Contributed photo by Aly Jones / Lily Hughes, 19, is shown with her mustang, London Fog. The two will compete in competitions in Nevada and Kentucky later this year.Lily Hughes, 19, and her 3-year-old mustang, Reba, have things in common. Both are free-spirited, love the outdoors and have flashes of unpredictability.
“She does have an attitude,” Hughes said of her equine friend, a mustang born in the wild.
To which Hughes’ mom, Kerry Hughes-Dishman, added with an ironic grin: “It’s sort of like having a teenage girl.”
Reba is named after country music star Reba McEntire. The horse’s official name is London Fog because of her smoky coloring.
Since she got her first pony at age 2, Hughes, of Flat Top Mountain, has been building toward her ultimate goal. She wants to train and show horses for a living. Now, she’s on the doorstep of that career.
“I always knew I didn’t want to go to college,” Hughes said in an interview. “I wanted horses to be my main focus, and I’ve tried to figure out how I could make a living out of it.”
Hughes’ family has lived on Flat Top Mountain for generations — almost 200 years. Her mother has been training and caring for horses for decades, and Hughes said she “grew up in the (horse) barn.” The family operates Flat Rock Ranch Horse Barn.
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By the time she was 9, Hughes was competing in Chattanooga Pony Club competitions. Over the past couple of years, she has worked in Florida and Texas as an apprentice to professional horse trainers, whom she hopes to emulate. (She was homeschooled and recently graduated from high school.)
She’s converting an old, $2,000 horse trailer into living quarters — sort of a tiny house on wheels — that she wants to haul around the country when she becomes an independent horse trainer. When told she sounds like a character on the TV series “Yellowstone,” Hughes grins and nods in agreement.
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In September, Hughes and a friend went to a wild mustang adoption event in Alabama sponsored by the U.S. Bureau of Land Management. According to its website, the bureau “manages and protects” wild horses and burros on 26.9 million acres of land in 10 western states. When the population of mustangs gets too big for an area to support, excess animals are put up for adoption.
Hughes said she never intended to snag a horse in Alabama but saw the gray-blue mustang and felt an immediate connection. She set the adoption in motion and immediately had second thoughts.
“I thought I had made a mistake,” Hughes said. “When we put her in the chute, she tried to to jump out.”
That was unusual behavior even for a wild mustang. What’s not unusual is the animal’s instinct to avoid human touch. Hughes realized it would takes weeks, even months, to establish a bond with Reba.
Back home in Tennessee, she began an intricate dance with Reba inside a small round pen. Hughes would occupy space in different places around the horse and lunge this way and that to see what encroachment on her personal space Reba could tolerate and what would spook her.
Sometimes the work seemed never-ending.
“It’s sun-up to sun-down,” Hughes said.
Next, Hughes graduated to touching Reba gently with a pool noodle. Over time, the two bonded and today they seem to be a formidable competition pair. In July, Hughes and Reba will competed in a Western riding competition in Las Vegas, and then in September they will compete in an English riding competition in Kentucky. Should the pair finish in the Top 10 in either of those Mustang Champions-sponsored events, they will earn a spot in the freestyle competitions that cap the shows.
Hughes said she rides Reba almost every day, and their connection has grown strong. Reba is stout and athletic. Hughes is a talented and confident rider, although Las Vegas will be her first Western riding competition.
Together, the two will hit the road this summer with the promise of great adventures ahead.
Horses can live 30-plus years, so Hughes is is hopeful this will be a long and happy partnership. They’ve already come a long way from those days in September when Reba wouldn’t let Hughes touch her.
“Now, I can walk out into our 45-acre field and call for her, and she’ll come running to me,” Hughes said.
Life Stories is published on Mondays. Contact Mark Kennedy at mkennedy@timesfreepress.com or 423-757-6645.
Contributed photo by Aly Jones/ Lily Hughes, 19, is shown with her mustang, London Fog. The two will compete in competitions in Nevada and Kentucky later this year.