By Mark Mellon

Pierre rose with the cock’s crow at dawn. The rooster had crowed all night anyway, indifferent to the sun’s absence or presence, and really had nothing to do with Pierre’s early arisal, in contradiction to all prior habit. He’d done so from the belief that the owner of the Rocking M Ranch should be up early to set an example for his “hand.” He donned the beat up, broad brimmed, brown hat Yoko bought for him to celebrate the ranch’s purchase.

By George Seaton

Gus Klynkee sighed, studied the sagging fence line through the pickup’s cracked windshield. The fence had sighed a bit itself against the nature of winter in the High Plains of north central Colorado—snow, felled aspens and pines rested on and, in places, had snapped the barbed wire; the obvious evidence of the passage of critters over, under and through the fence. Damned elk was where Gus assessed the majority of blame.

By Larry Menlove

The scent of fall woke him. That particular dank aroma. Deke Faldergrass had tried to define it for seven decades, spirit out what that sodden smell was that let him know summer was over. It wasn’t a sad smell or a bad smell, though it may very well have been decay, rot, summer broken under the boot of autumn stepping in. Deke loved the smell. The wet old earth fragrance that tickled more than his olfactory imagination. One day out of the year smelled like fall. And Deke had breathed in 71 of them. Fall brought him up out of bed this morning.

By Patricia Probert Gott

Friday evening, my boss Greg Fallon who owned the dude ranch where I worked, told me he wanted me as an extra wrangler on a pack trip that would leave Sunday.

He explained, “There’s a lady named Sara who has booked a trip for her father, two brothers, sister and herself. They’re from New York City and have never been on a horse pack trip before. I’m thinking I need you to go along and hold her hand and smooth things over if things get rough.”

Wesley E. Swaincott

His mother, her brain slightly addled by the incessant West Texas wind, was overly fond of flowers. When she first glimpsed the tiny face of her new-born son, with its delicate creases, it reminded her of daffodil petals. So she named him “Jonquil.” His father did not object to this sissified name because he did not know what a jonquil was. Besides, he left all such matters up to his wife.

Lee Landers

When I think of my Grandparents, I hear a sound in my mind: a haunting solitary note than says, “Come home, Come home.” I think of it as music from Sweet Horn Creek.

By Terrell Brown

Clay Hobbs was upset about the economy. The price of hay would go up a few cents a bale. He supposed that was good for someone up the line, but it was bad news for him. His business was raising beef, and if it had not been for Wendy’s and McDonald’s he’d have gone under. Under was right. He looked through the windshield at three or four cows and their calves grazing over a stretch of high ground ahead beyond the windshield.

Nancy Steele

It was the ugliest dog Tate had ever seen. Scruffy, wiry hair covered its scrawny frame, sticking up in random tufts. A scarred lip pulled one side of its mouth into a permanent sneer, revealing uneven teeth set in an undershot jaw. The sneer was accentuated by a dark moustache of hair drooping from the dog's upper lip, giving it the look of a villain from a John Wayne Western. It turned its head slightly and Tate noticed it was missing an eye. Yep, it was the ugliest dog he had ever seen, and all ten pounds of it was perched on his duffel bag.

Leslie Johnson

He’d worked the colt for three or four days, lunging and ponying him with one of our older, more experienced horses, to no avail. Put a saddle on him and the fireworks began, he’d buck until he threw the saddle off or you snubbed him to another horse and made him trot off. BD’s profit margin was so thin, the more time he had to work with one, the more money he’d have in it. You could get away with the general term “green broke” to cover a multitude of sins, but flat out bronc bucking wasn’t one of them.

Leslie Johnson

BD traded for a real nice, seven year old saddle horse, a term generally meaning he was gaited, in this part of the country. He had two real good quarter horse two year olds he’d bought somewhere back country, and since we didn’t fool much with non-gaited horses, the trader who owned the gelding offered to take a loss on his good horse by taking the two we just didn’t need.