As I walked through the mare pasture,  a blaze faced chestnut mare came up to me, and nuzzled my hand as I stood quietly in the dew sparkled morning Bermuda grass. I got to thinking about her ancestry.

Her daddy was a quarter horse I met out in the west Texas town of Fort Davis. They called him “bud”. He had some Poco Tivio breeding crossed with some Hancock. He was a big horse, but so well proportioned that if you weren’t  next to him he didn’t look big. However if you were next to him you’d be really close, because he was super friendly. He was even nice under saddle, so much so that riding him you wouldn’t know he was a stallion.

A real gentleman.

We bred him to a mare  whose daddy was named “Slim”. I remembered Slim as a cutting horse who worked best on really “bad” cows. Easy  cows bored him. But get him in front of a heifer who wanted to run over him and he was awesome! He was sired by a full brother of the famous “Jewels Leo bar” known as “freckles”. That brother was called “Son o sugar”. The mare Slim was bred to, was the daughter of a local stallion named Jody who was an incredible roping horse, a powerful cow horse, and a dream of a trail-riding, smooth, saddle horse.

My mind reeled back through the generations of this mare’s family and I realized that I knew all of them, I rode all of them and their genes were packed into her and the baby she was incubating. Other than feeling real old, it also made me feel proud and thankful for the gift of these great horses and for the decades of wonderful experiences they gave us.