He-Wolf of a Hand

Sometimes a story you tell on yourself will embarrass you, you have to ask yourself “was I really this dumb”.  Of course the answer is, yes…I was really that dumb…or was I ten feet tall and bulletproof?

Many years ago, I worked on the LS Ranch.  This was right after I was out of college and I was a legend in my own mind.  Probably the greatest hand with a horse the world had ever seen.  There wasn’t one that could buck hard enough or run fast enough to get away from me!  I was a regular holy terror!  A wolf of the world (to borrow a line from a Chris Ledoux song)!  There wasn’t anything anybody could tell me that I didn’t already know about horses!  Looking back now…I was a train wreck waiting to happen!

At the time I worked on the LS, it was “only” about 12,000 acres.  Considerably smaller than it was back in its heyday, when it covered a large portion Texas Panhandle.  But it was plenty big enough to put some miles on a colt.  And I took full advantage of that.  When I wasn’t caught up in the everyday cowboy requirements, I rode colts all over that place.  I could not believe they were paying me to do this kind of work, a whoppin’ $700 a month too!  A small fortune for me back then!  I really only had one time that I regretted my career choice….

Pride Goes Before Getting Pitched in the Dirt

I have always had buddies that were involved in rodeo and for a while I was too.  There are always stories about rodeo and probably anybody that has participated in it, has several…some they can share….some they’d better not!

Several years ago…about 25, to be exact, I got the chance to ride a bareback horse.  I thought this would be fairly easy, after all…I was a pretty fair hand at colt startin’.  I always liked ‘em best, back then, if those colts would buck…a lot.  So I thought ridin’ a bareback bronc couldn’t be a whole lot different.  I mean, after all, it just a buckin’ horse and instead of a saddle….you got that little suitcase handle to hold onto.  How hard could it be?  Heck, I was ridin’ a bull or two back then too….surely they were a whole lot harder to ride than a bareback horse.  I felt confident and almost over qualified to ride a bareback horse, so I thought I would give it a whirl!