The horse ride from hell

"This woman is like, a championship rider for South Africa," Janson gushed excitedly. "This is gonna be awesome."

It was Monday morning, 7:00 a.m. The five of us interns crammed into a rental car and sped away from the City on the N2. It was mercifully clear of traffic, unlike the twenty-plus kilometres of dead stop stretching from Khayelitsha to Cape Town, and I felt indulgent, adventurous and glad to be alive. This early-morning horseback ride in Gordon's Bay would be an interns' last hurrah of sorts; Bogey had to catch her flight to Chicago at 1, and Janson would leave tomorrow. We watched multiple sunrises - four? eight? - as the sun flirted through the jagged peaks of the Stellenbosch mountains, laughing exultantly, a clear day without a cloud in sight.

Two kilometres down a dusty dirt trail, we found the farm. A man opened the gate, wearing a shirt: "Dive Adventures." Janson and Denita had met him on the beach during the two-week EPRI conference at Villa Via in Gordon's Bay, and he'd taken them for a boat ride, put in a good word for his wife's business. The wind was surprisingly fierce and we shifted from foot to foot next to the stalls, rocking ourselves warm, as the woman asked about our riding experience and thought out loud, pairing us with horses.

Inside, we signed a waiver. "This is just so if you fall, I'm not liable," she said.

"Has anyone ever fallen off?" Janson asked, jovial. Just last week we'd signed a waiver for skydiving; this was simply par for the course, but Janson likes to make conversation.

"No, never," she said.

"And how long have you been doing this?"

"Twenty years."

Back outside, the woman showed us how to hold the reins English-style - with two hands, unlike in America - and Dylan, who would be our guide up the mountain, helped hoist us over the animals' broad backs. I got the only mare, dark brown and sleek and without a proper name. I leaned into her neck as I waited for the others, brushing my palm over her fur, whispering that we were going to be friends. She bent her head down and started munching some grass.

"Whoa!" - gasps - I turned just in time to see Dave fall. His horse had broken away, trotting straight for a tree with a low-hanging branch. Dave had no choice but to bite the dust. He sprang up, limped around stiffly in gray sweatpants, now earth-streaked, as the woman said, "Walk it off, just walk it off, it'll be fine." But the tone had changed. For the first time I remembered that what we were doing was in fact dangerous – that a horse accident, if you landed just so on your spine or your head, could kill or maim.

Pondering this, I missed the second fall - Denita's horse, over on the lawn, also tried to run her into a branch. Jolly as always, she laughed it off, but the horses sensed the fear. They started pawing, snorting, turning 'round themselves. "I think we just need to get them out of this enclosed area," Janson said, and the woman agreed. A reshuffling of pairings, and as soon as five seats were in saddles we were off.

And all hell broke loose. Janson kicked his horse gently in the side - a 'giddyup' - and the creature bolted. Bolted. Somehow I reined my mare into a trot as the others began galloping down the road. Don't follow them, don't follow, I willed the creature underneath me, my heart pounding in my chest as I watched a scene of mayhem speed away and crest a hill: the horses turned their heads wildly as they sprinted, snapping at one another, crossing paths; two girls with no experience clung desperately as they bounced, feet fallen from the stirrups. "I'm scared," I called urgently, irrationally - no one could hear me.

When I cleared the rise, Bogey was standing at the side of the road, holding the back of her head and looking as though she wanted to cry. Dave was dismounting his horse. Denita and Janson were at the bottom of the hill, recovering their runaway horses. Turns out Janson had seen the downhill stretch and decided he was better falling off than staying on, slid from his horse and fell to the ground. Denita's horse trampled over him, stepped right on the back of his calf. When Bogey's horse saw this, it stopped and she flipped right over its head, landed on her back and the base of her head. As Denita and Janson rode back up the hill, the woman caught up, told us, "If you still want to go out, I can take you... I'm sure they've got it out of their system by now."

"No, I really think we're going to have to cancel," Dave said firmly.

Inside, I rooted in the kitchen for ice and plastic bags for Bogey. Janson cut his pants off above the knee and iced the large bloody wounds on his knee. He's an Army man, West Point bred, two Iraq tours under his belt, so he was stoic - "I'll be fine, I'm fine." But Bogey had an 18-hour flight ahead of her, so at 10 in the morning we found ourselves not on a mountaintop but at a Strand clinic, to make sure nothing was wrong. The woman did not apologise; she praised me for handling it well, blamed Janson for kicking his horse in the ribs.

Looking back, there were warning signs. The fact that Denita's horse had lived wild in the mountains for four years, the woman told us, before they blindfolded it and lassoed it and domesticated it. Her brazen insistence that it'd be fine after Dave fell the first time, her apparent lack of concern.

"We can't go to work after a morning like that," Janson said. We agreed. We spent the afternoon in the sun at a winery in Constantia, thankful to be alive.