Saddle Pals
A Short Story by Patti Hudson

I didn't know it would be the last time we trailed cattle together, that winter Jake called and said the Bar J needed us. We had been saddle pals for so long neither he nor I could remember exactly how or where we met. But like most horsemen, we could clearly recall the animals we were riding at the time. (I was just starting a conscientious young filly that would die too soon and Jake was on an ornery old buckskin that would live into his thirties and still be bucking people off.) By this measure, we had climbed the spruce-blued mountains, loped across grassy meadows, picked our way through the rocks and gray-green sagebrush of Eastern Oregon in every season, on good horses and bad, for more than twenty years. We knew the John Day, the Powder, the Snake; how each of their tributaries ran and where to look for cattle the way a Portlander can sniff out the nearest Starbucks.

We were day riders, hired by ranchers whenever they needed help gathering and moving cattle from one range to another. Over the years it came to be expected if one of us was called to ride it meant we were to bring the other. We always rode as a pair and got paid to do what either of us would have done for free, if not for professional pride. We weren't wannabes, like the recreational riders and town dwellers who sometimes tagged along to play cowboy for a day, taking off from their regular jobs and riding for no pay.

Jake and I were not hobby horsemen. We were buckaroos, worth $50 to $75 a day in the Northwest, perhaps as much as $100 in California if we'd had any desire to live in such an over-regulated, overpopulated place. We did once talk about Texas; what it would be like to wear shirt sleeves in January, watch our horses graze on year-round pastures and not have to pitch hay and chip ice off the water troughs to keep them alive. Then I met my first Texan. It was it at the Pendleton Roundup and we were dancing close. He asked what I did for a living and I said I was a buckaroo. “Sounds sort of Howdy Doody-ish,” he said.

I stepped back and puffed up with self-importance and told him how in the Great Basin it was an honor to be called a buckaroo. It meant you were a specialist and above any work that couldn't be done horseback. Aside from a high level of prestige that came with being labeled a buckaroo, I pointed out that the term was without gender bias and had been that way long before political correctness started neutering the language. Not that I minded being called a cowgirl, it just wasn't necessary to separate the boys from the girls, since once we're horseback with 1200 pounds of muscle between our legs we're all pretty much equal.

I was still half-mad later when I bumped into Jake at the Rainbow Room and told him about the Howdy Doody comment. He bought me a beer and said Texas was out. “I sure as hell don't want to go anywhere I might get thought of as a puppet. Believe I'll just stay right here in the Big Empty where nobody's pulling my strings.”

We both were fairly independent and liked working freelance in a part of the country that still valued a well-educated horse and an able rider. But every now and then one of us would get to thinking we needed more stability in our lives and sign up for a full-time ranch job -- the sort that came with a house, a pickup and a small but steady paycheck. For this bit of security you got to fix fence, maintain irrigation ditches, run heavy equipment, and toil at any number of other tasks in which you were not allowed to utilize your skills with horse or rope. Still, there were some opportunities to ride, and when it came time to gather cows, to move them or sort or ship or brand, whichever one of us had the job always called the other to come and help.

Jake tended to take these seven-days a week nightmares more frequently than I did. But they rarely lasted long. As soon as he felt there was even the slightest possibility someone might try to pull his strings, he was out of there and back like me, trying to find affordable housing far enough away from traffic noise and city lights to still be able to hear the coyotes and see stars at night.

Ranch work was a little too steady, but buckarooing was rarely steady enough. Vet bills and feed costs and truck repairs, the want of a new saddle or the need for a younger horse could occasionally send us looking for employment completely outside the field. One year I was driving log truck and there was a popular song on the radio about a girl sitting on her daddy's knee and her daddy telling her she could be anything she wanted to be. When I finally got a day off to ride, Jake asked, “Is that what your daddy did to you to make you want to ride broncs and drive big trucks?”

I told him the only thing I remembered about my daddy's knees was being laid across them for a whipping. We didn't talk too much about our families. I knew he had been married once or twice and had grown children he saw from time to time. He knew I had never been married, never had children and had no regrets about either. That was all the family history we cared to share.

We were more likely to talk about our animals than our people. But we could trail cattle all day without saying a word. We didn't need to fill the distances we covered with conversation when we had all that scenery stretching before us. Sometimes we would pull up our horses to watch a herd of elk spill through the sagebrush like spring runoff, or stop to look down into the breaks of the Snake and glimpse an eagle hunting far below. We would gaze awhile and then ride on, never diminishing what we had seen with small talk. The landscape was too big for words and the work so instinctual it wasn't necessary to discuss what we were doing. We'd ridden together enough to know what to expect of each other. We knew how to position ourselves to one another and to the herd, moving as the cattle and the terrain dictated. When we needed to separate, we knew without saying which ridges and draws each would ride and where to meet up again.

We were as familiar as an old married couple, though we never once touched that it wasn't in the course of work - helping the other to their feet after a horse wreck; bumping knees if our horses squeezed together at a narrowing of the trail; brushing up against one another while trying load a young colt in a strange trailer. Jake came from a generation that thought women deserved special consideration, but the only time he showed that side of himself was in town. If we stopped at the feed store for vet supplies or a cafe for lunch, he always got the doors for me. I let him do what he had to in public. When we rode, we were equals and split the work right down the middle, whether it was riding the rougher country, roping the biggest stock or just getting off to open a gate.

There was one day, though. I was galloping after an elusive bunch of steers when my horse tripped in a badger hole and came down on top of me. My foot was crushed and soon swelled so badly I eventually had to cut my boot to get it off. Jake helped me back on, got every gate, then hauled me home, helped me to the couch, unsaddled my horse and made me supper.

“I expect you'll get a chance to return the favor one day,” he said when I protested.

I did, just a couple years later, when a bull ran him and his horse through a barb wire fence and left them both unable to travel. I rode two hours to get help and then nursed Jake and the horse for a month.

“I'm glad to have you,” he said one day when I came in from changing the dressing on his gelding's leg.

I told him I was just returning a favor. The horse finally went sound, but Jake had spent enough time around large animals to already have a bad back. It just got worse after that and he was never again able to shoe his own horses. I kept his and mine all shod for the next few years, until a blue-eyed roan dumped me on a basalt outcrop.

Our backs were both out the day my mare, who had been a young filly when Jake and I met and was now the most dependable horse I owned, slipped and broke her leg. We were deep into an erratic winter of thawing and freezing and the pasture was a sheet of ice. Maybe it's because I don't have much other family, but I get attached to my animals and I was more attached to this one than any before or since. Quick and smart and honest to the bone, she was the kind of horse you come across maybe once or twice in a lifetime, if you're lucky. It was a horseman's paradox: You should never let yourself love the good ones, because it will always be the good ones you lose. But when you have a good one, knowing the odds are against you, somehow makes you love them even more.

I didn't call a vet; I called Jake and he was there in ten minutes with his big .45 Colt.

“A person shouldn't have to shoot their own horse. That's what saddle pals are for,” he said, then did what I couldn't.

The sensible thing would have been to rent a backhoe, but Jake and I were neither sensible nor flush enough to hire a piece of equipment. We put on our neoprene and velcro back supports, popped a bunch of Ibupropren, found a patch of partially thawed ground and started chipping away at a grave. It takes a big hole to bury a horse and by the time the sun fell behind the Blue Mountains and started to pink up the sky we were worn out, in need of stronger pain killers and nowhere near finished. Jake pulled his pickup around and fetched a bottle of whiskey from behind the seat. When it got dark he turned the headlights on and we worked through the night, alternating between a shovel and a whiskey bottle.

In the morning we winched the mare's stiffened body into the grave. Jake took off his hat and said, “There's one that won't soon be forgotten.”

She wasn't. For years afterward I rode the densest, most corrupt horses I could find, just to save myself the emotion of losing another. I ended up with a herd of unlikable creatures that wouldn't die. They never got sick or went lame or tore themselves up on barbwire. I had no vet bills and no attachments.

“What the hell kind of life is that?” Jake asked one day when we were sorting pairs and I was trying to justify riding an animal that gave me no pleasure.

Not long after that I started looking for something better. By the time Jake and I took our final ride together I had a big dun gelding I was starting to like pretty well.

“He's gonna make you a helluva good partner,” Jake said as we came up out of Cottonwood Canyon pushing a bunch of late stragglers across a snowblown flat toward their winter feed grounds.

“Yeah,” I said. “That's what scares me. You know what happens to the good ones.”

“Nothing lasts forever,” Jake said.

He was short of breath and coughing quite a bit and if I'd thought about, I would have known what he was trying to tell me. He was a two-pack-a-day Marlboro man. I always gave him a hard time about it, telling him we were like the two cowboys riding the range in the anti-tobacco advertisement. The one with the cigarette in his month turns and says, “Hey, Bob. I've got emphysema.”

But what Jake got was a faster killer. I must've known it. Looking back, I remember riding through the sagebrush, how sweet it smelled and how I could feel the vibrations of Jake's horse on the frozen ground coming right up through my own horse. I remember how cold my feet and hands were and how the snow stung and cut into my face and how hard it was see the cows in front of us. I remember hoping we would still have them all when we got to the ranch and wondering if we would make it there before dark; before I started losing digits to frostbite. And I remember thinking, as miserable as I was, there was no place else I'd rather be and no one else I'd rather be with.

He called from the hospital six weeks later. “Take me home,” he said, his voice such a rheumy murmur I didn't know who it was at first. “I want to see my horses.”

He couldn't sit up without assistance, much less stand and walk. His cancerous lungs were so filled with fluid he had to fight for every breath. “Drowning,” he said, gasping for air. “Goddamn miserable way to die.”

He had already pulled his IV needle. I wrapped a blanket around him and carried him out of there. He was so wasted away; I doubt he weighed more than a sack of feed. A nurse tried to stop us, but backed away when Jake looked at her and she saw the desperation in his eyes. I got him in my pickup and drove to the little house he was renting at the edge of town. I propped him on the couch in front of a big picture window that looked out on the snow covered field where three diligent cow horses stood with their backs to the north wind. First one, then the other two swung their heads to look at him. Jake smiled faintly. I turned and went into the bedroom and pulled his .45 from the holster hanging on the bedpost.

“I’ll go take care of your ponies,” I said, laying the big gun in his lap.

“I’m glad to have had you for a saddle pal,” he said as I slipped out the back door and waited in the cold for Jake to once again do what I couldn’t.

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