Its Head Came Off by Accident by Muffy Mead-ferro

Author:Muffy Mead-ferro
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: TwoDot
Published: 2012-09-18T00:00:00+00:00

8

Real Work and a New Horse

Work went on year-round on Spring Gulch Road, but the nature of the work itself underwent near-total transformations. The kind of work we did depended on the season and where we were in the cycle of a cow-calf operation. A particular job might go hard and fast every day for a while and then it would be done and halt completely. For me that was a good thing because I was short on patience; I liked it that when things were done, they were done, and many of them didn’t have to be done again for another entire year.

Winter, the longest season in Wyoming, was relatively quiet. The cows were home from the range and had to be fed every morning, but that wasn’t as much of a hurry-up job as branding or haying. It just seemed in winter that all the ranch inhabitants, the ranch hands as well as the animals, were moving more slowly and not going as far. (Ranchers in Wyoming used to let the cows forage over the winter like the elk did, but in the mid-1880s there was a winter that resulted in a loss of cattle so devastating that some people still refer to it as “the great die-off.” After that a lot of cattle ranches shrunk in size and started growing hay to feed their cattle rather than making them dig through the snow.)

Until we bought the big new tractor when I was in junior high school, we used a team of draft horses to pull the hay wagon on runners over the snow-covered fields, with one man driving the team and one or two others balancing atop the pile of hay, pitching it off as they went. Sometimes, no one needed to drive the team. The Clydesdales could follow the same familiar circuit through the big pastures, if necessary, without needing a driver to work the lines, and all the hands could be up on top, pitching hay. The draft horses knew their own names—for instance, Chub and Shorty—and they responded to simple voice commands. And unlike a tractor, they wouldn’t just run over an obstacle, such as a cow giving birth that was unable to get out of their way.

The workhorses were serious animals, and they didn’t socialize much with the other horses or with us. I was a bit afraid to even give them a handful of grain in the corral because their oversize teeth and hooves struck me as potentially quite destructive. But they were steady and reliable and never seemed to fuss with their load, plodding out across the snow blowing steam. Ray was the one who broke the draft horses to pull the sleigh, and his method was efficient. He would hitch up a completely green horse in the harness next to an experienced one, and though the next few miles were pretty hard on the new horse, the old horse, and Ray, it didn’t take long for the new horse to figure out what to do.

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