Author Note

 

After nearly four decades of exposure to the equestrian community at local and Olympic levels, I am still astonished at the overpowering competitive nature of the sport. It seems to me that there should be schools like the one young Dori encounters here. The objective of the school is to teach spoiled and elitist young women what it's like to be a horse or pony. A few months or years spent under this kind of environmental control can bring about some astonishing changes....

Some of them physical and others psychological.

This story is fiction, but remember that what we create in our minds is often a precursor of something that may actually happen...

 

 

Jurgen von Stuka

Boston, Massachusetts, 2010

 

SUMMER SCHOOL

 

by

 

Jurgen von Stuka

Chapter One

To The Casual Observer

 

 

The car was from Boston and the three youthful tourists inside had been enjoying the picturesque roadside scenery when someone observed that they were no longer on a main road and that they were, most likely, lost. At that moment, they were passing a series of hilly pastures surrounded by a double wire fence. One tourist observed that the fence had small signs every fifty feet or so stating that trespassing was forbidden, that the land was posted and that the fence was electrified.

"Guess they don't want anyone going in there," one of the two young men in the car said.

"Or anyone getting out," the driver said with a laugh as he finished off his second beer and tossed the can out the window toward the fence. (He had no idea how true his off-hand remark really was). The aluminum beer can arched through the air and hit the fence, sending off a fury of sparks and a loud popping sound as the sports car cruised by. In the distance, behind the fence, small horses grazed, and they all looked up suddenly at the noise. They then focused as one on the red BMW convertible and it three occupants.

"I'll be damned," the girl in the right front seat said as she studied the horses from a distance.

"What? Where?" chorused the two males.

"I'd swear those horses, or whatever they are, were waving at us. Weird," said the girl. "They kind of raised their front feet towards us. Didn't you see that?"

"I didn't see anything except a fried beer can," said the driver, who had slowed and was looking for a place to stop and take a pee.

"They waved," the girl insisted, but her companions ignored her and began to search for a place to stop.

 

***

 

As the sports car moved on, each horse suddenly started and then trotted awkwardly off in the opposite direction, while thoughts of being rescued faded as the vehicle moved over the hill and their individual internal electronic probes registered disapproval at the group attempting to signal the car's occupants with a wave of their feet. Dori Alexander and her companion ponies knew they were going to pay for the indiscretion of the single, futile attempt to signal.

If the tourists had been sober, or if they had been using binoculars, they would have noted that the waving horses were unlike other horses they might have seen in the Vermont countryside. These horses had unusual front legs and the rear legs were strangely bent with different joints between shoulder and hoof. They were smaller than most horses and had very short necks. Their coats were more like rough buckskin than a real horse's hair and had shorter heads. They moved slowly and stiffly on their odd-shaped legs and could only graze on shrubs or bushes above the ground because their mouths could not reach the earth. They wore bands for hobbles on their hind and forefeet and each wore a locked leather and steel harness and bit. These horses were not of the equine species. They were human. They were female and from the elite New England Mountain School for Equestrians. They would each have dearly liked to be freed. Bound in the head and body of a young horse, gagged and harnessed, the four had been turned out to pasture for some exercise. To make sure they didn't wander too far, each wore a set of control plugs. Inside each ponygirl were three remote controlled electronic plugs that, when activated, motivated each pony to do exactly as she was told and trained to do. Their sweeping tails attached to the rear plug, buried well up inside the rear aperture. A vaginal plug and an oral one completed the control trio. As soon as they carried out the seemingly innocent move of raising one front foot a few inches off the ground, (which was all the harnesses permitted), their monitoring guard pressed several buttons on the control panel in the nearby watchtower silo. The ponies instantly received electrical shocks and buzzes in all three plug/probes. At the same time, they heard in their ears the orders to return immediately. They turned and trotted slowly and awkwardly toward the barn.

"We're in for it now," thought Dori. She knew that the school would have some terrible punishment waiting for them and she was both fearful and annoyed that a mere wave to a couple to guys would bring such harsh penalties. Dori thought about the decision she had made to come to the summer session of the school and she wondered if she'd ever get back home to Virginia. She recalled briefly, as she trotted with the odd gait of a stiff-legged pony, the day she'd left home for Vermont.