Newsletter from May 2, 2015
Unfortunately, living on the land is being around both life and death. I lost a good friend last week—an always faithful companion. It was my Morgan mare Missy. I had been watching her pretty closely, because I could tell she wasn’t doing well. We let our old friends live out their retirement in peace, but if they appear to be suffering in any way, we call the vet. On this day, our 23 horse herd went galloping off down to the low pasture, and she tripped in a hole on the way. Her old age of 32 years made it too hard to get up. Couldn’t tell if something broke or not—she just wouldn’t get up. We had to let her go.
I see some guys that never get attached to their horses, and wonder why. Some of them treat their steeds like motorcycles, hitting the on and off switch, but for me horses are more than tools and become companions. They are subjects, not objects. Some are more connected to their owners than others, but this mare defined faithful.
My Missy defined faithful. She was an easy ride, and threw her front feet out in a little Arabian way. We could lope, or canter for half a day and see miles fall behind us. I never wore spurs with her”¦all she needed was a slight shift in my center of gravity, and she would take off to cut that wayward cow. She wasn’t much to look at – just a plain bay mare- but she was gritty beyond belief. Even with 30 long miles under her fee, she would willingly ascend a cliff and rock strewn mountain with a gentle point from me. I would be raw bone tired, sleeping in the saddle, until a sidestep or rolling rock would wake me up in the wee hours of pitch blackness coming off the range at 2 am—but she stayed on task.
I remember one ride like that in particular. Cowboy Tim on his black mare April and I were mounted up in the early days on our summer range, and made a poorly devised a plan for a shortcut through a canyon we had not yet explored to try to get back to our truck and stock trailer about 15 miles away. We were already cowburnt from a long, hot day taking the herd over a high divide in black forest timber. We decided that since we had devised a shortcut, we had time to rejuvenate our gritty bodies by tanking up on water at a little icewater spring we cherish under big spruce trees, and letting the horses graze with saddles pulled for a few minutes while we grabbed a quick nap. That was nice about the two mares—they were connected with us enough we could just turn them loose while we tipped our hats. Later, post siesta, we would find them still nearby.
We remounted as the sun went down behind our backs. Little did we know what lay ahead. Things went well for the first part of the ride, but the moonless night would make for tough going later. The canyon walls got steeper by the mile, and before long, we were stuck between rock canyon walls pitching up thousands of feet to the starlit sky, and underfoot, the boulder-strewn ground gave way to brush choked beaver swamps filled with black depths of muddy bottomed pondwater and brambles. We dismounted as the going got tough, and found beaver chewed sharpened sticks stuck up like pike poles in the black, stabbing our legs and upper body as we occasionally lost our footing and went down in quickmud. We climbed up the rock slopes below the cliffs to find the tumbling rock worse than the swamps. The mares followed our lead, and yielded to a trust founded on hundreds of miles under us, in spite of sparks flying as boulders cascaded downslope below us.
We thought it would never end. Finally, soaked, mud spattered and punctured, and around 2 am, we tumbled out of the bottom of the Park Creek Canyon to where it met Little Hat Creek. I wanted to kiss the ground in Little Hat in thanks. We were exhausted, as were our mares, but at least we knew where we were by the starlit surroundings. But there was still a problem. There were about several extreme miles ahead of us that would have been easy in daylight, but in the darkness? The trail was only 10 inches wide in places, perched on a canyon wall with a mortal fall waiting for mount and rider with one misstep. The starlight wasn’t enough for our human eyes. Tim’s silence was fruit of the same notions or just plain fatigue.
I turned to Tim in the dark. I could just make out the silhouette of sagging cowboy hat in the starlight. Now, as a side note, we are of the Star Wars generation, and you need to know that Obiwan Kenobi’s advice to Luke Skywalker came bounding to me through the fog of my mind, and I said to Tim: “Trust the horse, Luke.”
Well, I guess it was actually force, but you get the idea. So we did, completely. It was Missy’s turn to be trusted, so we mounted up and moved out. We dropped our reins, and gave them their heads, and Missy broke into a fast walk into the black wilderness. Now this wasn’t a straight forward route through flat country, you ought to know. It was all mountainside, punctuated by four creek crossings, down one canyon, and up another for several miles to where our trailer waited.
I closed my eyes and almost dozed. It wasn’t inactive riding, but since I could see nothing on the ground in front of me, I rode by feel and feel alone, trying to help the mare balance. I could hear the creek bubbling far below my left stirrup. Missy obviously was traveling like she knew where she was going. In her equine head was a map of memory that went down the detail of rock, root and pebble. After an hour or so, I began to wonder where we were until a coarse willow branch tore at my face and I recalled ducking under it in the early morning light nearly 20 hours ago. The mare stepped lightly as she too recalled where the rig was in the middle of 70 square miles, and an hour later, the robin-egg blue of the trailer faintly glowed ahead. We had arrived.
Trust was the foundation in the relationship I had with that mare. On several occasions, I had big black bears with cubs stand on hind feet on the trail in front of us, staking claim. Missy stood firm each time, and held her ground, until bear retreat. I even put visitors on her, because she was so solid. Mark Schatzker, the author of “Steak”, wanted to take her home after several days riding her. Bridget Besaw, renowned natural history photographer, galloped with free abandon across the ranch while holding the motor drive button down snapping thousands of pictures. She wanted to take Missy back to Chile with her, and would have happily galloped the whole way.
This ranching endeavor really boils down to relationships, not only with people like you and our goat raising friends in Montana, but with animals. Even the land gets under your skin as you feel and live in the pulse of seasons, and the extremes of thunder and quiet.
We hope that by being one of our partners you gain an understanding that not only are you connected to us, the producers of protein, but you are connected to the land and the soil biota underneath it.
Thanks for being connected.
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