Erin The Goddess

When I brought Erin home from the ranch in Boise, she was skin and bones. A little filly that had lost her mother and thrown out in a pasture. I put her on a diet of grain and feeds to put weight on her and worried about her growth. At the time she didn’t have a name yet. She was a thoroughbred with amazing bloodlines, the grand daughter of the great NijinskyII-a bloodline of Northern Dancer. I had hoped to raise her into great racehorse and then breed her. She was a beautiful little filly with chestnut mane and tail and a perfect heart star on her forehead and big doe like eyes. I registered her as “Erin The Goddess” with the Jocky Club. 
For the next year or so I imprint and gentle trained her. The Trainer who was also the Shoer, would come and trim her feet. He wasn’t a tall man and kind of on the thin side with short silver hair, wranglers, with a white ring in the back pocket from his tin of skoal, cowboy boots and leather chaps. He would run his two fingers down her fetlock and pinch the bottom so she would pick her foot up to be shod. He would use a hoof pick to clean it out and then big metal pinchers to pull the shoe off. He would talk about horses that he had been training and the wild horse herds that ran between Mackey and Challis. Eagles and falcons flew overhead as the dogs sat quietly waiting for him to throw the hoof clipping their way for chews. 

later on that spring he took her for thirty days training after which he took me aside and said, “She’s never going to run on a track.” I immediately thought that she was unsound in her legs but, no he said that she was the laziest horse he had ever come across and that she just doesn’t like to run!

My ambitions for her future shifted. She was young and green and when I rode her out in the pasture there were many days that turned into an “eight second” ride with full out bucking and I would stay on if I could and ride her out but would often get thrown to the ground to “hunt for gravel”. 

Over time I set up jumps and a crude dressage arena and trained her for dressage. She was smart and good at it. She had such a sweet soul. She died on Christmas one year.