Riding Class by Bonnie Bryant

did it happily.
    Emily halted him and asked him to walk backward through the L. This was harder: Most horses don’t like to back up, because it makes them nervous not to be able to see where they are going. P.C. listened to Emily carefully and backed through the L obediently. The Saddle Club was especially impressed with the way he swung his hindquarters over when Emily tapped them with her crop.
    “When I tap him high on the hip, it means ‘over,’ ” Emily explained. “When I do a sort of fluttery thing behind my leg, that means ‘trot,’ and a firmer tap behind my leg means ‘canter.’ ”
    “Let’s try a more complicated figure,” Carole suggested. She set up a sort of open cross. Emily rode P.C. into the middle, and from there they could go in any one of three directions. P.C. had to listen to Emily instead of choosing a route on his own. Again, he did very well, walking both backward and forward.
    Emily patted him and let him trot around the ring a few times to reward him for concentrating so hard on the patterns. Meanwhile, The Saddle Club used a pair of small stepladders to create jump standards in the center of the ring.
    “Walk him through the standards first,” Carole told Emily. “See if they bother him.”
    They didn’t. Next, Carole set a pole on the ground between the standards. P.C. stepped over it solemnly. “We do a lot of work over poles,” Emily told them. “He knows to walk over them, and he doesn’t get nervous.”
    They added poles on either side of the stepladder standards so that P.C. had to walk over several of them. While he went through them, Emily held herself in her two-point position. After P.C. had walked through the poles several times, Stevie and Lisa stuck one end of each of two poles through the first rungs of the stepladders. The other ends of the poles lay on the ground. They formed a very flat X shape. The middle of the X was only a few inches off the ground.
    “This is called a cross rail,” Lisa explained. Emily walked P.C. over the low center part. It didn’t seem to bother him.
    “Good boy!” Emily said. She stroked his neck. P.C. tossed his head. Stevie thought he looked proud of himself.
    Carole removed the ground poles before and after the tiny jump and had P.C. step only over the jump. Then shethrew her red ski jacket over the jump to make it look different and told Emily to walk P.C. over that.
    “What if he steps on your coat?” Emily asked.
    “It won’t be the first time a horse has stepped on that coat,” Stevie assured her on Carole’s behalf. “I’ve seen her do the same thing for Starlight.”
    Carole pretended to be offended. “Starlight would never step on a jump!” she said. “He’s much too surefooted.”
    P.C. didn’t step on Carole’s coat, either. He did snort a little and roll his eyes at it, but Emily pressed him forward calmly, and in the end P.C. went over the coat and rails willingly.
    “That’s enough jumping practice for now,” Carole finally said. “We don’t want P.C. to get tired, and we’ve got a lot yet to do.” She glanced over at Stevie, who was humming to herself. Carole thought Stevie’s plan might work, but she wasn’t as convinced of it as Stevie and Emily seemed to be.
    “We should try opening the gate first,” Emily suggested. “From what you told me, that might be hard for me to do, so I need to start practicing.”
    To open a gate while on horseback, a rider first had to ride her horse alongside and very close to the gate, so that the gate’s latch was near the rider’s leg. The rider reached down and unlatched the gate; then, holding on to the gate,the rider asked the horse to move forward, pushing the gate open at the same time. Then the rider asked the horse to pivot so that the horse would be facing the other direction but his forelegs would still be in the same place. The rider asked the horse to walk forward while pushing the gate closed, and finally she moved the horse’s side