Bright Eyes

She arrived in the half-light of a dusty July morning, a little black spitfire with straw in her mane and the too much confidence for her small package. Fran hadn’t even known Lilly was pregnant until this filly blinked up from the bedding, like something out of my girlhood dreams. They called her Booger because she got into everything, especially trouble, and because the name made people laugh instead of worry.

Princess, an appaloosa pony mule with 40 years of opinions under her belt, took Booger on as an apprentice in mischief. Together they practiced acts of destruction, daring, and escape. If stubbornness were a sport, they would be gold medalists.

The first day I came to work with her, Booger got herself into trouble and then right back out of it faster than I could say “whoa.” She met me with the same look you’d give someone who rang the doorbell at midnight. I don’t know you. I don’t owe you. When I asked her to lunge, she said no in a dozen different ways. Buck, bolt, rear, plant. The dust rose, my patience fell, and somewhere between the two I fell a little in love. It wasn’t mutual.

I couldn’t stop watching the way Booger measured the world with those bright eyes, suspicious and curious at the same time, like life was a riddle she fully intended to solve.

We built the basics: stand tied, lead without dragging, feet here, ears there, saddle on, bridle on, bend, give, yield, listen. Winter came down like a curtain, and for months the only thing that moved fast was the wind.

By the time spring loosened the ground, Booger was three, and the round pen felt like a translator between us. At liberty she watched everything—my shoulders, my breath, the angle of my toes. Pressure and release became a language we both could speak. Catching her in the pasture was still a coin toss until I learned the trick that felt less like training and more like a handshake. Jog away. Don’t chase. She’d huff in mock outrage and then come catch me like we’d planned it that way all along.

Her fourth summer, I slid onto her back for the first time. She didn’t flinch. We walked and trotted inside the pen, then outside it. On trail, ponied off my steady geldings, she stretched into a trot that skimmed the ground and made my chest feel too small for my heart.

This one, I thought. This could be an endurance horse.

I tried to keep the rhythm that fall, but winter came again. Snow, ice, dark. And then 2015 arrived like a door flung open. We trail rode farther. She hopped cross-rails with the kind of honesty that makes you grin without meaning to. She discovered a teeter-totter and decided it was her new favorite toy. We learned to canter together, bareback sometimes, and I stopped thinking of her as “Fran’s project” and started thinking of her as the space in my day I didn’t want to give up.

That’s when things fell apart. Cross-cantering, swapping behind, ears pinned like she was mad at me or at gravity or both. Bloodwork fine. Neurological tests inconclusive. A day at the clinic that ended with shrugs and a bute trial that did nothing but make me cry on the drive home. The word “neurological” hung in the air like a dark cloud. I wrote the post I called “the last of Booger” and tried to believe I meant it.

I didn’t.

A year later I went over to clip a Cushings pony and Booger whinnied at me from the field like a Disney spell. She was bright, happy, sound. We started again: careful miles, small jumps, long hacks. Then life tilted. I got a new job, drew new lines in the sand. I let her slip out of my routine. I told myself I had to be practical. I told Fran not to pay me for a future we couldn’t promise. I told the internet I was done.

I wasn’t.

Fran brought home a bay mare with a blaze named Lucy. The world paused for a pandemic, and my routine rerouted itself back to Fran’s farm. I rode Lucy, but at the fence line Booger watched me with that old coin-toss look.  I may know you, but I don’t owe you. And then she’d breathe out, and I’d feel the memory of our language settle between us.

At the start of 2021 I wrote Booger’s name on my calendar, not as a client but as a vow. No invoices, no deadlines, just a number: one hundred rides. If we didn’t fit by ride one hundred, if she was too much horse or I was too little courage, I’d do right by her even if it broke me.

It didn’t break me. It built us.

We drove a cart down the lane like we’d been born to traces. We jumped again, clean and curious. We wandered into the woods and back out with stories instead of excuses. Somewhere around ride forty I stopped counting. Somewhere around ride sixty Fran handed me Booger’s papers. “She’s yours,” she said, and the ground didn’t shift because I’d been standing there all along.

In November 2022, I filled out the entry for the Jersey Devil Competitive Trail Ride and wrote Booger's registered name in the horse line in the tidiest letters of my life.

We left in the dark, which worked well because my nerves could hide in the night. Mike bedded the trailer with clean white shavings, and when I plugged in the overhang light Booger blinked those big, bright eyes. She sniffed the ramp, decided the new routine was satisfactory, and walked on with confidence.

Ride camp was pine trees, horse trailers and the particular electricity of a morning that’s about to mean something. People knew Booger’s name, somehow, and said it with the silly kind of smile it always earns. At the vetting, she pinned her ears at the stethoscope and gave Dr. Nick a look that translated to don’t push your luck, but she trotted out clean, circled like she might choose to canter just to prove a point, and passed with flying colors.

We started last, which felt like a wish granted. When we turned onto the powerline trail, Booger locked onto the horses far ahead and trotted like the ground had been designed for her. Ten miles per hour, then twelve when she caught the scent of competition and tried to catch up. I let her gallop a few strides and then folded her back to a trot, half-seat, hands quiet, words low. We tucked in behind two Paso Finos for a while, learned patience by walking when our pride wanted to pass, shared apples, and borrowed the steady drum of their hooves until her mind matched her body.

Water stops were buffets to Booger: sip, alfalfa, sip, alfalfa, blink at the man with peppermints as if he’d been put there by a committee who knew her personally. Volunteers remembered our number because they remembered her personality, and every time someone laughed at her audacity I felt a knot inside me loosen.

At ten miles we hit Elsie’s farm. Riders sponged off horses who steamed in the cool air. I looked at our new friends and said, “Mind if we walk on?” They didn’t mind. We did walk on. The last five miles felt like a path we’d been walking toward for nine years.

She was better then, more confident in her stride, looser in the reins, the kind of forward that isn’t frantic but determined. I watched the clock and the GPS and the way her ears flicked between trail and sky, and every number added up to right now. Dirt bikes hummed past and she didn’t flick an ear. A driving horse came by with wheels and shafts and clatter. Booger puffed up and acted as a shield for the nervous horses around her. We breathed out as one.

We reached minimum time with a mile to spare and walked the last stretch on a loose rein under a clear blue sky. At the finish, I was grinning like a fool. Booger looked like the kind of horse who’s already made up her mind about who she is.

Fifteen-point-three six miles in two hours and twenty-seven minutes. Square in the window, as tidy as the letters I’d written on her entry. Back at the trailer she ate like an athlete and tolerated the cold sponge the way a queen tolerates rain at a parade. At the final vetting, Dr. Nick said the thing I’d been too scared to ask out loud: “She’d pass endurance vetting.”

On the hands-on exam she was clean: no rubs, no soreness, guts happily gurgling. Somewhere in there she nickered for Mike, deep and low, the kind of sound horses save for their people. It hit me that somewhere along the way we’d stopped arguing about who belonged to whom.

We could have stayed for awards, but Booger isn’t impressed by ribbons. She loaded like she’d invented the idea and rode home quiet as could be. At the barn, I bathed her and turned her out, and the next day she met me at the fence, with a question she already knew the answer to.

Can we do that again?

Maybe the clinic had been wrong. Maybe the years we lost were the years we needed. Maybe there’s no timeline, like Mike says. Maybe there is only the next right step and the horse who takes it with you. It isn’t the OD 100. It isn’t a trophy or a buckle or a headline. It’s a little black mare with a misfit name and a heart that refuses to read the rules, and me, finally brave enough to follow her.

And that’s the beginning.