I TRY TO GIVE THE HORSES I work with a safe place to be and a sense of peace. Sometimes this means their just standing near me for a quiet moment. The feeling may not hold long because trust doesn’t just happen, but I know the horses feel the peacefulness. I felt it that night in the backyard when I was crammed into the barrel with my dog Duke. For a little while I was in a safe place for the first time since my mom died—a little cold, but safe.
I can’t help remembering this time spent with Duke when it’s time to wean our young colts. We wean them when they’re six months old, and no matter how many years I work with horses, I still feel sympathy for the youngsters. I know the terror that must well up in them when we separate them from their mothers, and I try to make being weaned as easy for them as I can.
The colts make a clean break from the mares. I like to take the colts out of earshot, so the mares don’t hear their cries and become frantic. Mothers love their babies, and it’s hard on them, too.
The first few months of life are a very precious time for the foal and the mare. The mare’s instincts have evolved over thousands of years, and she knows more about her baby’s needs and comfort level than I do. My colts end up being comfortable with my presence and handling after I wean them.
The first few days of separation are a troubling time for these young horses. It’s therefore necessary that they have the chance to work things out for themselves. Quite often the colts take support from one another because we leave them together as a herd. To further help the process along, I always put a “baby-sitter” in with the newly weaned colts, usually an older retired gelding whose stability is reassuring to the little ones. This isn’t an idea I came up with on my own—people have been doing it for years, but because of what I went through as a kid, I know what it feels like to have my mother taken away. I understand the reassurance and comfort that can come from a stabilizing factor.
The colts get along well with the gelding. In the beginning he’s a calming influence. Later on he provides discipline within the group, which helps keeps delinquency to a minimum.
We leave the youngsters alone at first. They need to be with other weanlings and their “baby-sitter” without being disturbed. You’re not going to teach them a whole lot while they’re troubled and insecure. But if you give them time to settle themselves before you begin halterbreaking them, there is a good chance these young horses won’t become herdbound or socially bankrupt. They’ll get from you what you are responsible for giving: guidance, teaching, and a safe place to be.
We begin working with the babies at the point when they are peaceful and beginning to be relaxed about not being nursed by their mothers. We give them the gift of time. This is something every baby deserves—horse or human. It’s the time when we start a lifelong relationship with the babies. We replace their mothers, and they place their lives in our hands. I view this as an honor and privilege as well as a responsibility.
The first order of business when I work with a young horse is to replace that awful void created by separation from his mother. She’s no longer there as a friend and, most important, as a leader. Leadership is what his mother had to offer. Hopefully, a young horse gets it from a good human, but, unfortunately, that’s where humans often fall short.
After a day or two, when the colts’ cries for their mothers begin to subside, we start halterbreaking them. We work the colts on the end of a halter rope, driving them around a round pen. We help them operate without being afraid, learning how to be led, or guided, by a human the same way their mothers led them. The colts don’t begin by viewing humans the same way they did their mothers, but in time they can if a human offers support and not just affection.
Did you ever wonder how a mare can get her colt to follow regardless of whether he’s hungry or not? She doesn’t own a halter or rope, and she doesn’t pull on him or otherwise force him to submit. Instead, she uses the herding instinct in both herself and her colt. She gets behind him and nudges his hindquarters—a little on the right, a little on the left—and all with just a gentle touch of her nose. Once the colt’s feet are moving, she slips in front in order to “draw” his energy with her.
This technique is very useful in a variety of circumstances. You don’t have to pull or try to dominate. You can put pressure on without being domineeringly physical. Once you’ve created the energy, you can then draw it in the direction you want to go. Subtle actions can have great effects, and believe it or not, some of this herding instinct remains in us humans, too.
Young children have little control over what happens to them. However, becoming adults gives them an opportunity to put things together and become sure of themselves. Many of you probably had some sort of black mark on your life when you were a youngster. You may have been abused or abandoned, but if as an adult you use these experiences to justify some proclaimed inadequacies, then you’ve made a mistake and missed some opportunities.
Adults are given free choice. When you grow up, you can’t blame your inadequacies on your father for having been mean to you, for having whipped you, or on your mother for having been mean to you, or on anything else done by your aunt, or your uncle, or your grandparents. You have to take responsibility for what you are and where you’re headed.
Horses are different from humans. We have to take responsibility for horses simply because they’re always in our care. They can’t get along without us. They’re forced to live in our world. That’s why the rules have changed: an adult horse in our world is still our responsibility. This doubles the burden for us humans. A human must be responsible for himself and for his horse. And when you succeed in both of those areas, life will be pleasant for you as well as for everyone around you.
In all the years that I’ve been giving clinics, I’ve heard a lot of people talk about how their horses have been abused. After they’ve told me all the things that a horse does and doesn’t do for them, they’ll tell me how they’ve rescued him. Sometimes these people sound as if they’ve started making excuses for the inevitable failures they have already mapped out for themselves. It’s almost as if they feel that, having saved an abused horse, it’s all right for them to fail at their horse work because, in their own minds, at least, they’ve been Good Samaritans.
However, many of these horses haven’t been abused at all. They may have been neglected, or they may not have a lot of quality, or they may have lacked an adequate education, but they haven’t been abused.
When it comes to a horse that truly has been abused, there are some things you need to understand. You can’t cure what’s wrong with him by just being sympathetic. You can’t help him by just leaving him be and doing nothing.
That holds true for all abused creatures, as I found out about myself.
Some people think that the foster child program is always a bad situation. Well, let me tell you, it’s not. Some really good people out there have put a lot of children’s lives back together, with many happy endings.
After Mom was gone, our life with Dad got worse by the day. I’m sure if we’d been around another six months, one or both of us would have died, because Smokie was getting to the point where he wasn’t going to take it much longer. Every day on the way home from school, we’d walk along the creek bottom that wound through the willows about a mile from the house in Whitehall, and we’d wonder if we were going to be around to make the same walk the next day, or if we were going to die at the hands of our father. The action that Johnny France took turned out to be the turning point in our lives.
Forrest and Betsy Shirley lived on a ranch outside Norris, just down the road from Bozeman. In addition to having raised four kids of their own, they had also provided a home for seventeen foster boys. Some stayed just for a short time, others for longer periods. Johnny France had been the first, and Smokie and I were the last. After we left, they didn’t take in any more. I think they either figured they’d done a good job and weren’t going to do any better, or we soured them on the deal altogether.
When Emery Smith, the social worker, dropped Smokie and me off at the Shirleys, we were a little scared. We were weary of dodging fists, belts, riding crops, and bowling trophies, and we weren’t sure what life had in store for us at this point.
Forrest had gone to Billings for a day or two, and only Betsy was at home. She was a tiny woman, but she was full of love, and she swept us into our new life. The first night we were there, everybody was watching TV in the living room. There was another foster kid named Joe, a cowboy named Royce who had been a foster kid and worked at the ranch now, and Betsy and some of her friends. The TV was blaring, Smokie and Joe were talking, and the adults were visiting. I was so exhausted I lay down on an old knotty pine bench and used a stack of Navajo blankets as a pillow. I looked over the side of the bench and found myself staring into the mouth of an old metal spittoon. All the visiting cowboys used it, and the most awful smell you could imagine filled my little corner of the room. I sat up, carefully pushed the spittoon toward Joe with the toe of my boot, and lay back down.
I closed my eyes and felt for the first time in a long time that I wasn’t going to be hurt. No matter how uncomfortable that little bench was, I felt at peace. No one was going to bother me. No one was going to stumble into my room drunk and holler at me, or make me get out of bed and sit at the dining room table in my underwear and listen to ranting and raving all night long. Spittoon and all, it was a very special night, and I carry it with me to this day.
The next morning, Smokie and I went down to help with chores at the barn. I just happened to be standing in the parking area by the ranch house when Forrest pulled in. I’d been wondering all morning what this man would be like and how he would treat Smokie and me. He’d been told what we had gone through, and I wondered if he was going to be sympathetic or uncomfortable and not know what to say. Was he not going to acknowledge us, or was he going to be mean to us like other men had been in the past?
Forrest got out of his truck and said, “You must be Buck.”
I just nodded. I couldn’t get any words to come out. My little legs were shaking. I was all of four-eleven and weighed eighty-seven pounds soaking wet. Forrest was six-four and had hands as big as those of any man I’d ever seen. He was a little wrinkled and old looking, but he still looked very strong.
Forrest walked toward me, and then, as if he had forgotten something, he turned on his heel and went back to his truck. When he reached into the front seat, I felt like a horse who’d been whacked too many times. What’s he reaching for? I wondered.
It was a pair of buckskin gloves. Forrest tossed them to me and said, “You’re gonna need these.”
The gloves fit me perfectly. They had that wonderful smell of new leather and were as soft as the skin on a foal’s nose. I couldn’t look at Forrest. I just couldn’t seem to process this simple act of kindness. Looking down at those gloves, considering the offering, I felt like a colt, confused and uncertain.
Forrest pointed to an old ranch truck and told me to get in with him. The truck bed was loaded down with fencing tools. Later on, I found out that Forrest always kept it loaded that way just in case he happened to have some company coming by for a free meal—he’d get a day’s work out of them first.
I crawled up into the front seat, and off we went to one of the far corners of the ranch. There Forrest showed me how to patch fence by stretching wire and driving staples. Fixing seventy-five-year-old barbed-wire fence turned out to be quite a job. About the time we’d get a wire tight—ping!—it would break ten feet away.
I was so proud of those gloves, it was kind of hard getting much work out of me. I didn’t want the barbs to tear them up. But work I did, and that afternoon in the pasture was a day that remains etched in my mind. It was a strangely comfortable time, filled with the smells of sage, lupine, and an occasional whiff of Forrest’s cigar.
We went out for hours that day and just fixed fence, stretched wire, and put in posts. Forrest never really said much to me about where I’d come from or what I’d been through, and I was so happy he didn’t. He just gave me something to do. He treated me as if I’d always been there, and I appreciated that.
I never realized at that age how wise he was, but I’m sure Forrest had put a lot of thought into his actions. We spent quite a few days together before he said much to me at all. And finally, around the time I was thinking, I wish he’d talk to me a little bit, he did just that. That’s where his influence really began with me.
I would give anything to still have that pair of buckskin gloves. I don’t know what ever happened to them, but I’ll never forget them or what they represented. I could buy a hundred pairs right now and they wouldn’t mean a thing to me, not like that pair did.
Smokie and I worked hard for Forrest, and he appreciated our effort. Deep down he felt sorry for us because of what we had gone through, but he was never overly sympathetic, and he never treated us special. He asked for discipline, but he didn’t have to be physical to get it. And he insisted that we have a sense of direction about our roles on the ranch. We weren’t just hired hands; we were part of the family.
Smokie was with the Shirleys for only a couple of years. After he graduated from high school he moved on, but for the time we were there, we both felt safe. We felt as if there was a chance we were going to grow old, maybe even get to be normal kids. Smokie was a bit of an introvert then, very much to himself, very quiet, and he still is. I was, too, for a while, but once I got a little confidence, I became more social and learned how to adapt around people.
Once Smokie and I started living with the Shirleys, we were able to do all the things we never got to do before. Our dad was so worried about us getting hurt in sports and ruining our rope-trick careers, he wouldn’t let us do anything. Now we finally got to play basketball and compete in track. Both Smokie and I were pretty good in sports, but then there were only forty kids in the whole school, so being pretty good wasn’t all that tough.
I went from having grades in the C’s, D’s, and F’s to pretty much straight A’s. I got a few B’s, but I was on the honor roll almost every quarter I was in high school. Smokie became a good student, too. Schoolwork came a little harder for him, but he studied harder than I did. That seems to be the way with a lot of siblings. One will be a good student and things will come easy, and the other will be a good student because he worked hard at it. I probably could have gotten all A’s if I’d studied, but all I wanted to do was play basketball, run on the track team, and chase girls.
This was in the mid-1970s, and all the other kids were listening to rock and roll. I didn’t. I listened to country music, and I dressed like a cowboy. I didn’t do a lot of the things the other kids were doing. I was too grown up for some of it, and I’d seen some things in life that a lot of those kids would never see. But I was still popular. I was the student body president, and I was on the varsity basketball team, so I wasn’t a total square. In a small school like that, even if you were a little bit square, you could still be part of the “in” crowd.
As far as girlfriends went, I had a few of them, too. You had to be careful not to trade around too often because you didn’t have to be very outgoing before you’d gone through every eligible girl around. Changing girlfriends was hard in another way, too, because we all knew each other so well that the girls were more like our sisters than girlfriends.
Smokie was never too interested in riding horses. He was more interested in the machinery, and putting up hay, and being more mechanical. It’s what led him into the Coast Guard right out of high school. After he left the ranch, he kept up his rope tricks a little bit. He can still do a few, and he rides once in a while, but he never really got into being a horseman and a cowboy like I did. It seems that if you grow up on a ranch, you either leave hoping you never see a cow or a horse again, or you spend the rest of your life trying to figure out how to get a ranch of your own put together. It seems to be one extreme or the other.
Smokie has a wife and kids now, and he has a happy life. We see each other every so often, but I don’t feel as if we have to reaffirm our relationship because we’ve been through so much together. I guess it must be like having gone to war with someone. Side by side, we felt fear and we shared it, and we held each other when we were scared that we were both going to die. Living through the tough times together created a bond that is everlasting. If I’ve needed him, he’s been there for me. When my first wife, Adrian, was in a coma, he left his Coast Guard station and took the chance of getting in quite a bit of trouble with his superiors, because he had to be with his little brother at such an awfully desperate time.
Smokie is a great guy. We will always be the best of friends, and we will always love each other deeply.
Forrest told me one time, “Son, if you want to ensure that you’ll always be able to eat, learn how to ride a colt and learn how to shoe a horse.” He taught me how to shoe horses, and, believe me, it wasn’t pretty. The only horses that neighboring ranchers trusted me with were the ones that were about as tough to shoe as anything that came down the line. They figured there wasn’t a lot of risk in letting me try to tack a set of shoes on them.
It didn’t take me too long to figure out that I wanted to make my living with my head higher than my butt, so I learned how to ride colts. Forrest raised a lot of Appaloosas and some Quarter Horses on the ranch, and he got me started riding the youngsters. It was pretty rough, and some of the things we did weren’t very kind, but we did the best we could with what we knew. We’d tie up a hind foot to get the young horse saddled. Then I’d step on while Forrest threw the gate open, and off I’d go for a ride. It was a rough deal. We didn’t work horses in a round corral, and it never dawned on us that getting a horse comfortable might help us live a little longer.
Most days were very long ones. These horses weren’t Ladybirds. I wasn’t being put on pets. There were a lot of wrecks, a lot of bronc rides, and a lot of runaways. In those days, everything we did seemed to be in a big cloud of dust. I rode a lot of tough horses at the ranch, and I learned what the reality of riding is all about.
I rode colts all through my junior and senior years of high school. I’d get up at four-thirty in the morning and ride two or three young ones before I’d get on the bus to go to school. In the evening, I’d ride another one or two when the weather allowed. That gave me quite a bit of experience by the time I turned eighteen, and I’d made a little money at it. For each kid Forrest and Betsy took in, the county gave them only a hundred bucks a month, so we foster kids had to help pay for our meals, clothes, and other expenses. By riding other people’s colts, I made enough to pay my share. I even saved enough to buy a used tan-and-rust four-door Plymouth Belvedere sedan that had more rust than paint. Smokie and I drove it back and forth to basketball practice when school was in session.
Anytime we could spring out of the ranch was a big party for us, and we’d take off and go to a rodeo. None of us could afford a horse trailer or roping horses, so we’d throw a bronc saddle in the trunk of our car and take off for the weekend. Saddle broncs were my event. We didn’t have much money, but we could live pretty cheap, and like a lot of kids in those days, we’d figure out a way to get someone to buy us a couple of bottles of Boone’s Farm or Annie Green Springs. If not, we’d forgo eating so we could afford a couple of bottles of that two-dollar wine.
And away we’d go riding bucking horses, chewing tobacco, telling cowboy stories, and chasing girls—all the stuff kids do that we hope to hell our own kids don’t do. We never hurt anybody, and it was a pretty harmless kind of fun.
I looked up to Royce because I thought he was pretty cool. He was older than I was, and he was a cowboy, which is what I wanted to be. I tried to copy some of things that he did, like chew tobacco. All the other cowboys that I was hanging around chewed, and I guess that’s why I started. I quit a number of years ago, and I’m just glad I never got into doing drugs, or anything like that, because quitting chew was hard enough to do.
I didn’t ride many broncs during my senior year in high school. In fact, I had pretty much quit rodeoing. It seemed every time I’d go, it was a net loss. Even if I rode well and made a little money, by the time I’d finished driving my car here and there across the country, buying meals and chasing around with the girls, I didn’t have anything left.
I enjoyed riding bucking horses. I wasn’t bad at it, and I rode a few, but it didn’t take me too long to figure out I had a lot better future learning how to get them to quit bucking. I was going to need a little nest egg to get out on my own, so after I graduated, I stayed home and rode colts all summer.
I’ve long since gotten over the hard times that I had as a kid, and I’ve learned from the things that pointed me toward the future rather than kept me in the past. Sometimes people may not understand how to approach an abused horse or one that’s had a lot of trouble. They’re so afraid of making mistakes that sometimes the biggest mistake they make is doing nothing. If the Shirleys had dwelled on the troubles my brother and I had had instead of providing us with discipline and a sense of direction, we would eventually have become spoiled, even more spoiled than kids who had been raised in a privileged home with unlimited amounts of money and material possessions. We’d have been spoiled because we’d have realized that Forrest and Betsy were willing to make exceptions for us because of our situation. Thank goodness they didn’t do that.
That time in my life, from the first day on the Shirleys’ ranch, made me understand the needs of horses that have been treated poorly and are scared or troubled. You can’t just fix things by showing them love while doing nothing with them. You have to give them some direction, a purpose, a job. They need something to do, a direction to take, a vision of the future so that the past eventually becomes irrelevant. A mistreated horse has more needs than a horse that has had a nice upbringing. You need to be understanding, and you need to have empathy, but you also need to know that an excess of empathy can get you into trouble. You need to provide discipline without forcing it.
Discipline isn’t a dirty word. Far from it. Discipline is the one thing that separates us from chaos and anarchy. Discipline implies timing. It’s the precursor to good behavior, and it never comes from bad behavior. People who associate discipline with punishment are wrong: with discipline, punishment is unnecessary.
Without discipline, it would be easy to become the kind of man my dad was.
Generally speaking, I despise and loathe noxious weeds. Some would think this is because they’re the scourge of the West, and because they deprive the cattle on our ranch from eating perfectly good grass that would otherwise have grown there. Actually, there are many scourges of the West, and although noxious weeds are one, I have other reasons for not liking them.
Starting about the time I was thirteen, I began to develop an imagination that was a little too busy for the adults around me to manage. Out back of our log horse barn was a small pasture that sat right on the creek bottom. It was a nice shady spot, and it was the home of our milk cow. She was a Jersey, a credit to her breed and gender, except that she was world famous among our cowboys who hated milking because she had terribly small teats.
Her pasture wasn’t used for anything else because it was completely full of cockleburs. Some refer to these botanical wonders as “burdock.” It’ll grow six feet high, and some plants have hundreds of burrs on them. If you get them in your hair, you just about have to get a haircut. Those burrs are like balls of Velcro or something out of a science-fiction movie.
Every once in a while, between calving and putting up hay and winter feeding, we’d have a little time on our hands in between projects on the ranch. That’s when occasionally I’d find myself bordering on getting into trouble. Forrest was always quite cognizant of this. He knew what I had in mind way before I’d even thought about it. About the time I was going to start causing trouble with the other boys or was on the verge of destroying something, I’d find myself down in the milk-cow pasture chopping weeds with a shovel. Forrest would send me down there with nothing but an irrigating shovel and instructions to dig up the burdock.
This task was tough when properly equipped for the battle, but armed with only a dull irrigating shovel, it was a mammoth undertaking for a little whelp like me. I hated that job. Every thirty days or so, I’d find myself back down in the pasture where it seemed there were three times as many cockleburs as there had been before—all that chopping had merely made them spread out.
For a few years I didn’t really catch on to the relationship between mischievous behavior and weed cutting. As I got a little older, I began to behave a little better. A certain sense of maturity came on, I guess. I was making money on my own then, riding colts and becoming more responsible, and I didn’t have to chop cockleburs quite as often.
However, about the time I was a senior in high school, I found myself down in the cow pasture again. I don’t remember exactly what I had done wrong, but it probably had something to do with staying out too late. I wasn’t too far from striking out and living on my own, and I figured I knew damn near everything a fellow needed to know.
Loaded with this infinite wisdom, I finally went up to the house and said, “Forrest, I’ve decided that you don’t have a very good system here. You don’t really know much about weeds, because I’ve been cutting weeds for five years on this ranch, and they’re just as bad now as they ever were, if not worse. And I’ve chopped my last weed. I refuse to cut another cocklebur. If you’ll go get a weed sprayer, I’ll be happy to spray every weed on the ranch, but cutting weeds is the dumbest thing I’ve ever heard of.”
He just laughed. He never said a thing—he just laughed.
A few months later I moved out on my own and started pursuing my life. Oddly enough, within two weeks after I left, Forrest went to town and bought a weed sprayer. It took one trip through to kill every cocklebur in the cow pasture. And they never came back.
Of course, at the time, I thought Forrest was trying to get me to kill all the weeds. He was actually having me preserve them until he was done raising his boys, and I was the last one. After I was gone he didn’t need the burdock anymore. The weed patch had served its purpose.
Sometimes you’ll work with colts that may be a little bit the way I was, kind of looking for an adventure when time permits. These colts are not bad, they don’t want to be bad, and they’re not trying to make things bad for you. They just might need a little something to do. They don’t need to be whipped, or knocked on, any more than I did as a kid. They just need to be directed, or better yet, redirected. So the work you do with colts like this may be like putting them in the cocklebur patch for a period of time. But don’t make them spend all their time in there. Give them opportunities to come out. You’ll find that eventually they’ll catch on. Punishing a horse for doing something wrong is no solution. A kick in the gut solves nothing. You’ll be farther ahead of the game if you redirect him toward where you’d like him to go.
Whenever I think back to the cocklebur patch, I realize we all have our weeds to clear in life. I learned more with that shovel than I can say. At the time, I sure wished Forrest had bought that weed sprayer a lot earlier, but he didn’t, and he probably saved me from the “domino effect” of bad behavior had my idle time gone unchecked.
This was the first example in my life of a person making the wrong thing difficult, and the right thing easy, as opposed to making the wrong thing impossible through intimidation. Forrest and Betsy gave me an understanding of what real love was about, what devotion meant, and how a lesson can be shared, not dictated. I think, above all, Forrest gave me a clear understanding of the difference between discipline and punishment.