When God created the cowboy she did so with a sense of humor that only a cowboy could appreciate, by giving dogs a sense of smell 30,000 times more powerful than a human. The result of this is that when you ride out horseback with your cow hounds in tow, the first rabbit trail you encounter will relieve you of your canine helpers as they zigzag out through the brush yelping to one another, “I got it! “Or “no, over here! “Or “there he goes!” Well, you whistle to them, and if you’re lucky, or have control collars on them, they come back and you progress toward the cow herd. Now, a little farther on you spy a deer, off to your right. As she ducks off into the Yaupon brush, dear doggy catches a whiff of her trail. Of course at first the deer’s scent is not directional, so that browser goes screaming off to your left in pursuit of the smell, only to discover at about 100 yards that the trail is cooling. So what does he do? He reverses and comes full speed back toward the trail of the deer, spooking your green quarter horse as he zips by at warp speed! The really twisted part of this joke is that God created deer to run just a weenie bit faster than cow dogs. So they can never catch them. Not that they’d know what to do with them if they did. Our cowboy is now spending half an hour whistling and trumpeting for hounds that are half a mile away. Having finally reacquired your pack you now have only minor inconveniences such as armadillos, turtles or squirrels to distract the canine mind. If you’re lucky your hounds may have enough energy left to actually help pen cows!
Monthly Archives: June 2016
Chuckwagon and Sourdough
Chuckwagon cooks are frequently referred to as “sourdoughs.” Not just because the front part of the word, “sour” refers accurately to their legendary personality trait, though, that is certainly often valid. The term refers to their use of an age-old leavening agent derived out of necessity from natural ingredients known as “sourdough.” Being in remote locations and often days from grocery stores, and rapid rise yeast packets, chefs of the range resorted to the tendency of sweetened flour and water mixtures, combined with root crops like potatoes, to grow a culture of natural yeast and bacteria. These “starters”, then would help bread and biscuits “rise.” They would also impart their particular tangy flavor to dough goods.
Some starters are more than a century old, kept going in families and institutions, but we often make them up on the spot for short-term use. This is what I was up to one day when I stirred water, flour, potatoes and molasses into my Marshall pottery crock to use for a feast we were preparing. It being a warmish day, I set the crock on the bed of our old Dodge ranch truck, parked in the shade of the tractor shed, to “work. “And “work” it did! The next day I returned to find the bed of the pick up “Painted” in off-white sourdough and smelling like a brewery! The cheesecloth was 10 feet away! Fortunately, I had mixed up a double batch, so there was still enough starter to make biscuits for the chuckwagon that day. I only wish that I could have been there to see Old Faithful erupt!
Horses still; despite the “infernal combustion” engine
So why do we mess with riding and training horses when we have jet airplanes, pick-up trucks, tractors, ATVs, and the Internet? Perhaps because they keep us grounded? Oh, I didn’t mean just when we fall off, it’s about dealing with something more elemental than machines, deadlines, clocks and “infernal combustion engines.” Horses bring us back to earth-time, they are more organic, more in tune with our own brain and central nervous system, which unlike Detroit, hasn’t come out with a new model in millennia!!
Sure, to most of us our horses are for recreation, they may even be our psychiatrist! Meanwhile, in certain places and in certain jobs the team of horse and rider are still indispensable. In agriculture for instance, ranch horses still occupy an important place. But they also find use in law-enforcement and in search and rescue, and security. The human on a horse can get to more inaccessible places, faster and with less expenditure of fossil fuel then ATVs. For this reason horses have not been totally replaced by machines, and increasingly on small organic farms, in forestry and in livestock work the horse continues to reign supreme as our work partner.! Besides, a four wheeler won’t come to the fence when it sees you come out your back door!
The Weight of the Leather
The great controversy between contact and no contact continues to rage in my mind! However, I feel like I’m getting closer to an understanding of some kind of universal truth.It all started back when I was a teenager (no, we didn’t ride dinosaurs). I was working with my mentor, a rancher – horse trainer. I was trying to learn how to train horses at the same time as trying to learn how to ride horses. This method, by the way, is not recommended. I did actually sign up for “English” riding lessons. There I was instructed to “post” the trot and to make contact with the horse’s mouth using a snaffle bit. Returning to my mentor, assuming he’d be impressed by my newfound knowledge what I heard was “Don’t hang on their head!” He and his compadres were of the old cavalry school prior to World War II and they were using horses for ranch work. They needed a “using horse”, one who would be light and responsive, with the reins held in one hand.They didn’t want a “hard mouthed” horse. Later when I was trying to learn dressage, every time I made contact with the horse’s mouth I was haunted by the echo “don’t hang on their head! ” It was like aversion training. But slowly I learned to ride a balanced seat, without “waterskiing” on the reins. I learned to use my hands independently of my body and seat. I didn’t resort to using the reins to stay on the horse. Now, I can actually take a soft contact with the horse’s mouth and follow the movement of his head with a relaxed hands and elbows. I’m beginning to see a contact as “the weight of the leather.”