Little Britches (26 page)

Every morning that first week Hi took the kinks out of Sky High before he went out to work the cattle. And every morning the colt broke wide open for a few seconds, but the white didn't show around his eyes any more, and he didn't tremble. After he had ridden Sky for a couple of miles, we'd change saddles, and Hi would let me ride him awhile, but he always rode his own blue right beside me. The colt always crowhopped a little after I got on, but he never did any hard bucking. Hi let me ride farther each morning. Then Saturday he tied the waterskin on behind my saddle and rode with me all morning while I took water to the men. Sky High didn't like the legs of the skin dangling against him. I could never tell when he was going to spook or crowhop, and had to keep my knees pinched in tight so I didn't get spilled.

By noon my legs were aching to beat the band from keeping them pinched up so tight on the saddle, and I had a lot of sagebrush scratches on them, because I couldn't always make Sky go right where I wanted him to. While we were eating dinner, Hi told me to put my saddle on Topsy and drag in half a dozen bundles of wood to hold Juan over Sunday, and then we'd get away early for the home ranch.

I didn't stop to have supper with the Y-B fellows at the home ranch, but made Topsy canter all the way, so I'd get home before dark.

Father was just coming in from milking when I rode into our yard. Mother came to the kitchen door, and all the youngsters came running out to see me. I hadn't known I was a bit homesick until I got in sight of our house, but when they all came running out to meet me my throat started swelling up, and I forgot all about my saddle and everything else except that I was so glad to be home.

It was a fine evening. Mother popped corn and let all of us but Hal stay up until ten o'clock. I told them all about the mountain ranch and the dogskin water bag and the chuck wagon. But I didn't say anything about Sky High or the bucking.

Father was awfully quiet, even for him, and I could tell he knew I was holding something back. I think I would have told him all about it if we had been somewhere alone, but I couldn't tell him with Mother and the others there. Whenever I wasn't talking I kept feeling guilty, so I told them all about dragging in wood for Juan's fire, and about Hi having his roan trained so he'd handle any kind of a mean animal without any reining. I said Hi was going to teach me how to train a horse that way.

Father just said that would be a good thing to learn, and that a man who could train a horse like Hi's blue roan would be able to teach me lots of worthwhile things about forethought and patience as well as horse handling.

Sunday morning I let Grace ride Topsy up to the corner and back on my saddle. Father went along on Lady, because Topsy was a strange horse, and he wouldn't trust Grace alone with her. Grace didn't like to have him go with her. I think she always did wish she had been a boy so she could have been allowed to do the things Father let me do.

We packed a picnic lunch and spent the whole afternoon down by Bear Creek, but we stayed away from the bridge where Fanny got hurt. Mother had a new book they had bought when she and Father went to Denver to hear Mr. William Jennings Bryan make a speech. It was
The Call of the Wild
, and Mother read to us most of the afternoon. I think I liked that book better than any one she'd read. While she was reading, Father and I whittled a sailboat. That is, Father whittled the boat part and I made the masts and split dry Spanish dagger leaves for the sails. Then Father rigged the sails and booms with string he had brought in his pocket. He fixed two long strings to the main boom so we could swing it from one side of the boat to the other as we walked along the bank.

While Mother and the others were getting supper fixed, Father and I sailed the boat down the creek. At a place where the current wasn't too swift, and where there was a pretty good breeze, we sat down on the bank and Father showed me how we could make the boat go either up or down stream by simply changing the angle of the sail. After I had learned how to do it and was moving the strings so to make the boat tack up against the breeze, Father said, "You know, a man's life is a lot like a boat. If he keeps his sail set right it doesn't make too much difference which way the wind blows or which way the current flows. If he knows where he wants to go and keeps his sail trimmed carefully he'll come into the right port. But if he forgets to watch his sail till the current catches him broadside he's pretty apt to smash up on the rocks." After a little while he said, "I have an idea you'll find that the current's a bit strong up at the mountain ranch."

Just then Mother hoo-hooed for us, so we took the boat out of the water and went back up the creek. While we were walking, Father fastened the strings so the sail couldn't move and tied the long cord onto the bowsprit. When we got to where Mother had supper laid out on the bank he gave the boat to Philip.

We left the creek just when the sun started to dip down over the highest mountain peaks, so I could get back to Cooper's before dark. When I went, Father walked out to the gate beside Topsy. He had his hand on my knee and was looking down at the ground, but he said, "Son, I want you to be a man and do the things men do, but I want you to be a good man. I'm not going to worry about you, but don't take foolish risks—and give the man who's paying you a good day's work. So long, partner." Then he waved to me as he closed the gate.

WE STAYED at the home ranch that night. Hi rapped on my window when it was just light enough so that I could see the outline of the cook shack against the sky. When I got my overalls on and went out to saddle Topsy, he was waiting for me at the corral gate. His blue was already saddled, and a pair of smooth leather chaps was hanging from the saddle horn. They were just my size and had silver disks along the sides of the legs and around the belt. Hi had cut down an old pair of his own to make them for me.

All the way up to the mountain ranch we talked about Sky High. Hi said there wasn't a mean streak in him anywhere, and that he had more brains than any other horse in the remuda, except his own blue. Then he told me to watch and I'd see that Sky always followed the same pattern in his bucking, and that he'd let me ride him from scratch just as soon as I had it figured out.

I didn't have to figure it out, though. All I had to do was close my eyes, and I could remember just how he did it. He'd rear high, bounce first left and then right for six jumps, then crowhop for a hundred yards and go into a stiff-legged run. I guess Hi liked it because I already knew. Anyway, he told me I could try it that morning, but to fall loose if I felt myself going. He said I might just as well get started if I was ever going to do it, because Sky might morning-buck all his first season. And it wasn't because he was mean, but just his way of showing how good he felt after a night's rest. He did buck every morning as long as I was there, and always just the same way. After I got used to it I could have ridden him blindfolded.

Hi started teaching me how to train Sky High right from that day. First it was breaking him to the rein, and teaching him to stop with a light pull on the line, then with just lifting them. By the time we went back to the home ranch the next Saturday he would rein either way without any pull, and come from a lope to a walk when I raised the lines with my hand. After that, Hi filed the rowel out of his bit.

I would have liked to ride Sky High home Saturday night, but Hi thought it would be better for me to take Topsy. I guess he thought Mother wouldn't let me come back if she saw the colt put on his morning show, and he was probably right.

I guess I never noticed how good a cook Mother was, or what good times we had at home, until after I went to work at Cooper's. It wasn't that I didn't like the things we had to eat at the mountain ranch, or that I didn't have a good time when I was up there. I did. It was only sometimes at night, after I was in my bedroll, that I'd even think about home. But always when I got to where I could see our house on Saturday nights, I'd be so homesick that I'd make Topsy run as fast as she could.

That week end we all went for a picnic up in Bear Creek canyon. It was the first time the other children had been up there, and I think Father had been planning it long before Sunday came. He had traded our old buckboard, and the colt he got for building ditch boxes, for an almost new spring wagon with two leather-covered seats and red-striped wheels. Mother had the lunch basket all packed when we got up Sunday morning, and Father and I did the chores as fast as we could. You could just barely see the tip of the rising sun when we drove out of our yard.

Father could tell every different kind of tree and rock and most of the bushes and flowers. And he didn't just point them out and say, "That's a spruce and that's a fir and that's a jack pine." He'd show us where this one was different from that one, until even Hal could tell them at a glance. Of course, Hal was too little to go on the hike up the canyon with us, or to climb up the side of the mountain, so he had to stay at the wagon and help Mother get lunch ready. But Father took the rest of us way up into a box canyon he had found when he was hauling fence posts. It was just like a big room, built off to one side of the main canyon, and the walls went up almost straight. He could call one of our names, and the mountains would keep calling it back till it sounded as if they were all full of people who knew us. And he found a smoky topaz for Muriel, and a piece of quartz with green agate in it, that he afterwards ground and polished for Grace.

Mother finished reading
The Call of the Wild
to us during the afternoon, and we didn't get home until time to do the milking. Father said I could have taken Topsy along with us. Then I could have saved about five miles by cutting across to Cooper's place from Morrison. I didn't want to do it, though, because I liked to help Father with the milking, and to have him walk out to our gate with me when I went, and say, "So long, partner."

I learned a lot of things during the six weeks we were at the mountain ranch. My real work didn't take more than an hour a day, and I spent all the rest of the time practicing the things Hi showed me. He taught me how to train Sky High until we could ride the two blue roans side by side, and make them do exactly the same things without even straightening a rein. And he taught me to swing a rope till I could spin it in a flat circle I could walk in, or make it dip to catch the leg of a running calf.

After that first week, I was the only one who ever got a leg up on Sky High, and I must have been on him at least twelve hours every day. As soon as I learned to handle a rope well enough so that I could get it on a calf and shake it off again without getting out of the saddle, Hi helped me break the colt for handling a steer. The first thing we did was to pare his forehoofs right down to the quick so they were tender. Then we set shoes on his hind feet. Always before, when I would snub a calf to the saddle horn, Sky would set his forelegs against the lunge, but Hi said that would be bad with steers. He said that in a couple of years the colt would get sprung knees and never be able to take quick turns. Sky didn't do it any more, though, after his front hoofs were trimmed.

I don't know how many steers I roped in the next few days, but there were lots of them. Sky High's forehoofs got tenderer and tenderer, till by the end of the third day he'd sit down— almost like a dog—and dig his shod hind hoofs into the ground the second my rope settled around a steer's neck. Then he'd take the weight off his forelegs till his hoofs would skim along the ground as light as a dragged hat.

He had just two bad faults that bothered me: he wouldn't always keep a tight line, and he wouldn't always keep his head pointed right at the animal. That way, a breachy steer would rush us every once in a while, or nearly tip us over sideways. I asked Hi what I ought to do about it, and he said, "You take Topsy to peddle water with tomorrow, and we'll let an old bull learn that Sky boy a good lesson."

I lay awake in my bedroll for a long while that night, worrying about what kind of lesson Hi was going to let an old bull give Sky. I had seen a bull rip one horse's belly open, and I didn't want anything to happen to my colt. A couple of times I started to ask Hi what he was going to do, but he was a lot like Father in some ways: he liked to show me how to do things, but he didn't like me to ask questions about it beforehand.

I took the waterskin on Topsy the next morning, and the old bull gave Sky High a hard lesson. Hi put a heavy, double-cinched saddle on the colt. Then he had two of the boys help him catch and halter the biggest bull in the valley. They tied a long rope from the bull's halter to the horn of Sky High's saddle, led them out into the middle of the valley, and took the colt's bridle off.

The bull didn't like the idea of being tied away from the herd. He put his tail up and his head down the minute he was loose, and charged off toward the hills. When he hit the end of that rope, he was at right angles with Sky, and they looked like a pair of acrobats I saw at a carnival. The bull turned a somersault and the colt rolled over onto his back with his heels kicking. Sky High was up first, but the bull was up maddest. That time he didn't charge toward the hills, but right toward Sky. The colt dodged clear and the bull went past him. He circled before he got to the end of the line and charged again. Sky High sidestepped out of the way and raked a chunk of hair off the bull's rump with his teeth. By that time there was a loop of rope lying on the ground clear around Sky. When the bull hit the end of it, it knocked all four feet out from under the colt, and tied him up like a calf ready for branding. Every time Sky would try to get up, the bull would yank on the rope and tip him over again.

I had seen all I could stand, and kicked my heels into Topsy's ribs. As she started I dug my free hand into my hip pocket for my knife, but I never got it out. There was a whistle around my head and Hi's rope tied me up like a chicken for roasting. He could have jerked me right out of the saddle, but he didn't. So when the rope tightened around my arms, I pulled Topsy up without meaning to, and Hi slid his blue to a stop beside me. "Lookin' to get yourself killed?" he asked. "What do you think that bull would do when you lit down to cut that rope? Now you hightail on up the canyon and get some water to them boys, and don't come back till dinner. If that colt can't learn to get out of his tangles, he ain't worth savin'."