) Sunday afternoon, and the more civilized 2:00 PM start left me with no excuse to stay home.
Due to the warmth, and the fact that hounds had hunted hard the previous day and earlier in the week, staff wisely decided to take a fairly slow pace, and concentrate on educating some of the young hounds. For the first hour or so, we moved at a comfortable pace, neither boring nor breakneck, going through gates instead of over jumps.
Then we picked up a coyote for a brief run, and the pace picked up a bit. Galloping along, we found ourselves facing the moment of truth: the first jump of the day. We were approaching a corner, with a stone wall in front of us and a coop in the fenceline on our left. A couple of hundred feet in front of the corner was a small ditch.
As I saw the ditch, I considered Arthur's tendency to jump small ditches like that much bigger than necessary when he was excited, and he was definitely excited now. I decided that, instead of fighting for control to try to make him cross the ditch in a more sensible manner, and possibly get ourselves unbalanced, I'd just let him take it however he wanted to keep our momentum for the upcoming jump. I thought I was prepared for the leap over the ditch. I wasn't prepared for what really happened.
Arthur had apparently sized up the situation and reached a slightly different conclusion. He decided that this was something he could handle better with no interference, and it was time to ditch the rider ... literally.
He did a beautiful sliding stop at the ditch, dumped me in it, jumped over me, galloped up to the corner, eyeballed his choice of jumps, made a hard left, and sailed gracefully over the coop. Everyone who saw him jump agreed that it was absolutely magnificent, and if he failed to perform that well with me on his back, it was obvious whose fault that was.
Someone commented that I was at least lucky that nobody had a camera. I said that I would actually like to have a picture of him jumping solo. It would be good for me to look at it as a lesson in humility every time I was tempted to blame him for my incompetence.
The one bright spot was that I was told by someone who witnessed my own leap over the coop to reunite with Arthur that I "did it in fine form and everyone commented that it had to be someone 'young' to vault over the coop like that."
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