The War that Saved My Life by Kimberly Brubaker Bradley

All this time, in secret, I’d been messing with Butter. What Miss Smith didn’t
know I was doing, she couldn’t forbid.
The Tuesday that she stayed in bed I sat on him for the first time. I coaxed
him to stand beside the stone wall, then climbed the wall—wobbling, without
my crutches—and threw my bad leg across his back. I grabbed his mane and
scrambled, and there I was, astride him. The smell of him rose up around me,
and his coat felt warm and prickly against my legs.
He walked forward, his swinging steps moving my hips along with him. I
held on to his mane for balance. I tried to steer him, but it didn’t work, and
before long he dropped his head to graze. I didn’t mind. I sat on him most of
that morning, until I grew hungry myself. Then I slid off him and went in to
eat.
The next day my legs felt wobbly. All stretched out in a new way. I didn’t
mind that either. It was nothing like as bad as walking.
The stables had a storeroom attached. It had been locked, but Jamie’d
found the key under a rock near the door. Inside was all sorts of stuff I
guessed had to do with Becky and her horses. I went looking for straps like
I’d seen on the pony who raced our train, and found boxes full of leather
pieces, some of them buckled together. I pulled them out and examined them.
If you pick up a bridle, which is the leather stuff that goes around the
horse’s head, by the wrong piece—by the noseband or the cheek piece, say,
instead of the headstall—it doesn’t look like anything that could go onto a
horse. It just looks like a mess of leather. So at first I couldn’t make sense of
anything. Finally I found a sort of square thing on a shelf. It had pieces of
paper covered in writing I couldn’t read, and partway through had a drawing
of a horse’s head with the leather pieces fastened round. I studied it and the
leather bits until I understood.
That afternoon, when I tried to bridle Butter, I must have been using tack
that fit one of Becky’s bigger horses. I got the headpiece over his ears, but the
metal bit hung below his chin, and the part that should have wrapped around
his head wrapped around his nostrils instead. He snorted and ran off, trailing
the reins. It took me half the afternoon to catch him, and that was with Jamie’s
help.