Horse People: Scenes from the Riding Life
Michael Korda
Language: English
Pages: 384
ISBN: 2:00196066
Format: PDF / Kindle (mobi) / ePub
Bestselling author Michael Korda's Horse People is the story -- sometimes hilariously funny, sometimes sad and moving, always shrewdly observed -- of a lifetime love affair with horses, and of the bonds that have linked humans with horses for more than ten thousand years. It is filled with intimate portraits of the kind of people, rich or poor, Eastern or Western, famous or humble, whose lives continue to revolve around the horse.
Korda is a terrific storyteller, and his book is intensely personal and seductive, a joy for everyone who loves horses. Even those who have never ridden will be happy to saddle up and follow him through the world of horses, horse people, and the riding life.
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Street for the journey through the streets from Claremont to Central Park. In the end, Frank and Mr. Novograd pulled him forward with a canvas strap around his hind legs, while I used the whip and two other grooms held on to his bridle, but at last Malplaquet found himself outside the building, eyes rolling. “Don’t worry, Mr. Korda,” Novograd shouted to me from the doorway. “He’ll settle down before you know it.” He instantly shut the overhead electric garage door to discourage any second
around the square at a leisurely pace, apparently for no other reason than to offer people the pleasure of looking at them, simply doing a mounted version of what everybody else is doing on foot. Occasionally somebody hands up a bunch of flowers to one of the girls—nothing personal, it appears, just a gesture of goodnatured admiration for the spectacle. When one of the girls accumulates more flowers than she can conveniently hold on to, she tosses a couple of bouquets to her girlfriends on foot,
eyes the two girls critically as they ride around the ring. “We teach them the basic two-point position,” he says, demonstrating what he means. “They have to stretch up out of the saddle, put ninety percent of their weight on the stirrups and lower leg, and get used to doing that. Then we teach them good pelvis position—not to slump, and all that—so they have a secure seat before they start jumping.” The instructor looks over in his direction, and he nods. The girls, both beginners, are ready to
unused for the next ten years or so, in shiny reproach. Roxie could not only look after horses, she could ride them. Nobody who had worked for Janet Black and Katherine Boyer (who was still working for Katherine Boyer, come to that) would ever have any difficulty getting on a horse and making it look better—and go better, too. Roxie might not be built on the tall, thin model—she was in fact solid, chunky, and muscular—but once she was seated on a horse, it perked up its ears and paid attention.
of dozen times, if you want a taste of what that kind of thing can do to your back!), and of dealing with large animals at close quarters. The horse is at risk too in the hands of people who don’t know much, if anything, about it. It can slip on ice, with disastrous consequences; it can get too hot, too cold, too wet; it can develop colic and die in agony, or injure itself, sometimes fatally, in countless ways in the barn or the paddock. It is, in short, not an animal that thrives without an
