Catching Dewie’s Mare

 

     I was a tad grouchy that October morning, forty-some years ago, when my old stock truck rolled along the Snake River and onto the flatlands where Dewie and Carolyn lived in a barn above their fluctuating herd of horses. Dewie was a horse trader, Carolyn a horse tamer and carpenter. Dewie said he always had more horses than he could afford, and Carolyn claimed they had three doors in the barn house that went nowhere.

     Dewie stood with a rope halter outside a pole corral with half a dozen horses all snuffy, tails in the air, stirring up dust. When he saw me, he turned and hooked a boot heel in the corral fence and stuck out a paw. We shook hands and he asked what I was doing. 

     I allowed that I was headed to find winter work in California, that I had quit my ranch job in the high country yesterday when I discovered all my missing work gloves under the seat of the bosses truck, that I had not hit the cheap old bastard, did make him pay me every penny he owed me, and that I was a little bummed at the entire cowpoke game. What was he up to?

       He said he had spent the morning trying to get things calmed down enough that he could catch that buckskin mare out there, that she was horsing and he wanted to trailer her over to Idaho and breed her to a fancy stud over there. Did I want to try to catch her? He handed me the halter. 

    I went through the gate, walked directly up to the mare, she kinda stuck out her nose, I haltered her, and we walked back out the gate, just like that. Dewie snapped on a lead rope and tied her to the fence, saying that I was pretty good with horses and should rethink giving up the cowpoke profession. I went to California with my daughter and worked for a woman who had Hannoverian jumping horses.

     Twenty five years later I was rolling down a long straight stretch of eastern Oregon two-lane, thinking about my life, when I realized that Dewie had set me up, that my kid could’ve caught that mare with a piece of hay string, that he was just wanting me to feel better about myself. After all, he was the same guy I saw give a pocket knife to a young boy in exchange for what Dewie claimed was the nicest stick he had ever seen. You never learn younger.