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But he wouldn’t move. I spat in the dirt and glared at the horse. He looked placidly back at me, chewing. Maddening.
It was one of John Cosgriff’s horses. They’re grazing on our place for the winter, but they’re not supposed to come in the yard. Otherwise they’d tear up the grass and leave turd piles for us to remember them by. There’s a three-rung wooden fence that surrounds most of the yard except where it abuts Otter Creek, and John had run a single white strand of electric fence along the creekside. Between the three-rung fence and the single-strand electric fence, the yard was fully enclosed. But this horse had gotten into the yard enclosure somehow. I needed to get him out.
He was grazing down by Otter Creek, at the far side of the enclosure from the gate. The reason he was at that end of the yard was that the rest of the herd, which was still outside the enclosure, was grazing on the opposite side of the creek. This horse, like all horses, wanted to stay as close to the others as possible. They’re herd animals. I grew up around horses, and I knew that one of the toughest things to make a horse do is leave the herd. It’s as difficult as driving a cat, or making a cat come to you, or teaching a cat to retrieve, or making a cat do anything useful for that matter.
Well, maybe not that hard, but it is difficult. Most of John’s horses are fairly skittish, so I figured I’d try to drive the horse over to the gate. Although it’s not easy for a single person to drive a reluctant animal, I figured I could use the fenceline to my advantage the way an open-field tackler uses the sideline – to limit his options. I’d just drive him along the fence until we reached the gate. So I walked toward the horse.
And he came to me as I approached. He stopped a couple feet away and reached his nose toward me like he was going to bite a button off my jacket. Clearly, I thought, you can’t drive a horse that won’t run from you. So I spoke softly to him and lifted my hand. He sniffed my glove then resumed sniffing my chest. Slowly I lifted my hand to his neck and petted it. I can get a lead rope on this horse, I thought. I’ll just lead him out. That’ll be easier than trying to drive him.
So I retrieved Duke’s leash from the truck, tied a piece of nylon rope to the end of the leash to lengthen it, and walked back to the horse. I approached slowly. Again he reached out as though he wanted to make a snack of my buttons. Again I let him sniff my hand, and again I reached up to his neck. I slipped the leash over his neck and tied it in a knot that wouldn’t slip and strangle the horse under tension, then I tugged on it. The horse started after me, and I congratulated myself on knowing my way around horses. Once you know one horse, I thought, you know a good bit about the rest of them. Then the horse got more reluctant, and I had to pull to keep him going. He slowed further, and I was leaning against the rope as I pulled. Then he stopped altogether.
“Come on, now,” I said. I pulled. The rope slipped through my hands.
I wrapped the rope around my knuckles and pulled. “Come on, damn you!” But still, nothing. I pulled again, this time with sustained effort. The horse held his head high and leaned back ever so slightly, bracing against his front hooves, and the only thing that changed was that my knuckles hurt. I might as well have been pulling at a barn.
“Damn your time,” I muttered. I walked around behind the horse, still holding the rope, and slapped him across the rump. No reaction. I hit him again, harder, then ran back in front of the horse to pull. He stood still. I looked him in the eye for a considered moment, then walked around to the horse’s side and pulled his head alongside his flank. When you do that, a horse has got no alternative but to turn – it’s the way they’re built. The horse turned, following his head, and I led him in a quick circle then straightened out and headed briskly for the gate. He stopped in his tracks and, because I wouldn’t let go of the rope, so did I.
I turned back to him. “Are you a horse or a damned mule?” I demanded. I’d never been around a horse that absolutely refused to be led. I jerked on the rope three times in succession. Nothing. I let the rope go slack and considered the situation. Surely I could outsmart a horse. The horse relaxed, blew through his nose, and reached his nose toward my jacket as if still hoping to pluck a button. “Up yours,” I said. I pulled again on the rope, this time turning away from the horse and laying the rope against my shoulder. Again the horse braced lightly on his front hooves and did not move. I must have resembled a Yorkshire terrier pulling against its leash: straining, ineffectual, and running my mouth in an incomprehensible but annoying fashion. At length I desisted.
Time to change tactics. “Alright, I’ll fix you,” I told the horse. I let his lead rope dangle and went to the garage, where I found about thirty feet of burlap rope and our ATV. I grabbed the rope, got on the ATV, and drove across the yard to the horse. I got off, walked up to the horse, and pulled on the lead rope one more time. He didn’t move.
“That was your last chance,” I told him. "Now we’ll do it the hard way.” I tied one end of the burlap rope to the lead rope, played out about ten feet of burlap, then tied it to the ATV. I got on the ATV and started idling toward the gate. Its engine had more than one horsepower, I noted with satisfaction. Slowly I pulled the slack out of the rope. It pulled tight. The horse jerked his head up in alarm. I idled forward. The horse tossed his head backward. The burlap rope snapped. The horse paused, realized it was free, and went back to grazing. I swore. The leash, nylon rope, and a few inches of burlap rope trailed from the horse’s neck.
“Damn you,” I whispered.
I walked over to the electric fence control box and switched the power off. I walked along the single strand of electric fence and pulled three of the stakes out of the ground. The single white strand lay harmlessly on the ground on the bank of the creek between the herd and the Rebel Grazer. I grabbed the rope that dangled from the horse’s neck and pulled him toward the fence I’d taken down. He came willingly enough now that I was leading him back toward the herd. I wondered why I hadn’t thought of this sooner. I was almost to the creek when he stopped. He was looking at the white strand laying on the ground a foot in front of him.
“Come on,” I said. “It’s off. Just step over it.”
But he refused. I pulled. He stayed. I pulled again. He stayed again. I whacked ol’ Button Biter across the rump with a stick. He stayed put. It was a familiar sequence, and after an unreasonably lengthy period, I gave up.
I hated to call John. I’d have to admit that I had been unable to get a single horse from the yard to the pasture. He’d think: “has this guy ever handled a horse before?” and he’d say: “oh, that’s okay this is a difficult horse” and then he’d use some old-rancher method and would, in about two minutes, whisk the horse back into the pasture. It would be some simple method that looked obvious in retrospect, and I’d feel the way you do when you look all around the house for your favorite hat and finally realize, after an hour’s search, that all you had to do was reach on top of your head.
Some of the mountain men faced even steeper learning curves than me. Before I started studying the subject, I recognized that most of the trappers had to learn mountain skills from scratch: how to find mountain passes, how to travel through deep snow, what kind of animals were dangerous, how to communicate with Indians. I had to learn some of the same things myself. But I didn’t realize how much some of the trappers-to-be had to learn. Osborne Russell, for instance, signed up with a fur company in St. Louis in 1834 and traveled west. He remarked early in his narrative, Journal of a Trapper, that many of the recruits were new to wilderness travel, but I didn’t realize how new they were until I read the part where Russell was assigned to garrison Fort Hall. Fort Hall is near Pocatello, Idaho, and it took Russell’s party almost four months to get there. After Russell had joined the garrison, and after the main party had left, some members of the garrison went out hunting for the food they’d need to survive the winter. Russell wrote, “I now prepared myself for the first time in my life to kill meat for my supper with a Rifle.” He had never hunted before? The man was in the middle of Idaho – parts of it are barely civilized now; the area was certainly wild then – and he had never killed game with a rifle! It seemed like he’d waited a little late for his first experiment. But Russell goes on blithely to recount the experience of shooting twenty-five times at a buffalo without killing it, and of chasing a wounded grizzly into the brush and nearly getting mauled as a result. Back at the fort, Russell boasted of his grizzly encounter. “[B]ut I secretly determined in my own mind,” he wrote, “never to molest another wounded Grizzly Bear in a marsh or thicket.” Good call, Osborne.
The horse was nonchalantly grazing in my lawn. Time to call John. I started to turn back toward the cabin and the phone, but then I hesitated. I’d give it one more shot -- I’d try driving him once more. Again I walked up to the Captain Recalcitrance, and again he turned toward me.
“No,” I said, “get out of here.” I waved my arms and stepped toward him. I pushed against his neck. “Get on.”
The horse stepped away from me. “Go on, now,” I said, and I slapped his side. He started walking. I drove him toward the single-stranded electric fence, then alongside it, then alongside the three-runged wooden fence and all the way to the gate. It took about two minutes. I drove him into the pasture. He whinnied as he trotted through the gate. Then he curved around the enclosure and broke into a canter. I leaned on the fence to watch him. He slowed down as he crossed Otter Creek, then cantered, almost galloped, across the tawny pasture toward the herd. Head held high, dark mane and tail streaming behind him. A gorgeous animal. Osborne Russell ended up trapping the Rockies for eight years, operating much of the time as a free trapper who called his own shots. Maybe I’d make it yet.
A couple of Cosgriff's horses on the proper side of the fence.
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