There is more than one way to like a horse?

I grew up in the West, first in Alberta and later in Saskatchewan, so it is only to be expected that horses would somehow have been a part of my life. At a tender age my friends and I used to catch horses off the Sarcee Indian reserve at the West end of Glenmore Dam and ride them with only a chunk of rope for a bridle. We spent days pursuing and cornering horses on the reserve and in a pasture where a nearby farmer boarded horses for wealthy Calgarians. The Indian horses were of undetermined lineage but some of the boarded horses definitely had some thoroughbred in them. It was a passtime enjoyed by a group of friends that all came to a halt when Jimmy Curley took a tumble from one of the thoroughbreds and shattered his arm. Soon the story spread and we were confronted by parents, owners and the farmer and the jig was definitely up, no more riding, we all secretely held Jimmy responsible for being such a wuss and piss poor rider, but what can you do.

I don't know what the cause was, I know it was worthy, but what I know for sure was that for 25 cents I could buy three tickets for draw on a horse. So thats what I did. It was the opportunity of a lifetime for a 10 year old boy, owning your own horse. I could see myself, just like one of the cowboys in the Calgary Stampede parade, it would drive so much envy into the hearts of my friends on the Air Force base where we lived. And sure enough it came true. We received a phone call from one of my dads friends who heard my name called as the grand prize winner on the radio. But all stories don't have the happiest of endings, you see my parents had an issue with me keeping a horse on the base on our 50 by 100 lot, and it was with great saddness I accepted a $25.00 check instead. But it turned out OK as I bought a new 3 speed Schwin bike and my first set of golf clubs with the money.

I had been raised on stories about horses by my mother who in my mind was the Annie Oakley of her time, only better. I knew all about "Biddy" the standardbred that she roamed the prairie on when she was a young girl, with her trusty Remington pump .22 calibre rifle held high with one hand as "Biddy" again raced down the dirt roads out of control. Even her brothers recognized that she had the boss horse and whatever nag they were on just didn't measure up in a race. Life was good until one day when Biddy shied at something and she was thrown into a ditch where the Remington pump came out second best in a collision with a large boulder and she banged herself up pretty good. My grandfather brought some sense to the farm when he decided the horse was to unpredictable and nasty for a kid to be riding. I used to take the old Remington out of the case when we were visiting the farm in Lockwood and try to make it work but the slide on the pump action was just to bent, man it was a beauty to play with. I had a great time down on the farm and had my first experience riding a horse there.

As I look back I realize that my two uncles didn't always exercise the greatest judgement with me. When I was 8 years old and visiting in the summer during haying season I got my big chance and it was something I will never forget. They still used horses for some of the farm work and one day my uncle Don who would have been in his early twenties hitched up two of the draft horses to a hay rake to coil some hay. I of course wanted to go on this big adventure so he agreed and we set out down the road me half sitting and standing on the rake as we headed out to the field. It didn't work out to well when we got there because the rake had a trip that was activated when you pressed on a peddle and there simply wasn't enough room on the rake for us both, so he had an idea. Do you want to ride on the horse he said, Wow, I guess I did, so he hoisted me up onto the horses back which was in full working harness and told me to hang on. What a great time for the first 20 minutes as we plodded around the field putting the hay into windrows but the next few hours were terribly boring and hot. Finally it was time to head home, so down the road we went. Exercising terrible judgement he decided he would let the horses have a run. Everyone has seen old movies of the runaway stagecoach, well thats about what we looked like except that the guy who jumps on the lead horse wasn't a stunt man, it was an 8 year old, frightened out of his wits boy who realized that if he lost his grip of the harness he was toast under the steel wheels of the rake, thats if the hooves didn't get me first.

I had two uncles, Don, the oldest and Neil, and where horses were concerned my uncle Don knew more and had the best judgement and this is after acknowledging that he put an 8 year old in that situation. They used to just roar with laughter when they would tell the story of their father sending them off to Lockwood on a wagon carrying 75 bushels of wheat pulled by a team of horses. The Lockwood grain elevator was about 7 miles away from the farm which made for a long boring trip for a couple of 12 and 14 year old boys. My grandfather had a saying about boys working "one boy, good boy", "two boys, half a boy", three boys, no boy at all" think about it for a minute and you will understand it. The trip into Lockwood would have gone without incident if either one of them had been alone but with two, something was bound to happen. Along the sides of the road in the ditches water collected in low spots and bullrushes grew. If you have never seen a bullrush, they grow about 6 or 7 feet tall with a strong stem and a large brown growth at the top about an inch around and seven or eight inches long. They make great spears and many a boy has spent countless hours tossing them around, so of course it was easy to jump off the slow moving wagon and collect a bunch. After a while the new possibilities of what to do with a bunch of bullrushes gets pretty slim and when boys are bored, strange thoughts enter their heads. If you have been around horses you will have noticed something, when a horse takes a dump it expells a bunch of turds that resemble golf balls, except brown in colour and when the last few are being expelled a horse has the ability to kind of turn its arse inside out to get rid of the last few. And when its last offering drops, the arse kind of retracts and shuts itself up and if you have been around horses much you know they eat about a half bale of hay a day which means many piles every day. So what is a boy to do, there you are sitting on the seat at the front of a wagon, with a 7 foot bullrush in your hand and every 20 minutes a tempting target presents itself, the die was cast, the arse turned inside out and from the seat eager hands inserted the bullrush. What happened next had not been thought through. The arse immediately clamped shut and retracted pulling the bullrush from my uncle Neils hands and sucking it about a foot into the horse. If you watch the chuckwagon races at the Calgary Stampede you can imagine what happened next, except a grain wagon is not built for speed and particularly when pulled by a crazy horse who has no idea of what is happening to him except that its not good and its scary. The wagon hit the ditch, and overturned, the pole hooked to the wagon broke and a wild eyed horse galloped and kicked its way down the road. I can only imagine the stories of how to explain what happened and leave the boys in a good light that were tried, but the long and short of it was when the horse was eventually located by my grandfather and discovered with a seven foot bullrush protruding from its arse nothing would get them off the hook.

Behind the barn at Lockwood there was a corral with a fenced off pathway that led to the door. My grandfather used to buy wild horses that had been caught in the foothills of Alberta and have a full boxcar shipped to the farm at a time. My uncle would break the horses to saddle and they would then sell them off. He got very good at riding and it was his plan to compete in the bucking bronc event at the Calgary Stampede. He was on a horse one day in the corral breaking it and the horse suddenly took off and ended up running into the barn where it continued bucking. My uncle was hurt badly by the horse in the barn when he crushed the ankle on his left foot, he was never able to ride quite the same again and didn't make it to the Stampede.

When I went into Grade 11 I had to attend school in Battleford which meant a long walk every morning or riding a horse up to the Drummond Creek school and leaving it in the barn for the day. Trouble was my sister had a horse and I didn't and since I wouldn't ride on the back of the horse usually I walked. Sometimes one of the neighbours kids would pick me up if they were riding alone. One of the only times I rode behind my sister we were almost seriously injured. We were late to get to the bus that morning so I rode behind her. It was late in the fall and the ground was frozen and there was a skiff of snow on the ground. Because it was cold I was wearing 2 pairs of pants and the ones on the outside were a kind of canvaslike material. As soon as I got on the horse I felt uneasy because the pants were so slippery and we never even owned a saddle so everything was bareback. The horse was galloping full out when we came around a corner at the top of the second ravine and I lost my balance with those pants on because I couldn't get a grip, so off I went onto the frozen ground at about 35 miles an hour. It made for a very unhappy time with all the skin lost and the bruises I received, never rode behind her again.

Whenever she would stay home or stay overnight in town then I had the horse to myself and he was a good one. There were 4 boys around my age that lived nearby and there was nothing we liked better than a good horserace. A couple of events stand out. One spring day when the ground was thawing out and we were heading home we headed into a field of Stan Carletons that had been summerfallowed the year before and there was about 4 inches of mud on it. We started racing, Gerry McNabb and I had horses that were pretty evenly matched, so we were neck and neck in the lead. We could hear Gerry Mants screaming at us to stop so we checked up a bit to see what was happening. Poor Gerry he rode an old ploughhorse named "Dynamite" who couldn't keep up but would try, the mud flying off the hooves of the lead horses completely covered him.

You have to understand that horses are a herding animal and their natural instinct is to travel together, thats what "Dynamite was trying to do, keep up with the other horses and Gerry couldn't hold him back. being the good buddies we were we slowed down just enough that Dynamite could stay about 20 feet behind us, right where the mud was the thickest being thrown off the hooves of our horses. We circled the field several times with Dynamite and Gerry in tow until they both looked like the kid from "Slumdog Millionaire" when he fell into the pit of shit.

I did get hurt a few times with horses though so it wasn't always a good time. Gerry Mcnabb and I were racing once and he was on his sisters horse "Tango", a big buckskin that was a bit faster than mine. We headed off the road at full clip down a ravine where the horses were almost out of control, ahead was a narrow opening into some trees that as just big enough for one horse to get through. Just as my horse going full tilt was about to jump the small creek at the bottom a sheet of old newspaper caught in some brush moved with the wind and my shied sideways. I left the horse headfirst and ploughed in a bunch of willows. Thank goodness I didn't hit a large tree head on but the willows were about two inches thick and were in a cluster. When I hit them a branch went through my pants just below my belt and I got hung up upside down about 4 feet off the ground barely conscious. I was hurt so bad I couldn't get myself out of the trees where I was hanging upside down. Finally as my head cleared I realized how bad a position I was in, no matter how hard I tried I couldn't get my belt undone but after a while I was able to slip out of my pants and fall to the ground. Gerry didn't realize what had happened so he just headed on home. Again, no broken bones but it took a long time before I could walk without pain. Makes me wonder somtimes if some of the injuries I received when I was younger that I am paying for them now.

My uncle Donald, of hay rake fame loved horses and had one of the best trained horses I ever saw. It was a quarter horse named Laddie that eventually became my sisters horse. If you told him to stand at attention he would stretch out which lowered his back by about a foot making it very easy to get on him. he was a wonderful horse around cattle and could cut them out of a group and keep them separated pretty much by himself. I was riding him one day when we were moving some cattle across a summerfallow field. A big tall steer decided to take off in the wrong direction and I set off at full speed to bring him back. When we caught up to him I brought the horse alongside and had the horse lean on him to turn him back to the herd, and it worked for a while until the damn steer cut in front of the horse and stumbled. The horse got tripped up and did a cartwheel over the steer with its 4 legs pointing to the sky, Iwas thrown off of course landing on my back just in time to see a thousand pounds of horse coming down on me. Its back landed so close it brushed the side of my head, there is an old Saskatchewan expression of buying the farm, well I came a couple of inches away from buying it that day.

I finally bought a horse of my own when I was in Grade 12. It was a tall rangy black gelding with a pronounced backbone which made riding him something like sitting on a 2 x 4 on its edge. But at least it was dependable transportation. I paid $15.00 for him from an Indian on Sweetgrass reserve and kept him for a couple of years. Once the government put a road by our place I was able to graduate to something with rubber wheels and didn't ride much anymore except to work cattle. So I sold "Chief" back. I ran into the Indian one day in town and he asked about the horse and by the end of the conversation he agreed to buy him back. The buy consisted of a trade, a load of treated fenceposts for the horse. So I delivered the horse and in the spring he was going to get the posts. I kept in touch and one day I arrived with the truck for my posts. They are out in the woods he said, so we set off.

A source of income for a lot of the Indians on the reserve was cutting and treating posts with bluestone in pits. They would cut the posts and set them up in a big hole they would dig in the ground. Into the hole they would pour a few barrels of water mixed with a copper sulfate. The posts would absorb the mixture and when the tops turned blue they were done. We drove along a trail in the bush for a few miles until we came to a pit full of posts so we loaded them up. I found out later that they weren't his, we had driven until he found a pit with no one around.

After we got married Sharon wanted a horse so I traded a steer to a neighbour for a 2 year old palomino which we kept until we moved to BC. Sharon gave the horse to her sister Peggy who rode him for about 20 years.

We had some dutch neighbours, Martin and Johanna Rumpf that we spent quite a bit of time with. A visit usually consisted of lots of coffee and conversation, helping with chores and of course a big meal. The centerpiece was quite often a huge Moose roast. If you haven't eaten moose before it is quite lean, dark and more taste than beef, cooked like a pot roast with onions and carrots its great.

After several years of these feasts Johanna told Sharon one day, it isn't really moose, we just say that, its horse. Quite a look on her face as Sharon stopped chewing and removed a big hunk of roast from her mouth and stared at the remains of "Old Dobbin".

Yes, Johanna said, we buy an old horse from the stockyards every year and do it up ourselves.

I have to admit of all the horses I was around, I liked Rumpf's the best.