She wasn't wrong.
"Ready to try the pickup?" I said.
That redirected her. Her eyes went to the orange cone I'd set at the base of the fence rail—low, simple, just something to reach for. Then back to me.
"Walk me through it," she said.
"You're going to bring him past the cone at a trot. When you're alongside it, you lean out to your left—right hand on the pommel, left arm down. Don't look at the cone. Look through Bishop's ears."
"Don't look at the thing I'm trying to grab."
"Your peripheral vision will do that work for you." I leaned against the fence rail. "Your brain can calculate the distance from the corner of your eye better than it can from straight on. You look directly at it, you start making micro-corrections—your weight shifts, Bishop feels it, the whole thing goes sideways."
She considered this. "Like how you're not supposed to look at your feet on stairs."
"Exactly like that. You already know where the step is. Looking at it makes you trip." I nodded toward Bishop. "Same principle. Fix your eyes on something stable—through his ears, to the fence line on the far side—and let your body handle the rest. It knows where the cone is. You've already clocked it."
"So I'm trusting my peripheral vision."
"You're trusting your training." I held her gaze. "Same thing you've been practicing every time you go limp on command. Stop overriding what your body already knows."
She looked at me for a moment. Something moving through her face.
"You're annoyingly good at this," she said.
"I know." I pushed off the fence. "Go again.”
As she clicked her tongue and Bishop trotted off, I heard footsteps crunching in the dry winter grass behind me. I turned to see my cousin Dakota coming toward me, wearing a battered PRCA hoodie and precariously carrying three steaming mugs of coffee. I helped him offload two without dropping them, snickering when he sloshed some onto the ground anyway.
“I told my mom I'm a terrible delivery boy, but here we are,” Dakota muttered. He flung his hand to get rid of the excess coffee, then wiped it on his jeans as he looked up at Daniela. “Shit, dude…she's looking really solid.”
I looked back at her just in time to see her lean perfectly out of the saddle, look between Bishop’s ears, and snatch the cone off the ground.
Dakota hooted and clapped his hand on his thigh. “Damn, girl! Hell yeah!”
Daniela grinned and circled Bishop back toward us. Dakota laughed under his breath.
“Given how many nights you've had that trailer rockin’ I wasn't sure if you were doing any actual training or?—”
“You're gonna want to shut up before you talk about my girl that way,” I cut him off, still watching Daniela, still smiling.
He raises his eyebrows. “Huh…your girl. Okay…”
"Dakota."
"No, no, I think that's great." He took a long sip of his coffee, utterly unbothered. "Your girl. Love that for you."
"Iwillput you on the ground."
"You won't. My mother sent the coffee and if you spill it she'll hear about it somehow." He leaned against the fence beside me,watching Daniela bring Bishop around for another pass. "She's really good, man."
"She works hard."
"Yeah but—" He tilted his head. "She's got something. That thing where you can tell a person was just made for something they haven't done yet." He glanced at me sideways. “Might have to steal her for rodeo instead.”
I shook my head. “Nah…she's going places.”
“Hey, I go places.”
