The Spyder and the Sheep

At the age of fourteen, I landed at boarding school in Ventura Co, California; a custom-made solution for my new step-mother’s dream. I’d be 3,000 miles from home and I would be required by school rules to work twenty to twenty-eight hours a week to pay for it. A win/win – for her!

Though intelligent and mature, I floundered like a fish out of water at first, trying to be like the others. And for the first two years I often suffered bouts of homesickness. The first year and a half, when I lay down to sleep at night, instead of counting sheep to fall asleep, I would close my eyes and travel the road from our house out on East End of St. Croix into town.  I would picture every house, every palm tree, every turn and every pothole.

Being profoundly introverted, living in a dormitory with a hundred other girls took some getting used to. Not that I was not used to lots of people around me. I came from a family of six children and two step-siblings. So sharing a room with just one roommate actually came as quite a treat!

The problem lay in my inability to find solitude.

At home if I needed a quiet moment, I could sit out on the balcony with my cat, Clyde, feet dangling over the edge, and relax. I loved to listen to the soothing, musical sound of the halyards clanging against the metal masts of the boats at anchor. I could go down and walk on the beach, or take a sleeping bag up on the roof and fall asleep with only the stars as witness.

But every minute of dorm life meant busy-ness, and nowhere could one find solitude. The morning started with a loud industrial buzzer jolting you from sleep. If you were already half awake, you could hear the individual room buzzers coming down the hall – each a slightly different pitch, but each louder than the previous one. To an introverted, non-morning person, it was akin to watching a tidal wave coming ashore with no route of escape.

Then a fire-alarm-like bell called us to worship. I personally thought that incongruous dissonance a hellish thing. Alarming, bone-jarring sounds calling you to come quietly before the Lord…

Then five minutes after morning worship, a rush to get to the cafeteria. Inhale food and either off to classes (if you were a freshman or junior) or off to work (if you were a sophomore or senior) for the morning. Four hours of classes or work, then lunch followed by four hours of whatever you didn’t have in the morning. 

Then dinner and an hour of "play time" in the gym if it was Monday or Wednesday.  Back to the dorm and then another screaming bell calling you downstairs to worship.

Back up stairs again, and someone poked their head in to be sure you and your roommate are in your room for two hours of study hall. Then lights out until the morning buzzers said to do it all over again!


And even quiet times were punctuated with “Can I borrow a pen?” “Have you finished your English?” “Do you have my algebra book still?” or just the pining of a roommate for their mother or boyfriend or surfboard or dog at home.

Amidst the staccato of this cacophony, I craved solitude. Don’t get me wrong. I made friends easily and dearly loved my friends, many of whom I am still close to thirty years later. But I just came into the world needing a much greater ratio of quiet time to busy time than most, I guess.

Extroverts thrive on and are actually rejuvenated by activity; but introverts need just the opposite. So it was natural that I be drawn to the stables at any free moment to listen to the horses who didn’t talk or need to check your answer to #27. I could climb to the highest rail of the iron fence and feel the breeze in my hair and just be silent.

Being assigned to work in the campus’s commercial laundry came as a sentence worse than death. Four hours in an over-crowded, over-heated, deafeningly loud building could be compared to four hours of nails on a chalkboard with an amplifier while locked in a small cage to be poked constantly with sharp sticks.

Huge, automated washing and drying machines could each hold a mountain of hospital or hotel sheets and towels the size of Mt. Whitney. And loud whistles, beeps and buzzes indicated when each of the whirring and roaring machines changed cycles, or started, or stopped or broke down. People had to shout at the top of their lungs to be heard above any of it.

So imagine my joy when I landed a job at the stables my junior year. It was my get out of jail free card! The new boys’ dean’s wife, who knew nothing about horses, had been hired to replace the departing stables manager. She was clueless and desperately needed someone to tell her how to do things. So I taught her which horses belonged to the school and which were boarded there; how to saddle a horse; where to buy hay or used saddles; how to treat thrush or ringworm or founder.

I would shovel all the horse manure in the county to be allowed the silence I needed to nourish my soul. I plowed through all of my chores so quickly in my joy that the boss had to get creative to keep me busy for four hours a day. By the time I had cleaned, saddle-soaped, organized, painted, doctored and fed everything in sight, she decided to let me train horses.

So I started on a regimen of bad-habit correction training with the instruction horses. When I’d trained all the riding horses who needed fine-tuning, she had nowhere else to turn. So my job in my spare time became to try to train Spyder. 

Seven-year-old Spyder, the half-Arab gelding, had been donated to the school by someone who was too smart to try to break him. Though most horses are trained by age two, Spyder had reached middle age without ever being ridden. And for good reason.

Everyone considered him psychotic – with which I had to agree. He had never worn a saddle or bridle for a very good reason. He was crazy! He would literally jump at his own shadow, bolt at any sound. In hindsight, I think we must have been destined to come together. Who better to understand his aversion to stimuli?

I decided my first step had to be to accustom him to things that scared him. Since he’d been jumping at his own shadow for his entire life, I didn’t know what to do about that, so I put it on the back burner. He was terrified of plastic bags. So I put him in a stall and laid a plastic bag between him and the water and feed. He’d eventually have to step over, around or on it to get to his food or drink. Wasn’t I smart – and with no psychological training yet!

But the next day when I arrived the poor thing still stood in the same corner, trembling and dripping sweat. He hadn’t moved an inch or slept all night! I felt awful and gave up the plastic bag lesson and tried another of his phobias. Slowly, one day at a time, I brought him out of his shell – though not without many a setback.

In no time at all, I had him broken to bit and saddle. Then I could mount him and ride him around the arena. But never knowing when he would see his shadow, or the flag flying across campus, and jump sideways or backward or bolt forward without warning. Many a time he came close to unseating me in his terrified skittishness. But I always managed to stay in the saddle, though sometimes quite ungraciously.

Once I got him past some of his fears, he learned quickly. I’d never really trained a horse before (though we lived on horseback back in the islands), but he quickly learned to come when I snapped my fingers at the pasture gate. I taught him to jump hurdles, walk sideways, backward and in place. 

He quickly learned flying changes of lead, prancing in place, even bowing down and doing gymnastic tricks. He even would play tag with me out in the pasture, somehow instinctively understanding the rules of the childhood game.

But Spyder still continued to be afraid of his shadow – or anything that moved unexpectedly. I surmised he might have visual problems, but the boss’s husband thought he was just stubborn and needed to be worn down. So imagine my joy when told I needed to take him on a 2-hour trail ride three days a week – by myself.

So the island girl who couldn’t escape the constant contact with people and sounds and walls was now given freedom! I am still surprised they allowed it. 

But Spyder and I would set out, skirt the track and ball field, circle around behind the boys’ dorm and disappear into the hills, roaming through the wilderness between Newbury Park and Moorpark. Miles and miles of hills and canyons and dirt roads and silence, broken only by the wind, or the sound of the grasshoppers, or an occasional hawk overhead.

One day, as we rode miles from nowhere, down an uneven slope, I heard a pop and suddenly Spyder started limping. After one quick steps, he stopped and held his front right hoof off the ground, much like a dog with a sore paw might do.

I quickly dismounted and looked under his hoof to see if he had stepped on a stone, but found none.


He lowered his hoof until the tip of it touched the ground, but would not put any weight on it. The beginning of discomfort wrapped its fingers around my heart. I was miles from school, or the nearest phone, or even a paved road!


Maybe if I didn’t ride him, but just led him, we could get back to school. It would be hours before anyone missed me. And then even if they did, they’d have no idea where in all of this wilderness to look for me. I tried to coax him into a slow walk, but he would not budge.


In desperation, I lifted his foot again, checking the underside for a stone - or maybe a thorn that got stuck in his frog. Anything… But I found nothing. Again I held my hand to my brow and scanned the wilderness as far as I could see. No sign of life whatsoever. I had to solve this dilemma on my own.

I checked the frog, the rest of the hoof, then his fetlock (the ankle in a horse.) I flexed it back and forth but registered no distress. Okay, it wasn’t the hoof or the fetlock. I palpated the back side of the shin; no pulled tendon. The knee seemed to work fine and caused no pain.

So I came to the conclusion it had to be his shoulder, though I’d never heard of a horse’s shoulder going out. So, carefully, I raised the hoof and slowly extended the leg out in front of him. I pulled, gently but firmly, until his leg was fully extended. I imagined I heard a soft clunk, and lowered his leg. And he put weight on it for the first time. I led him for a while, then mounted him and walked a few steps with no apparent problem, so I decided it would be safe to head home.

About half way home, his shoulder went out again. I quickly jumped off, and this time he held his hoof out as though trusting that I would fix him again. And I did. He only had it happen once again in the two next years that I rode him, and as soon as I dismounted and snapped my fingers, he lifted his hoof trustingly toward me, melting my heart with his complete trust.

Oddly enough, about this time his jumping at his own shadow seemed to almost entirely disappear. I don’t know if it was because we’d finally worn him down as the boys’ dean suggested, or he finally knew he was safe in my hands. 

But the surprise side of this is that it became Spyder’s next trick to entertain fans. He now knew how to shake hands with just a snap of my fingers! And he gladly repeated the trick at the slightest snap of my fingers, but not for anyone else!

Spyder and I had been enjoying our trips into serenity for several months when one spring afternoon we came over the rise to find the dirt road blocked by dozens and dozens of wooly sheep; some milling, others just standing. I blinked a few times at the surreal scene before me. 

Then I turned around in my saddle and scanned the great expanse around me, wondering where in the world they’d come from. No clues.

Not only did I not 
know where they’d come from, but I had no idea how to get past them. They did not offer to make a path for me to pass. I hemmed and hawed, and even tried talking to them, but to no avail. Finally I tried to urge Spyder to push into the crowd, but he would have no part of it, anxiously looking this way and that, fearful that they would surround him. In the end, I had to dismount and beg and threaten and finally whip Spyder with the reins to get him to walk into the midst of the flock of bleating alien beings and out the other side.

But now I had a whole new problem. As we made our way to the far edge of the flock of sheep and I mounted once again, I was concerned to find that as we began to ride off from the other edge of the flock, the nearest sheep turned and followed blindly behind us. And their friends turned without question and followed them!

So now my silent stroll through the rolling hills somehow became a rather noisy, unintentional sheep-napping! I tried to shoo them away, but they ignored me. I tried yelling at them to no avail. They didn’t speak English.

When I tried to break into a trot to outdistance the wooly things, they just began to trot after us, terrifying my poor, psychotic Spyder. So I stopped and tried to calm him, wondering as I had the day his shoulder went out, what in the world to do now. I didn’t want to steal anyone’s sheep! But I did have to get back before dark, or it would be the end of my trail rides through heaven!

Just about then I heard a sharp, far-off whistle and as I looked to see where in this wilderness it had come from, I heard another, different whistle. Down the hill to our right bounded an Australian sheep dog, following the whistle calls of the still unseen shepherd.

Spyder skittered and danced around as the dog circled in and out, herding the sheep skillfully and cutting them away from around us. Then another whistled command brought the dog and sheep back toward the shepherd, sitting off on another hill under a spreading live oak tree.

I waved at him and saw him wave in return. But then I watched sadly as the sheep returned to their shepherd, surprised at feeling like we’d lost something magical.

And as I rode back toward civilization and the social bee hive that was my life, I couldn’t help think about those sheep. Though I’d been around horses most of my childhood, and had cats and dogs and even sea turtles and mongooses growing up, I’d never had any experience with sheep before. And I found their behavior intriguing.

How odd that they had turned aside so quickly to follow the silent lady and her psychotic horse! I flipped through the filing cabinet of my brain to locate what little information I had filed away about sheep, but had no first hand association।

The only point of reference I had for sheep came from the nursery rhyme songs and the Bible. No wonder Mary’s little lamb followed her to school one day. It just couldn’t help itself!

And then of course, who has not heard the story of the shepherd who leaves the 99 sheep to come searching for the one who was lost? But this shepherd not only didn’t come after his sheep, but sent his dog to go fetch them. Although maybe if the dog brought them back and the shepherd discovered one was missing, he would go in search of that one. I guess I’d never know.

I searched for more references to sheep. And I thought of the verse in 1 Peter 2:25, “For you were like sheep going astray, and now you have returned to the Shepherd and Overseer of your souls.”

I had read that and heard others reference it before, but never fully understood the context. Were we like Mary’s Little Lamb – all cute and fluffy and wanting to go to school with her…? I’d had been given a new view. Sheep might be cute, but they do not crave knowledge, and are actually pretty stupid.

I discovered that day that sheep are as dumb as bricks! When Peter spoke these words, he spoke to country people in terms they understood, using things from their day to day lives. I am sure they knew how dumb sheep were, so they were better prepared to understand the point Peter was making.

Our run-in with the sheep taught me a lot that day. For the first time I understood just exactly how easily dim-witted sheep can go astray. Maybe if Peter was writing this today he’d describe us as kids after an ice cream truck. Or like lawyers after an ambulance. We are all like sheep gone astray.

So easily we are distracted from our search for truth that we are sidetracked by the first psychotic horse that comes along, just because he’s moving. The ‘psychotic horse’ we chase may be our jobs, our hobbies, our favorite tv series, or anything that becomes a distraction in our lives. And like those sheep, we follow blindly, bleating contentedly as we get farther and farther from our Shepherd.

The lesson I learned that day from Spyder and the sheep has stayed with me throughout my life. Though we are as dumb as those sheep, in following whoever or whatever leads us away from God, He loved us enough to send his Son to be our Shepherd to get us back.

"He committed no sin, and no deceit was found in his mouth.

When they hurled their insults at him, he did not retaliate;

when he suffered, he made no threats.

Inestead, he entrusted himself to Him who judges justly

He Hiimself bore our sins in his body on the tree,

so that we might die to sins and live for righteousness;

by his wounds you have been healed.”

1 Peter 2:22-24

And verse 25? “For you were like sheep going astray, and now you have returned to the Shepherd and Overseer of your souls.”

1 Peter 2:25

This is a picture of Spyder and me six years later at our five-year class reunion. I went down to the stables and stood by the gate and called his name out across the pasture.

He instantly raised his head and whinnied and came trotting up to see me, melting my heart.

Liz Carson Rosas

17 April 2009