For the last several months, we’ve been keeping our eyes open and mentioned to a few friends that we were in the market for a young horse. Sarge is coming 17 years young this year, and while he’s still feisty and full of good years, we knew that if we were going to bring along a young horse for Richard, we’d best get started.
Here and there we heard about horses, even looked at and tried one fairly local, but something made us take a pass.
We were convinced we’d end up with an un-started or barely started 4 or 5 year old, but sometimes timing is everything. My only absolutes were: 1.) gelding and 2.) not gray. (One too many melanomas has put gray horses on my “thanks but no” list for now.)
A friend we’ve known forever in distance riding posted a notice that she was looking for a home for a gelding, just not a match for her. I sent her a note, very brief. “Is he gray? If not, give me details.”
I got a long note back with lots of details including photos. As soon as I saw them I knew I’d seen and admired the horse at a ride a few years back. Our kind of horse! Big, squarely built, powerful.
We made arrangements to drive down the 8 hours to see him, Richard built a fifth stall in the barn, and last week, Wynne, a big Polish-bred gelding, 10, a solid 15.2 hand gelding with a couple of CTRs and 50s under his belt joined our herd. Buying him was a no brainer. He is big and handsome and sweet and polite and boldly forward and well trained, and he and Richard immediately clicked. Besides, he wears the same size blanket as the rest of our herd, so it was kismet.
Rich rode him on trail for about an hour and I got to do what amounted to a five-minute tryout in the riding ring, roughly two figure eights in working trot, changing bend and flexion and checking evenness behind. Just those five minutes convinced me that I’ll be stealing Wynne and schooling dressage as much as Rich will allow me to do so.
I’m doing the DQ mental equivalent to rubbing my hands in eager glee!
So far all we’ve done is settle Wynne into the herd. We realized that, with the exception of our friend Kathy’s old gelding, Jivus, who we kept in a separate stall and paddock, Wynne is the first horse to join our herd in a decade.
He’s doing well. Ned and Ace, in the middle of the pack, are the most shook-up by the addition, and occasionally give chase, or make faces, but Wynne is holding his own just fine, eating and drinking and doing all the things that natural endurance horses do because they have a good sense of self-preservation.
Having come from Maryland, he’s not sure he’s a big fan of feet of snow and wind chills, so he’s sporting a blanket we already had. It fits him perfectly.
Sometimes things are just a match.