UNDER CONSTRUCTION, FOR REAL THIS TIME This is the first page of the new Dixie site, and it isn't finished. If you knew the old one, you know what happened to it. Every page coming back is typed on my own computer and saved on two floppies before it goes up, so they'll come slower this time, but they'll stay.

MEET DIXIE

I bought Dixie the summer I turned seventeen, with every dollar I'd saved from the feed store and two years of baby-sitting. She was five, she'd only been ridden a few dozen times, and she wouldn't load in a trailer for love or money. The rancher who sold her said she had "a lot of go and not much whoa," and he was right on both counts. The first month I mostly fell off.

We learned together. An old barrel racer down the road, Mr. Workman, gave me lessons for the price of mucking his stalls on Saturdays, and he told me the thing I still think about every time I get on: a fast horse is a calm horse that knows where it's going. It took us a year before Dixie ran her first pattern at a lope without falling apart. It took another year before she ran it like she meant it.

WHAT BARREL RACING IS

If you've never seen it: three barrels are set in a triangle in the arena. You come in through the timer at a dead run, go around the first barrel, cross over to the second and go around it the other way, then run down to the third barrel at the far end, go around it, and race home through the timer. The path makes a cloverleaf. You can start with the right barrel or the left, whichever your horse turns better. Dixie is a right-barrel-first horse.

It's timed to the hundredth of a second with an electric eye. If you knock over a barrel, it's five seconds added to your time, which pretty much ends your chances. If you go off pattern, you get no time at all. You're allowed to touch a barrel, and even rock it, as long as it stays standing. Dixie has rocked a few that I'm still having nightmares about.

Most of the races we go to are jackpots run on the 4D system. That means they split the riders into four divisions by time: the 1D is the fastest time of the day and everybody within half a second of it, the 2D is the next half second, and so on. So you don't have to beat the professional with the twenty-thousand-dollar horse to win something. You just have to be the best in your half second.

HOW WE TRAIN

People think barrel horses run the pattern every day. They don't, or they shouldn't. A horse that runs barrels every day gets sour and starts anticipating, cutting in too close and ducking the turns. Most days, Dixie and I don't go near a barrel. Here's a usual week:

Two words you'll see a lot when the training diary comes back. Rate is when the horse gathers herself and shortens her stride coming into a barrel, so she can turn it instead of flying past. Pocket is the room between the horse and the barrel on the turn. Too small and you hit the barrel; too big and you waste time going the long way around. Dixie's problem, when she's excited, is dropping her shoulder into the turn, which shrinks the pocket and rocks the barrel. We've been working on it all summer.

OUR 1999 SEASON SO FAR

One race a month that I count, the jackpot at our county arena. (The 1998 results come back with the next batch of pages.)

HOW I TAKE CARE OF HER

• Feed: coastal Bermuda hay, all she wants, and a coffee can of sweet feed morning and night, a little more in race season. A salt and mineral block in the pasture. (I sell them for a living, so she gets the good one.)
• Feet: the farrier comes every six weeks. She wears shoes on the front only.
• Teeth: floated every spring by the vet, so the sharp edges don't hurt her mouth.
• Shots: every spring: tetanus, Eastern and Western encephalitis, and flu and rhino.
• Coggins: a blood test every year. You can't take a horse to a show around here without current negative Coggins papers, so they live in the truck.
• Worming: every eight weeks, rotating brands, written on the calendar in the tack room.

COMING BACK SOON

The training diary (all fourteen months, and the summer since), our 1998 results, my tack, how I got her to load in the trailer (it involved a whole lot of patience and a bucket of grain), and the pictures. The pictures were scanned at the library from prints, and the prints are in a shoebox under my bed, so those will come back as soon as I can get time on the scanner.