Jenny: Just For A Moment

"Hut! hut!" the Guttersnipe urged, and drove her heels into the colt's flanks. The animal erupted beneath her, soaring on light feet across the yard. At the last moment she gathered herself, knees firmly gripping the heaving barrel, and the colt leapt the fence. For one moment the world seemed to hang in a crystal balance, full of light and wind and the dark wiry spray of mane, and then the ground came rushing up to meet them again and the colt landed, gathered, and sprang off into a giddy run. An insane, heady wave of laughter came up from her throat. She would give him a moment to have his head, to run off the fidgets in his feet, and then she would make sure Domitia had not fallen out of her seat yet.

Up the back pasture the colt sprang, delightfully obedient to the pull of her hands as though to say, "You let me run, and I'll take you where you want to go." She laughed again and bent into the weaving neck. The wind braided their hair together. To be bareback! she thought wistfully, and to be one with this creature on the rolling upland vastness...


All too soon the colt was dropping to a lazy saunter, and she turned his willing head back down the slope to join up with Domitia and the mare.