Chapter 3

For Brenda, the feeing of suddenly being “alone”, out in the wilderness, as she thought of it, also brought a mixture of other feelings. Bob was there, of course, but he was riding ahead of her, and not talking. He’d said they had to cover ten miles before they’d reach a suitable camping spot, and at this pace, that would take hours and hours. She was impatient to see something ... get somewhere... be a camper. At the same time, the gentle swaying of the horse was comforting, and the absence of all sound, save the clopping of eight hooves, made her feel like she was already a thousand miles from civilization. At least Buttercup didn’t seem to be interested in stopping all the time. She walked more quickly than the horse in the picture back home, too.

Suddenly, Bob was right beside her. She hadn’t seen him do anything ... hadn’t heard him give any command to his horse, but he was suddenly there, close enough to reach out and touch. His horse, and hers, nodded at each other and rubbed noses as they walked.

“Running a horse is very different than walking,” said Bob. “Your legs have to get involved, flexing at the knees, so you can moderate the weight of your butt on the saddle. Otherwise it will beat you to death. Have you ever cantered or galloped before?”

Brenda looked at him with wide eyes. “I guess not,” she said. “I just thought you sat there while the horse did whatever he does.”

“Hold on to the saddle horn with both hands,” said Bob. He made a clucking sound, and his horse jumped forward, moving into a trot. Buttercup followed instantly.

Without warning, Brenda was suddenly bouncing around like she was in an earthquake. She had automatically reached for the horn, at his comment, and gripped it frantically as she felt like she was being tossed three feet into the air. One foot came out of the stirrup, and she wailed, knowing she was going to fall.

“Whoa,” said Bob, and both horses slowed to a walk again. They had only gone thirty feet.

He looked at her, without smiling.

“See what I mean?”

“Ow,” she said, leaning to rub at her bottom.

He explained what she had to do with her knees and thighs, and they tried it again. She thought she would be beaten to death, at first, but seeing him watching her made her ... a little angry, maybe ... and she concentrated on her legs. It took another thirty seconds or so before she found the rhythm, and her violent jounces settled into rapid bumps. She was still hitting the saddle hard, and her butt hurt. She realized in an instant that, if they kept this up, she wouldn’t be able to ride more than a mile or two before it would hurt too much to sit.

He slowed them to a walk again.

“Now, a gallop is completely different,” he said conversationally. “You’ll learn to use your abdominal muscles then. It’s a different rhythm. Even though the horse is going faster, you’re body’s reaction to the movement will be slower. We’ll only go a short way, and this time, I want you to not hold on to the horn. You’ll find your arms help with balance. Don’t pull at the reins, though. Buttercup stops on a dime, and if you aren’t ready, you’ll fly right over her head. When you’re ready to stop, just lean back and tug them enough to let her feel it. Don’t jerk them!”

This time he asked her if she was ready and, when she nodded nervously, he gave a “Heayah” kind of sound. Buttercup launched ahead like a rocket, and by the time Brenda had let out the breath she had been unconsciously holding, and took another, she felt like she was flying.

This rhythm she caught onto instantly, leaning forward a bit, and flexing her knees. The horse’s back seemed to rise and fall almost gently, and she had no trouble keeping her butt on the saddle. She felt her gut tighten and loosen, as her upper body seemed to stay at the same place, relative to the ground, while the horse, and her lower body, dropped and rose in a measured beat.

This ... was glorious.

She heard a high pitched scream, and realized it was her own voice that had made it ... a scream of delight as the ground flashed by beneath her. She looked ahead, and then to her left, where Bob was flying beside her on his big, black horse. He was grinning, and she realized her lips were stretched wide in the same way.

It seemed to go on forever ... and yet all too soon he yelled at her to lean back. “Gently!“ he called.

Feeling like she was glued to the horse, she leaned back and tugged gently on the reins. Buttercup dropped into a canter immediately, and suddenly she was bouncing all over the place again.

“Whoa!“ she called, and tugged harder.

Only the fact that she wrapped her arms around Buttercup’s neck, and the saddle horn, digging painfully into her gut, stopped her from flying forward as Buttercup skidded to a halt. The horse tossed her head, and looked backwards, as if to say “What?”

Bob had gone on ahead, and turned his horse to come back.

“You okay?” he asked.

She sat up, panting. “This is a lot harder than I thought it would be.”

“Takes years to get really good at it,” said Bob.

“I don’t have years. I’m going to have to learn a lot faster than that,” she said grimly. Then she smiled. “I like galloping.”

He smiled. “Everybody likes galloping. It’s hard on the horse if you do it too long, though. They can keep a canter going all day long.”

“Of course they can,” sighed Brenda. “The one thing I can’t do, a horse can do forever.”

“You’ll get the hang of it,” said Bob. That’s how to cover a lot of ground.” He looked at her. “That is what you want to do ... right?”,

He was giving her a chance to back out of this, and she knew it. She was stubborn, though. “I’ll get the hang of it,” she said firmly.

He kept them at a canter. It took another half hour, and her butt was so sore that she wasn’t at all sure she’d be able to do this, when, suddenly, the bouncing just stopped. She looked around in confusion, but the horse was still moving along at a trot. Her head was still moving up and down, but it wasn’t the jarring bump that it had been for what seemed like hours. To her chagrin, as soon as she recognized that, the bumping started again. It took her another ten minutes to get the rhythm back in a way that she could recognize how to do it consistently.

“You need to stop?” called Bob. He’d been riding ahead of her, picking the path, while Buttercup just followed the stallion.

“Yes,” she called out, “but not yet. I just figured out how to do this without killing myself.”

She watched as the big man turned in his saddle, his rhythm unbroken, and watched her for half a minute while his horse went on ahead without any direction that she could see. She watched in amazement as Ranger dodged to one side to avoid a boulder, and Bob’s body compensated for the movement he couldn’t possibly have seen coming. When Buttercup did the same thing, she was just as amazed to feel her own body sway in the saddle, leaning automatically so she kept her place.

“You’re a quick learner!” he called back, grinning.

“My butt’s killing me!” she yelled back.

“We could stop for a snack,” he yelled.

“Just a little farther,” she shouted, leaning forward just a tad and feeling how that took the strain off her legs.

He led them on for ten more minutes, and pulled up beside a copse of trees. He dismounted with a fluid grace she tried to emulate, but failed miserably at. Her legs felt like they were made of rubber, and her butt cheeks felt like they were on fire. Even the insides of her thighs felt raw. She hobbled, walking bowlegged, to lead Buttercup next to Ranger.

“I have something for the pain,” said Bob, dropping Ranger’s reins to the ground. “Let her reins hang loose like that,” he instructed the girl.

He got into his saddle bags and pulled out a mason jar that had a thick, pasty brown substance in it.

“Bob’s patented saddle-sore solver,” he said, holding it up to her.

“What do I do with it?” she asked, skeptically. “It looks like it would taste nasty.”

“It would taste nasty, if you were foolish enough to eat it.” He grinned. “Smear it on your butt and inner thighs. Rub it in pretty well. In about sixty seconds you won’t be able to feel a thing.”

She stared at him. “I don’t suppose I put it on the outside of my clothes...”

He grinned again. “Of course not. Rub it into the skin. It’s an old Indian remedy that deadens the nerves. One of my hands makes it up for me. When it wears off you’ll think you’re going to die, but I have enough to last two or three days, and by then you should be toned up enough that the pain won’t be there any more.”

“And where, exactly, am I supposed to do this?” she asked archly.

He pointed to the copse of trees. “Go in there. I won’t watch.”

She looked at the paste, in the jar, in her hand.

“How much longer before we get to our first camping spot?” she asked.

He looked at the sun. “Well, it’s about eleven now, and I figure we’ll be there around three this afternoon. That will give us plenty of time to set up camp and do any exploring you want to do before supper. Once supper is fixed and eaten, I imagine you’ll be wanting to sleep.”

Brenda looked at her watch. It was eleven minutes after eleven. She looked at his wrist, and saw it was bare.

“Four more hours?” she asked, pain in her voice.

“With several breaks,” he said easily. “Go put that stuff on. You’ll feel much better. I promise.”

Brenda stood in the middle of the trees. There was thick brush all around her, and she couldn’t see anything, but she still felt nervous about dropping her pants. Her inner thighs were still burning fiercely, though, and that drove her to unbuckle her belt, unzip her jeans, and push them down. She realized she’d have to push her panties down too, to get to her buttocks, and looked around nervously again. She opened the jar and sniffed, jerking her head back instantly. The stuff smelled awful! She could just barely get her fingers far enough into the neck of the jar to scoop out some paste.

She tried it on one inner thigh first. It felt cool, and before she’d even gotten to her other leg she could feel the soothing relief, as the pain just vanished. When she finished with her other thigh, it felt so much better that she ignored her nervousness and pushed her panties down quickly. She felt stupid rubbing her own bottom, but as the ache disappeared she got over that too. She pulled her clothing back up and took a few steps, bending this way and that, astonished that she could feel nothing but the coolness, penetrating to her sore tissues. She decided it felt a little like what the dentist did. Reaching back she ran her fingers over her butt lightly, and couldn’t feel them at all. It was just numb.

When she pushed back out of the brush, to see Bob sitting on his horse, she grinned.

“That stuff is amazing!” she said, handing him the jar.

“I know,” he said smiling. He leaned and turned to stow the jar back in his saddle bag. He made it look effortless. “You ready to try it again?”

As she had dismounted her horse, the only thing she could think about was how hard it was going to be to get back up in the saddle. Now, though, with the pain gone, Buttercup didn’t look quite so tall as she had before. Lifting a foot to the stirrup, Brenda sighed at the fact that it didn’t hurt at all, and pulled herself up into the saddle. It didn’t feel as foreign to her as it had before, and she smiled brightly.

“Yes!” she said happily.

For the first twenty yards, she bounced, and then got back into the rhythm of the canter. For the first time she was able to look around, at the country they were riding through.

They stopped three more times, to let her get down and stretch her legs. She had to apply the salve again, the second time they stopped. This time he walked around a big boulder while she slid her jeans and panties down. She looked, to make sure he wasn’t watching her, but didn’t feel the nervousness she had before. When she called out that she was decent again, and he sauntered around the boulder with a weed sticking out of his mouth, she looked at him closely, for the first time.

That he was tall, she remembered. She hadn’t realized how brown his skin was, and that his face was covered with tiny lines that made him look older than his body suggested. She saw sliver tips at the ends of the hair in front of his ears, and realized that, if he got a haircut, those ends would not show. The rest of his hair was a uniform dark brown. He had the kind of crinkles around his mouth that suggested he smiled a lot. Of all the adult males she knew, and who were about his age, he was the thinnest. He looked muscular, somehow, but was thin. She decided that it was the way he moved that made him look muscular. He walked like he was weightless, and could jump six feet straight up in the air if he wanted to. She guessed he was in his late thirties.

Brenda cocked her head as he sent her an inquiring look. She knew instinctively that he wanted to know if the salve was still working.

“Good stuff,” she said.

“That’s good,” he answered. “You hungry?”

They ate sandwiches from his saddle bags. They were mashed flat, but she didn’t care. This ham and cheese was the best she’d ever tasted, as far as she was concerned.

At the third stop he had her climb a tall rock spire with him. It used different muscles, and she felt weak as she struggled to follow his effortless climbing. He showed her where to put her hands and feet when it got steep, and moved beside her.

“Aren’t we supposed to use ropes and stuff?” she asked nervously at one spot where it was ten feet straight up.

“This is pretty easy,” he assured her. “There are lots of niches to put your fingers and toes. Besides, we’re almost there.”

She crawled along a sloping ledge that went around a bulge, and saw that it opened up to a flat area that was ten or fifteen feet across. When she stood up, she had to take a step to counter the force of the wind that whipped her hair and shirt, plastering it against her body.

She felt like she could see for a thousand miles. The country they were riding through was littered with large boulders, many bigger than the horses themselves. For the last few miles she had been unable to see more than a hundred yards in any direction before her vision was blocked by what she had thought were hills. Now, from up here, she could clearly see that the wind had blown slops of soil up against huge chunks of rock, over the years, and plants had taken hold in that soil.

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