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Short Stories & Tall Tales
The Voice of Experience
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.
Every horse trader has a gaggle of retired horsemen that have nothing better to do than sit around, drinking coffee or “pop”, desperately waiting for someone to tap into their vast knowledge of horse trading and sure fire short cut methods to straighten a rogue out enough to unload him on another trader. If there is a code of honor among horse traders, chief among the Commandments would be “Thou shalt jump on any opportunity to sucker a brother horse trader…” The other would be you “Never, Ever, Ever, knowingly, sell a horse that can come back on you.” Which means the obvious; not selling a horse you know is a fool, to some Rube who will take it home and get hurt on it. No good horse trader ever willingly made a mistake like this, if for no other reason than the fact his reputation as a man you can buy horses off of will be dragged through the mud, and possibly a small claims court.
One of our learned and grey bearded sages knew exactly what to do to stop this annoying habit. JP pulled his britches back up to his waist and rolled over to the corral panel. “I had this same trouble in, was it ’73 or ’65, a sorrel hoss that could buck the ..” BD gave him a hard look, and he cut to the chase, so to speak. You make the horse buck until he is “bucked out”, once this happens he’ll understand that bucking gets him nowhere and be instantly amendable to further training. Now, since he’d been breaking horses since before there was indoor plumbing, he’d found a short cut or two to speed things along. All you needed was a spare tire and a rope.
Hmmmmm…sounds crazy enough. Yeah! I’m all over it! BD rummaged through his collection of spare tractor and truck tires, since even a tire with a fist sized hole in it might be needed some day, and found one just the right size and weight. Even had a rim! He shook out a rope, and following instructions, looped it loosely around the colt’s flanks in a slip knot, then tied the other end to the tire. The old man was almost giggling with glee now, no matter what happened there was going to be a show and the knowledge that he had orchestrated it was icing on the cake.
I was holding the colt, snubbed to my Galacenio, Zapata’s, saddle horn, when they told me to let him go. Even Zapata had a dim view of what was going down, and he wasted no time getting out of the corral. The colt took a step or two, then ducked his head and bucked, as usual, only this time the rope tightened up and dragged the tire bouncing through the dust a few feet behind him. He saw it, boogered sideways, bucked again, and was rewarded with an ever tightening flank rope.
The combination of the two unnerved him completely. He bucked until his tongue hung out, then began to run in desperate circles. The tire caromed in the air behind him, smashed into the gate you entered the corral from, and shattered it like a glass window. The colt spun around and bolted through the opening before anyone could haze him away from it, and raced down the driveway slinging the tire like a wrecking ball behind him. He took out the driver’s side window on Dave’s truck (JP’s brother-in-law) bashed the door in on BD’s, and then battered the rear panels on every truck he passed. Once through the maze of vehicles, he scrabbled and skated across the asphalt road until he got to the gravel of the parking lot across the street from us. Everyone was in hot pursuit.
Now the parking lot across the road from us belongs to a large and imposing brick church. with basement windows at the parking lot level, expensive, double paned windows for weather protection and easy cleaning, about three feet apart. Between each window was a brick facing, part of the foundation of the building. The colt raced past the church and the tire ricocheted from gravel parking lot to each brick divider, never once hitting the window beside it. One, two, three times, four, five, and then the tire smacked the corner stone and flew sideways, pulling the colt off balance and nearly off his feet. This brought the rope close enough to the stop sign on the corner that it could wind it’s self around it and pluck it from the ground like a stemmy flower. The stop sign and tire tangled up and swept the rope sideways into the colt’s hind legs, throwing him down on the lawn, thank goodness. Exhausted, shell shocked, and done with caring completely, the poor colt lay there on his side and wheezed for air.
That gave the guys plenty of time to get to him and remove the “sure fire” cure, plus a stop sign, which was hastily jammed back in the gaping hole and tamped with a boot. The rest of the damage was not so easily fixed and to this day Dave blames JP for the window of his truck. JP waved it off cavalierly with the remark he’d promised the colt wouldn’t buck again, which it didn’t, and it wasn’t his fault the corral gate wasn’t strong enough for the job at hand. And Dave had parked in his spot anyway and it served him right.
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