Excerpt

Once the horse has these basics, it is put out to pasture until
the next year when it is brought back to finish its schooling as a
three-year-old. It was at this point in the training program that
Joel arrived on the Circle H and started working with Harry on
the horses.
Joel liked watching Harry train the horses and always took the
cue for the day’s lesson from him. Heaven knows if you were
waiting for Harry to tell you what he had in mind you could wait
forever. Joel needed to observe and learn from Harry’s actions
and then apply the lessons in his own training. It was starting to
come back to him quickly, and by now, Joel could even anticipate
what Harry had planned for each of the horses. Nevertheless, Joel
knew that he was watching a master. There was something magical
about how Harry Manyhorses put a young horse through its
paces. From what he had seen in the last thirty days, Joel understood
why his dad had Harry working on the ranch.
One of the early lessons that Joel had picked up from Harry
was the need to properly warm up the three-year-olds. First he
would walk them in the big arena and then trot them for maybe
ten or fifteen minutes. After that he would head out to the dirt
road and lope a mile down the road. There he would sit for five
minutes, maybe even ten, giving the horse an opportunity to rest,
fill up on air, before he would return on the lope.
Once the horse was properly warmed up and had some conditioning
the next step was to get to the lesson of the day. Each
horse was different, learned differently, and was blessed with a
personal athletic capability and temperament, so each required a
unique training approach. For all of the horses, the skills they
had to learn were the same: circle work, lead changes, speed control
both in circles and on the straight-aways, stops, backups,
rollbacks, and spins. If all went well, come the end of the summer
or early fall, the three-year-olds would be incredibly well-trained
equine partners capable of fetching the ranch a top-dollar. Their
training would allow Joel to maximize his farm gate revenue once
it came time to sell them.