My grandfather was twelve years old when he became a cowboy; pushing two dozen half-wild steers to the stock-pens in Fredricksburg by himself on a stout mustang-cross gelding.It took him three days to move those steers the forty miles through the parched landscape of horse-high thickets of greasewood and creosote brush with breaks of prickly pear flats and mesquite that covered that part of the fringes of the South Texas Plains.
He managed it without a major incident and brought the payoff back home, satisfying my great-grandfathers' question of what kind of cowboy Granddad would become.I began cowboying for my granddad when I was fourteen and could barely manage a single cow more than forty yards, much less forty miles. I improved over time only to the point that Granddad realized that for the sake of all involved; there ought to be as many pastures as possible situated between any cattle and me.
What I could do well was work horses; my granddad realized that and put me in charge of the remuda strings that we ran for our cowboys and neighboring ranches. For the next fifteen years I broke, finished out and tuned up horses; competed in bareback riding in the TRA circuit rodeos and more jackpots than I should have; and free-lanced for the BLM as a mustang wrangler on the Pryor Mountains in Montana and Wyoming.The past fifteen years I have spent soft-breaking working ranch and reining horses. In all that time I have come across a handful of horses that epitomized the bewildered owners phrase " that one there I'm afraid won't amount to much... Lil' Sis was one not one of those horses.
I met her a couple of years ago when she off-loaded from a transport trailer from another ranch located in Wyoming. She had been a wild mustang, captured and then adopted out for ranch work. Little success had been attained and she had made her way here where with many, many, many hours of time in the round pen, then under saddle, she had become perhaps one of the best ranging, tracking horses of any of the horses here at the line-camp.
She had her moments; she could sulley up in a heart-beat being led by a new, inexperienced cowboy or ranch hand, or she would disappear for weeks at a time, roaming and unattainable in the huge vastness of the ranches canyons and arroyos, then show back up in the remuda sting as if she had never been gone. I didn't completely understand her, but I grew very fond of her. So this is difficult to recount:

"Hey there Clay, looks like Lil'Sis is back in the remuda and she looks sick with the loco-weed."

Those were the words that Junior Baze called out this morning as I was finishing a second cup of coffee. It hit me like cold water down the back of my neck.

To Be Continued