A working student's journey.

NEWSLETTER Volume 1, Number 3, October 2004

Last month our community of horsewomen said goodbye to a young women who had come North Idaho as a working student, eager to learn colt starting and how to work with "problem horses" from a natural horsemanship point of view. Sophia is working on an Equine Studies degree at a college in southern England. As part of her program, she was to complete a three month long internship at a training facility. Sophia was interested in natural horsemanship (still very much in its infancy in the UK) so she went on the internet and found references to Fullcircle Ranch in Potlatch, Idaho. She contacted its owners, trainers Bill Basham and Angie Reitmeier, and hatched a plan to spend the summer working with them.

Sophia lives not far from London. She had her nineteenth birthday while she was in Idaho this summer, and had just finished her freshman year of college. She had never lived away from home before, never been to the United States before, and certainly never seen anything like rural Idaho before.

To describe Sophia's first week as overwhelming would be a considerable understatement! She was wracked with self doubt, physically and emotionally tired, and wondered aloud if she was going to make it ¨ there were a lot of tears. I remember during those first few days that Angie encouraged Sophia to think about the horses and to imagine what it must feel like for the young colts especially, away from familiar surroundings, being introduced to lots of new stimuli, and wondering too if they were going to make it. It was a valuable piece of advice. A week after her arrival I went over to visit Fullcircle Ranch and I knew that Sophia was indeed going to make it. She was dressed in a pair of Angie's old chaps, riding a big buckskin quarter horse called Sundance, and had a broad smile on her face.

Sophia didn't forget Angie's lesson about thinking how it must feel for the horses and trying to empathize with them each day. She quickly started to think carefully about each horses personality and had theories for why certain ones behaved as they did, who needed a little special attention, who was a fun horse to ride, who was temperamental at times. And of course she developed her favorites ¨ Sundance, Babe the mule, and Banner a little Missouri Foxtrotter colt. She loved riding in the mountains (yes, there was one accident where her horse spooked and Sophia hit her head on a tree branch, but apart from some dramatic looking bruises she healed quickly) and knew she would miss that when she went home to England. But my final ../images of Sophia's transformation are ones I only had described to me. Sophia had the opportunity to travel down to Owyhee County in southwestern Idaho where Bill Basham was catering an endurance ride and working with a horse trainer and buckaroo. Sophia stayed at a ranch at the end of a several mile long dirt road. She spent her first night ever in a tent, then her host loaned her a lovely Arabian mare named Quicksilver (an experienced endurance horse), and entered Sophia in a thirty mile race. Sophia also got to be a buckaroo (or is that buckarette?) for a day, and had her photo taken standing on top of a horse waving a classic Nevada buckaroo flat hat. Not bad for the student who didn't know if she would make it.

Sophia went home a couple of weeks ago, to a teary good bye. She laughed that she had learned a lot, and that she had muscles and a tan! It was quite a summer for her, and the horses proved once again that if we stop and listen to them, they are our best teachers.

Anna Banks
Moon Hill Ranch, Idaho [You can read more about Sophia's journey at fullcircle-ranch.com/WorkingStudent2]