Читать книгу Finding the Missed Path. The Art of Restarting Horses онлайн

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Many horses probably would have had trouble with the kind of awkwardness from the saddle that we had to use in order to have the scene look realistic, but Rusty had no problem with it at all. He walked slowly to his mark, stopped exactly where he was supposed to, and stood calmly while John struggled out of the saddle and then fell face first onto the desert floor. We shot the scene three different times, and each time Rusty was as good as gold.

The next scene was in a different location. The script called for Rusty to be filmed while saddled and standing tied to a hitch rail outside a remote line shack. There was to be no other action in the scene. However, the scene just before that was where the bad guy shoots John inside the shack. The director decided he wanted John to stumble out of the shack and more or less drag himself up to the hitch rail where Rusty was tied.

In and of itself, that doesn’t seem like that big a deal, except for the fact that everything at the location was temporarily set in place. This included the line shack itself and the hitch rail that Rusty was tied to. In other words, the hitch rail was only set in the ground about 6 inches and not designed to actually hold a horse should he decide to pull against it even slightly. For that reason alone, I made sure Rusty wasn’t hard tied to the rail, but rather we just looped the rope attached to his halter over the rail. Still, even with the rope looped over the rail, all he really had to do was set back just a little against it and the whole hitch rail would come right up out of the ground with him attached to it.