“If you’d of left my stuff alone, I’d have him saddled.”
“Red Wolf’s been in there.”
“Right. You feel like turning some cattle back for me?”
Evelyn carried her saddle and blanket out to the colt, who had indeed pawed up a considerable mess. She brushed him and handled him a little, but Cree shied back when she threw the blanket up near the base of his neck and slid it down into place to make his coat lay flat. She kept the offside stirrup on her own side when she put the saddle up because he looked like he was getting ready to fly back. Cree was coming good, but he was quick to spook. When Evelyn was on his back, she still couldn’t open gates and if someone handed her anything, he was liable to bolt. As she pulled the latigo, she felt behind the cinch ring to make sure it didn’t roll up some skin and pinch him. Then she fastened his girth and led him around a bit until he quit the little skittering toe dance and let her bridle him. He kept his teeth closed at first until she gently slid her thumb up against the base of his tongue. Evelyn pulled his nose next to her, went around and did the same on the other side, then led him a few feet from the nearest thing it would hurt to be bucked off against and stood up in the near stirrup, feeling him line his body up straight to take the weight, and swung aboard, discovering all over again that it was the very best place to be, and they jogged toward the cottonwoods where Bill and his kelpie dog, Cow Patty, were bringing in some black-bred heifers from a stand of reed canary grass where they had nearly disappeared. From Cree’s purposeful little shuffle she could tell the young horse had already happily seen the cattle and felt as if he might have business with them. The scattered glimpses of shifting cattle began to solidify under the movements of Bill and his dog, until a small black mass moved gradually toward the overhead gate of the pen. Then a piece of irrigation dam flapped up from one ditch, and Cree bolted gustily for forty feet before stopping and staring it down. Evelyn nudged him with her spur, and he reluctantly started off where the last of the cattle were skipping past Patty, who lay on her belly at the gate. With her intent black-and-brown face, she seemed to be counting them in.
Evelyn followed the cattle into the pen and swung the gate shut behind her. The heifers had quickly gathered around a bale of hay in the center, and Bill was off to one side on his spavined, thoroughpinned old cow horse Avalanche, leaning one elbow on his saddle horn and his face in his hand. Evelyn walked several circles, jogged, long-trotted for a few minutes and eased into a lope. The first thirty or forty saddles, Cree was wont to bog his head when he broke out to gallop, but those days were gone, and he could lope out smooth now from a walk or any other gait and change leads just with a weight shift in the stirrups. He packed his head with his face enough forward that at morning or evening Evelyn could see the light through the walls of his nostrils as if he had fire around his face. He felt good in the broken-mouth bit she now suspected Bill had tricked her into, for she could see the Kelly Brothers in the mouth of old Avalanche, who generally went around in a US Cavalry bit whose shanks had been mended with a pair of harrow tines.
Cree loved to work cattle but was also thoroughly afraid of them. When he was a green colt, Evelyn took him to the sale yard to be around cattle in the winter. The state livestock inspector scared some steers he was trying to clip to check their brands, and they ran right over poor Cree, who skinned up his legs trying to climb over a Powder River panel. He was a nicely made colt with a butt that was closed right down to the back of his knee with muscle, feet set nicely under him and a pretty slope to his shoulder and withers. He had tight, round hoofs at the end of moderately sloped pasterns nicely domed around the frog that took a size-aught shoe and never split out a nail or chipped when he was barefoot, but left a rounded, nearly burnished edge. Evelyn liked to step back from him after he was saddled. He looked like such a little cow horse, though he wasn’t so little and at three, tipped a thousand pounds on the Fairbanks Morse cattle scale whose wiggling floor and clanging weights gave him new doubts about the state of the world.
Cree kept one eye on the dreaded cattle, and when one or another picked its head up to look at him, its face dusted with alfalfa particles, he gained speed. Evelyn just sat deeper and let him run it out. When at last the edge seemed to be off, she slumped down and let him stop.
“I think that ring-eye’d look at your colt,” Bill said.
“Don’t see a ring-eye.”
“It’s just rubbed off around her left eye, got a little ridge of hair between her shoulders, mud two inches up her left ankle, frosted ear tip and low headset to her tail, peeled brand. Between the flattop and the bonnet.”
“Oh, yup, got her.” Evelyn twisted in her saddle to study this particular heifer. She saw what Bill liked, something in the way she glanced at the horse from her place by the hay bale, gentle and alert. Evelyn walked her horse toward the cattle, and they began swinging to the far side of the hay to better watch the horse. With all these faces looking at him, Cree seemed lighter on the ground. One high-headed, slant-eyed yearling took this moment to lope around them, and it was all Evelyn could do to keep her colt from bolting for the gate. Despite Cree’s intermittent losses of nerve, Evelyn was able to separate a heifer. Once the yearling was driven off by itself and the herd was well behind him, Cree’s confidence returned. The cow ran to the left and he followed easily with her, then stopped as though chilled. When the cow headed the other way, he rolled smoothly through his hocks, turned around and rated her speed. At this point, deciding she was in earnest about returning to the herd, the cow ran straight at the colt and made a series of wild dodges that carried Evelyn around the pen, running, stopping, sliding as though on skates, feeling all the while the ambition rise within her shy young horse as he discovered new ability at every jump. When the cow gave up, she reached down to pat his neck, then rode him away. The cow went back to feeding. “That will do,” said Evelyn, lifting the gate latch from her saddle and swinging it aside.
“Good,” said Bill.
They rode through a big pink patch of cheatgrass, and detoured around some lilacs that indicated a vanished homestead cabin while Evelyn awaited the inevitable comment.
“He was great,” said Bill Champion.
“But what?”
“It could be you’re riding him a little tighter with your left leg, I dunno, seems like it’s a little easier for him to go the other way. I’m not saying it’s so, I’m saying think about it. Maybe you’re not turning your own head as good that way and he’s feeling it especially when that cow gets a little bit behind your left shoulder. I was sure pleased you let that cow pull you from place to place, seems like you were a little ahead of him with your spurs last time, just a hair. Also, when he gets to feeling doubtful, go on ahead and just drive up to your cow and see if you can’t sink the hook that much more. I noticed once or twice you did that, he started to melt real pretty like he was a hundred percent ready for anything she wanted to throw at him.”
“What if you’re wrong about my left leg?”
“I could be, I sure could be. In that case you’re gonna have to bump him from the other side and make him give you that rib. Either way he has to bend identical either direction or he’s gonna get beat by that cow the first turn around or the hundredth. It’s there. But don’t get me wrong, you got you a good scald on your colt today.”