Mr. Fosnight’s manner was brisk and businesslike, as though he were checking his mental items off. Now he turned to Marechal and handed him the whistle. “Whistle,” he said. He handed him the list. “List.” Then he turned back to us standing in a bunch in front. “Any questions.”
He’d struck us so hard and fast that we just looked blankly up at him. Nobody said anything.
“Good,” he said. “Goodbye.” And he walked off as though the last item on his list were settled quite satisfactorily, and another tedious but necessary little task were out of the way.
Mr. Marechal looked at the whistle in his hand, and then after Fosnight as he walked to the shuttle station. He didn’t look as though he liked whistles. Then he stuck the whistle in his pocket. He folded the list and put that away, too. When he was finished he looked up and looked us over slowly, perhaps taking our measure. We looked back up at him, taking a good look at the man who was going to have us in charge for a year and a half. It wasn’t a case of taking his measure, since the child’s side of an adult-child relationship is pretty ordinarily to assume that the adult knows what he is about. If he doesn’t and the child finds out, then things go to pot, but to start with he generally has the benefit of the doubt. I will admit that Mr. Marechal was not an overwhelming figure at first sight.
He said, “Well, Mr. Fosnight forgot something he usually says, so I’ll say it for him if I can remember more or less how it goes. There’s an anthropological name for Trial. They call it a rite of passage. It’s a formal way of passing from one stage of your life to another. All societies have them. The- important thing to remember is that it makes being an adult a meaningful sort of thing, because adulthood has been earned when you come back from Trial. That makes Trial worth concentrating on.”
He stopped then and looked off to his right. Everybody looked that way. Mr. Fosnight was coming back toward us. Mr. Marechal looked at him and said questioningly, “Rites of passage?”
“Yes.”
“Never mind. I just finished going over it for you.”
“Oh,” Mr. Fosnight said. “Thanks, then.” He turned. around and went back toward the shuttle station.
He was so dogged about the whole thing that the moment he was out of sight, everybody started laughing. Mr. Marechal let it go on for a moment and then he said, “That’s enough. I just want to say a couple of things for myself now. Me and the people who’ll be coming in to show you things are going to be doing our best to get you through Trial. If you pay attention, you shouldn’t have any trouble. Okay? Now the first thing I’m going to do is assign you horses and show you the first thing about riding.”
Mr. Marechal was a slow-speaking sort of person, and didn’t have a complete command of grammar, but he did have the sort of personal authority that makes people listen. Without consulting the list in his pocket, he called off people’s names and names of horses. I got stuck with something called Nincompoop. That got a laugh. Jimmy’s horse was Pet — the final t is written but not pronounced since it comes from the French. Venitia Morlock got a horse named Slats. When Rachel Yung was assigned her horse, we moved over to the corral, where Mr. Marechal perched up on the top rail.
“These horses are yours from here on out,” he said. “Don’t get sentimental about them. They’re just a way to get from one place to another the same as a heli-pac, and you’ll be getting practice with both. But you’ll have to take care of both, too, and that means especially the horse you have. A horse is an animal and that means he’ll break down easier than a machine if he isn’t taken care of. You damned well better take care of them.”
One of the kids raised his hand. “Yes, Herskovitz?”
Herskovitz was a little surprised to be tagged quite that easily. “If horses are that lousy, why do we have to go to the trouble of learning how to ride them? Thatз’s what I want to know.”
Even more slowly than usual, Mr. Marechal said, “Well, I could give you reasons, I suppose, but what it all boils down to is that you have to pass a test. The test goes by certain rules and one of those rules is that you have to be able to ride a horse. But don’t let it bother you too much, son. You may find that you like horses after a while.”
He swung over the fence and landed inside. “Now I’m going to show you the first thing about riding. The first thing about riding is getting a saddle on your animal.”
One of the boys said, “Excuse me, but I already know how to ride. Do I have to stick around for this?”
Mr. Marechal said, “No, you don’t, Farmer. You can skip anything you want to. Only one thing, though. Before you walk out on anything you’d best be mighty sure you know every blessed thing I’m going to show, ’cause if it’s something you walked out on I’ll be damned if I’ll do it again for you. If you can’t help missing I might be generous — if I’m in the right mood. If you fall behind of your own doing, you’ll have to catch up on your own, too.”
Farmer said that in that case he thought he’d stick around today just to see how things went.
Mr. Marechal caught up one of the three horses in the corral, the red roan mare, and put a bridle on her, showing us what he was doing as he did it. Then he put on the blanket and the double-cinch saddle. He took them off, and then he showed us again from the beginning. When he was done, he said, “All right. Now you people will have to try it. Go collect your tack and lead out your horses.”
There was a scramble then to find and get acquainted with your horse, locate your gear, and get both into a position where the second might be strapped onto the first. Nincompoop turned out to be brown — what they call a chestnut — and not terribly large. He was more of a pony than a horse, a pony being less than 56 inches high at the shoulder. It seems to be an arbitrary cutoff point. His size pleased me, since a larger animal would probably have intimidated me more than this one did. As it was, I hardly had time to be intimidated, just time to get in line with everybody else, our animals more or less in a row with gear on the left side. Mr. Marechal stood out in front and told us what to do.
The first time went badly. I got everything where I thought it should go, but when I stood back, the saddle didn’t stay in place. It seemed to be in place for a moment and I looked up feeling pleased, but when I looked back, it was tipped. It seemed to be on tightly, but it was tipped.
I figured I’d better try again. I undid the cinch, the strap that goes under the belly of the horse to tie the saddle on, straightened the saddle, and restrapped it.
Mr. Marechal was walking down the line inspecting and offering advice. He got to me as I was hauling the cinch tight.
“Let me show you something,” he said. He walked up to Nincompoop, lifted his knee and rammed him a hard one in the belly. The horse gave a whoof of expelled air, and he yanked the cinch tight. The horse looked at him reproachfully as he notched it.
“This one will swell up on you every time if you let him,” he said. “You’ve got to let him know you’re sharper than he is.”
We spent about an hour with saddling and unsaddling before we quit for the day. On the way home, I asked Jimmy what he thought. We were sharing our shuttle car with half-a-dozen others from our group.
“I like Marechal,” he said. “I think he’s going to be okay.”
One of the girls said, “He doesn’t seem to stand still for any nonsense. I like that. It means we won’t waste any of our time.”
The Farmer boy was in our car. He was the one who already knew how to ride. “My time was wasted,” he said. “He didn’t go over anything I didn’t know already today. That’s what I call nonsense.”