Gold Medal Rider by Bonnie Bryant

which were set up under a giant tent. Dorothy went to register the horses, and Nigel spoke to an official to learn which stalls belonged to Southwood and Campfire.
    “Can I help unload the horses?” Stevie asked, opening the latch at the back of the trailer.
    “Not quite yet,” Nigel said. “We have to get the stalls ready first. Let’s have a look.”
    They followed him down the dirt aisle to two center stalls. “Kate, you and Stevie check over this stall, and Carole and Lisa can do the other. Look for any nails orsplinters that could cut the horses.” Nigel went back to the trailer and returned with buckets, feed tubs, and hay nets, which they fastened to the walls of each stall.
    Dorothy came back with the numbers Kate and Nigel would wear during competition. She admired the job they’d done preparing the stalls. “You girls work hard,” she said. “This goes a lot faster with you here.”
    Dorothy unloaded the horses. Campfire looked around his stall nervously and whinnied a few times. “He’s always like that,” Dorothy told Carole. Southwood seemed relaxed. He lipped some hay out of his net and sniffed at his water.
    They carried all the tack trunks into the aisle near the horses’ stalls. The girls helped Dorothy and Nigel unload.
    Finally all their gear was sorted and the horses were comfortable. Nigel found a parking space for his trailer and unhitched it from his truck.
    “Whew!” Stevie said, collapsing across the hay bales she’d help stack in the aisle. “I’m so hungry, I could eat a horse trailer! But I’d hate to have to do that—when’s dinner?”
    Nigel smiled. “You can go get something now, if you like,” he said. “Kate and I need to go walk the cross-country course while it’s still light enough to see the fences.”
    Stevie hopped up. “That sounds cool. I guess dinner can wait.”
    They all went out to walk the fences. The courses were each several miles long, and the fences were huge. “I thought I’d seen a lot of events,” Carole said, standing in a ditch and looking up at a fence that towered over her head. “I’ve never seen fences this big.”
    “You’ve never seen an advanced course,” Nigel reminded her.
    “This fence isn’t big,” Lisa said, walking over to a small set of barrels. “I could jump this on Prancer.”
    “That’s not an advanced fence,” Nigel said. “Cross-country fences are permanent, you know, so they tend to build several courses on the same piece of land. I’ll be riding at preliminary level tomorrow, and Kate at advanced, and our courses will cover most of the same ground even though we jump different fences.”
    Nigel brought Carole back to the giant jump-and-ditch combination she had stood in earlier. “See these wooden flags sticking out from the fence, one on each side? You always keep the white flag on your left. You keep the red flag on your right, no matter what. And see the diamond under the red flag? That shape tells you that this jump is for the advanced course—other levels have other shapes. And the number in the diamond tells you what number fence it is—you jump them in order, one, two, three, four.”
    “So Kate can tell what fences to jump by reading the flags?” Lisa asked.
    “If I have to read the flags, I’m lost,” Kate said. “I’llremember the course.” She sounded fierce, almost annoyed by Lisa’s comment.
Of course
, Lisa thought, with a flash of sympathetic understanding,
Kate’s feeling nervous about jumping all these enormous fences.
    They went around the course from jump to jump. Nigel studied the preliminary fences while Dorothy and Kate looked at the advanced ones. At each fence, Kate and Dorothy studied the approach and decided where it was best for Southwood to take off. They talked about how fast he should be traveling when he jumped and how Kate should sit when he landed. They discussed the different ways Kate could ride through some of the complex fences.
    It was long and