by Ralph Moody
Sunday morning I let Grace ride Topsy up to the corner and back on my saddle. Father went along on Lady, because Topsy was a strange horse, and he wouldn’t trust Grace alone with her. Grace didn’t like to have him go with her. I think she always did wish she had been a boy so she could have been allowed to do the things Father let me do.
We packed a picnic lunch and spent the whole afternoon down by Bear Creek, but we stayed away from the bridge where Fanny got hurt. Mother had a new book they had bought when she and Father went to Denver to hear Mr. William Jennings Bryan make a speech. It was The Call of the Wild, and Mother read to us most of the afternoon. I think I liked that book better than any one she’d read. While she was reading, Father and I whittled a sailboat. That is, Father whittled the boat part and I made the masts and split dry Spanish dagger leaves for the sails. Then Father rigged the sails and booms with string he had brought in his pocket. He fixed two long strings to the main boom so we could swing it from one side of the boat to the other as we walked along the bank.
While Mother and the others were getting supper fixed, Father and I sailed the boat down the creek. At a place where the current wasn’t too swift, and where there was a pretty good breeze, we sat down on the bank and Father showed me how we could make the boat go either up or down stream by simply changing the angle of the sail. After I had learned how to do it and was moving the strings so to make the boat tack up against the breeze, Father said, “You know, a man’s life is a lot like a boat. If he keeps his sail set right it doesn’t make too much difference which way the wind blows or which way the current flows. If he knows where he wants to go and keeps his sail trimmed carefully he’ll come into the right port. But if he forgets to watch his sail till the current catches him broadside he’s pretty apt to smash up on the rocks.” After a little while he said, “I have an idea you’ll find that the current’s a bit strong up at the mountain ranch.”
Just then Mother hoo-hooed for us, so we took the boat out of the water and went back up the creek. While we were walking, Father fastened the strings so the sail couldn’t move and tied the long cord onto the bowsprit. When we got to where Mother had supper laid out on the bank he gave the boat to Philip.
We left the creek just when the sun started to dip down over the highest mountain peaks, so I could get back to Cooper’s before dark. When I went, Father walked out to the gate beside Topsy. He had his hand on my knee and was looking down at the ground, but he said, “Son, I want you to be a man and do the things men do, but I want you to be a good man. I’m not going to worry about you, but don’t take foolish risks—and give the man who’s paying you a good day’s work. So long, partner.” Then he waved to me as he closed the gate.
26
Training Sky High
WE STAYED at the home ranch that night. Hi rapped on my window when it was just light enough so that I could see the outline of the cook shack against the sky. When I got my overalls on and went out to saddle Topsy, he was waiting for me at the corral gate. His blue was already saddled, and a pair of smooth leather chaps was hanging from the saddle horn. They were just my size and had silver disks along the sides of the legs and around the belt. Hi had cut down an old pair of his own to make them for me.
All the way up to the mountain ranch we talked about Sky High. Hi said there wasn’t a mean streak in him anywhere, and that he had more brains than any other horse in the remuda, except his own blue. Then he told me to watch and I’d see that Sky always followed the same pattern in his bucking, and that he’d let me ride him from scratch just as soon as I had it figured out.
I didn’t have to figure it out, though. All I had to do was close my eyes, and I could remember just how he did it. He’d rear high, bounce first left and then right for six jumps, then crowhop for a hundred yards and go into a stiff-legged run. I guess Hi liked it because I already knew. Anyway, he told me I could try it that morning, but to fall loose if I felt myself going. He said I might just as well get started if I was ever going to do it, because Sky might morning-buck all his first season. And it wasn’t because he was mean, but just his way of showing how good he felt after a night’s rest. He did buck every morning as long as I was there, and always just the same way. After I got used to it I could have ridden him blindfolded.
Hi started teaching me how to train Sky High right from that day. First it was breaking him to the rein, and teaching him to stop with a light pull on the line, then with just lifting them. By the time we went back to the home ranch the next Saturday he would rein either way without any pull, and come from a lope to a walk when I raised the lines with my hand. After that, Hi filed the rowel out of his bit.
I would have liked to ride Sky High home Saturday night, but Hi thought it would be better for me to take Topsy. I guess he thought Mother wouldn’t let me come back if she saw the colt put on his morning show, and he was probably right.
I guess I never noticed how good a cook Mother was, or what good times we had at home, until after I went to work at Cooper’s. It wasn’t that I didn’t like the things we had to eat at the mountain ranch, or that I didn’t have a good time when I was up there. I did. It was only sometimes at night, after I was in my bedroll, that I’d even think about home. But always when I got to where I could see our house on Saturday nights, I’d be so homesick that I’d make Topsy run as fast as she could go.
That week end we all went for a picnic up in Bear Creek canyon. It was the first time the other children had been up there, and I think Father had been planning it long before Sunday came. He had traded our old buckboard, and the colt he got for building ditch boxes, for an almost new spring wagon with two leather-covered seats and red-striped wheels. Mother had the lunch basket all packed when we got up Sunday morning, and Father and I did the chores as fast as we could. You could just barely see the tip of the rising sun when we drove out of our yard.
Father could tell every different kind of tree and rock and most of the bushes and flowers. And he didn’t just point them out and say, “That’s a spruce and that’s a fir and that’s a jack pine.” He’d show us where this one was different from that one, until even Hal could tell them at a glance. Of course, Hal was too little to go on the hike up the canyon with us, or to climb up the side of the mountain, so he had to stay at the wagon and help Mother get lunch ready. But Father took the rest of us way up into a box canyon he had found when he was hauling fence posts. It was just like a big room, built off to one side of the main canyon, and the walls went up almost straight. He could call one of our names, and the mountains would keep calling it back till it sounded as if they were all full of people who knew us. And he found a smoky topaz for Muriel, and a piece of quartz with green agate in it, that he afterwards ground and polished for Grace.
Mother finished reading The Call of the Wild to us during the afternoon, and we didn’t get home until time to do the milking. Father said I could have taken Topsy along with us. Then I could have saved about five miles by cutting across to Cooper’s place from Morrison. I didn’t want to do it, though, because I liked to help Father with the milking, and to have him walk out to our gate with me when I went, and say, “So long, partner.”
I learned a lot of things during the six weeks we were at the mountain ranch. My real work didn’t take more than an hour a day, and I spent all the rest of the time practicing the things Hi showed me. He taught me how to train Sky High until we could ride the two blue roans side by side, and make them do exactly the same things without even straightening a rein. And he taught me to swing a rope till I could spin it in a flat circle I could walk in, or make it dip to catch the leg of a running calf.
After that first week, I was the only one who ever got a leg up on Sky High, and I must have been on him at least twelve hours every day. As soon as I learned to handle a rope well enough so that I could get it on a calf and shake it off again without getting out of the saddle, Hi helped me break the colt for handling a steer. The first thing we did was to pare his forehoofs right down t
o the quick so they were tender. Then we set shoes on his hind feet. Always before, when I would snub a calf to the saddle horn, Sky would set his forelegs against the lunge, but Hi said that would be bad with steers. He said that in a couple of years the colt would get sprung knees and never be able to take quick turns. Sky didn’t do it any more, though, after his front hoofs were trimmed.
I don’t know how many steers I roped in the next few days, but there were lots of them. Sky High’s forehoofs got tenderer and tenderer, till by the end of the third day he’d sit down—almost like a dog—and dig his shod hind hoofs into the ground the second my rope settled around a steer’s neck. Then he’d take the weight off his forelegs till his hoofs would skim along the ground as light as a dragged hat.
He had just two bad faults that bothered me: he wouldn’t always keep a tight line, and he wouldn’t always keep his head pointed right at the animal. That way, a breachy steer would rush us every once in a while, or nearly tip us over sideways. I asked Hi what I ought to do about it, and he said, “You take Topsy to peddle water with tomorrow, and we’ll let an old bull learn that Sky boy a good lesson.”
I lay awake in my bedroll for a long while that night, worrying about what kind of lesson Hi was going to let an old bull give Sky. I had seen a bull rip one horse’s belly open, and I didn’t want anything to happen to my colt A couple of times I started to ask Hi what he was going to do, but he was a lot like Father in some ways: he liked to show me how to do things, but he didn’t like me to ask questions about it beforehand.
I took the waterskin on Topsy the next morning, and the old bull gave Sky High a hard lesson. Hi put a heavy, double-cinched saddle on the colt. Then he had two of the boys help him catch and halter the biggest bull in the valley. They tied a long rope from the bull’s halter to the horn of Sky High’s saddle, led them out into the middle of the valley, and took the colt’s bridle off.
The bull didn’t like the idea of being tied away from the herd. He put his tail up and his head down the minute he was loose, and charged off toward the hills. When he hit the end of that rope, he was at right angles with Sky, and they looked like a pair of acrobats I saw at a carnival. The bull turned a somersault and the colt rolled over onto his back with his heels kicking. Sky High was up first, but the bull was up maddest. That time he didn’t charge toward the hills, but right toward Sky. The colt dodged clear and the bull went past him. He circled before he got to the end of the line and charged again. Sky High sidestepped out of the way and raked a chunk of hair off the bull’s rump with his teeth. By that time there was a loop of rope lying on the ground clear around Sky. When the bull hit the end of it, it knocked all four feet out from under the colt, and tied him up like a calf ready for branding. Every time Sky would try to get up, the bull would yank on the rope and tip him over again.
I had seen all I could stand, and kicked my heels into Topsy’s ribs. As she started I dug my free hand into my hip pocket for my knife, but I never got it out. There was a whistle around my head and Hi’s rope tied me up like a chicken for roasting. He could have jerked me right out of the saddle, but he didn’t. So when the rope tightened around my arms, I pulled Topsy up without meaning to, and Hi slid his blue to a stop beside me. “Lookin’ to get yourself killed?” he asked. “What do you think that bull would do when you lit down to cut that rope? Now you hightail on up the canyon and get some water to them boys, and don’t come back till dinner. If that colt can’t learn to get out of his tangles, he ain’t worth savin’.”
I went, but I didn’t want to, and I chewed my fingernails clear down to the quick, worrying about Sky High. I thought sure he’d get a broken leg or his insides ripped out, and every time I gave one of the fellows a drink, I asked him if it wasn’t pretty near noon. They were rustling the stragglers down from the draws and gulches where the cows hid away with their new calves, and sometimes I’d have to sit there an hour and wait for a driver to come out into the canyon. When Juan blew his old cow horn for dinner I raced back out to the valley as if there were a pack of wolves after me.
I could see Sky High and the bull from the moment I came out of the canyon mouth. They were still in the middle of the valley, and were having a tug-of-war, but Sky’s hind feet were planted deep in the sod and the bull couldn’t budge him an inch. The line was tight as a stretched elastic band past the side of his head. I kept an eye on them all the time I was eating my beans and bacon. The bull got tired of the tug-of-war business after a while and started circling again, but Sky High backed away and turned so as to keep a tight rope running past his head.
When I was tightening up my cinches after dinner, Hi came over and noticed that the end of one of my fingers was bleeding. He slapped me on the back so hard it made my teeth rattle, and said, “You stop frettin’ ‘bout that old cayuse or you’ll have your fingers et clear down to the knuckles. He ain’t nobody’s fool, and I’ll lay you no bull will ever dump him again as long as he lives. You stick around here and help Juan this afternoon; I’ll let Tom peddle water to the boys in the canyon.”
I did go and drag in a couple of loads of firewood, but that’s about all Juan let me do besides peel the spuds for supper. He didn’t have too much to do himself. I was learning to talk enough Spanish so that we could get along pretty well, so a lot of the time we sat in the shade of the chuck wagon and watched Sky High and the bull. They must have gone up and down the length of the valley a dozen times during the afternoon. I don’t know whether Sky ever got dumped again during his life, but he didn’t during the time I knew him.
The only other lesson that really hurt me was teaching Sky High to stand ground-tied. When a fellow is working with cattle there are lots of times that he needs to tie his horse where there is nothing to tie him to. He has to be able to go away and leave him sometimes for hours, and find him right there when he comes back. Some horses learn to stand ground-tied after they’ve jerked their mouths a few times by stepping on a hanging rein, but Sky High was too smart for that. If I left him with the rein hanging, he’d hold his head off to the side so as to keep the line out from under his hoofs, and go back to the remuda. It was a nuisance when I was gathering wood, because I always had to find a bush where I could tie him.
One morning Hi told me to catch up another horse for a couple of days, because we were going to “learn” Sky to stand ground-tied. Hi saddled him, and put on a bridle with short reins and a big rowel in the bit. The rowel was so big that the colt could hardly close his mouth without having it cut against his tongue and the roof of his mouth. After that, Hi got a long iron picket pin with an eye-loop at the top. Then we led Sky High up into the canyon, drove the picket pin clear down to the eye, and ground-tied him within twenty feet of the brook.
There was good grass around the picket, but he couldn’t eat it with the rowel bit in his mouth. And every time he tried to take a step forward or back, the bit would cut the rowel into the roof of his mouth or against his tongue. I got mad about that, and told Hi it was a dirty thing to do, and there ought to be some easier way of teaching a horse. He said, “Yep, they’s easier ways, and it would be easier for him to forget. The lessons you remember longest are the ones that hurt you the most when you learn ’em. Do you follow what I’m tryin’ to tell you?”
I couldn’t help thinking about what Father had said—that night out on the chopping block—and I said, “I guess I know what you mean.”
We rode back toward the chuck wagon side by side. Hi kept looking down at the horn of his saddle, but he went on talking. “You ain’t goin’ to like this, because it’ll make his mouth bleed, and he’ll slobber a bit, but it ain’t going to hurt him much more than it hurts you to get a tooth pulled. After a couple or three hours I’ll trade that rowel for a straight spade bit that won’t cut him, but he’s goin’ to have to stand there through all of today and tonight without feed or water. That way he’ll learn that he can’t move for nothin’ less than prairie fire when he’s ground tied. And if he’s half the horse I think he i
s, he’ll remember it the rest of his life.”
Sky High’s mouth wasn’t sore for more than two or three days after his ground-tying lesson, and from then till haying time Hi let me work with the cattle as soon as I had dragged Juan enough wood for the day. We were herding out on the rolling prairies between the home place and the hogbacks. Juan would move the chuck wagon from place to place with the herds, and I sometimes had to drag the firewood three or four miles from the nearest scrub oak patch. I had to drag two loads a day, so I always brought one the last thing at night, and then got up at dawn to go for the other one. That way, I could spend the rest of the day at the herds with Hi and the men. I always carried my waterskin on the back of my saddle, and by going from one herd to the other, morning and afternoon, I had plenty of time for training Sky High as I worked.
Hi was range boss, so he went from one herd to the other as I did, unless he had to be at the wagon for branding or dehorning, or something like that. Between herds, we always practiced tricks with Sky High and Sky Blue. We got them so they would even do figure eights at a canter without ever losing step, and so we could stop and turn them both right on the same dime. I think my blue roan liked Hi’s roan as well as I liked Hi.
The way Hi had me train him for cutting was to pick some quick-moving steer, or a breachy-looking old cow from the middle of every herd, then work that one to the outside without running it, and drive it a quarter of a mile from the herd. They never wanted to go where I wanted them to, and would duck and dodge to get away from me. At first I had all kinds of trouble, because Sky High would get excited when I had to keep turning and twisting him from one side to the other in trying to work some ornery old heifer out of the herd. Sometimes he would get so mad he’d bob his head and rear. Then we’d always lose the cow we were after, and half the time we’d start some of the other cattle running—and Hi didn’t like that. By haying time Sky wasn’t as good at heading them off as Fanny used to be, but he could almost always tell which one I was after when I picked it, and would work it to the outside of the herd without my having to rein him enough to make him mad.
