Blue Hawk
“Just relax,” the mine-man tells him. While Hawk thanks him for this no-doubt useful advice, he was looking for something a little more practical, like, “this is how you get on,” or “this is how you sit comfortably on horseback,” or “this is how you make the horse move forward, or turn, or stop.”
Eventually, after watching the others mount, Hawk copies their motions, much more awkwardly, and ends up on horseback. He takes a moment to make the horse go forward, then stop, then to turn a full circle in each direction. Hmm, he thinks, this may not be as difficult as I thought.
The tribesman tells the others to call his name if they need to rouse him from his recovery trance. He waits a few minutes to make sure that the horse knows what it’s doing, and then enters the trance.
Almost immediately, a voice cries, “Hawk!” and the shaman opens his eyes to see that he has drifted away from the carriage, and is nearly off the trail. He notes that his grip on the reins is tighter on that side, adjusts his grip accordingly, gets back in position, and, after thanking whoever earned him, and reminding the others that his name is Blue Hawk, not just “Hawk,” he goes back into the trance.
“Blue Hawk!” At least this time, they got his name right. He opens his eyes to see the world tilted at a jaunty angle. He tries to push himself straight, only to realize that his right foot had slipped out of its stirrup, which is how he began sliding off in the first place. Grabbing the front of the saddle, he rights himself, and puts his foot back in the stirrup.
The shaman tries to get back into the trance, but now they’ve hit a rougher portion of road, and with every step the horse takes, it feels like the saddle is the point of an axe trying to split him up the middle. He tries to relax his legs as Ranar suggested, but this only seems to make the issue worse. He then tries to stand up using the steps as if they were solid ground, and this reduces the strain, but he is no longer relaxed enough to enter the trance.
Disgusted in himself, horses in general, and this one in particular, Hawk gives up the trance as a lost cause and decides to instead focus on controlling the horse for their journey through the Wazifi countryside.
