Green horses and a red wagon
Cowgirl Sass & Savvy

Julie Carter

Lots of things in a cowboy's life are not fair. Two items on the top of the inequitable list are having to feed in the mud when green grass should be filling that bill and fixing a water gap into a droughty pasture when the guy up the hill got all the rain.

In ranch country, feeding cattle is a standard operation that is driven by opposing weather conditions - the lack of rain or the abundance of snow.

Most outfits have the necessary equipment for feeding cattle in all kinds of weather.

The hands that operate it, and the cattle that depend on it, fall into a routine that continues throughout the season.

One year, this particular ranch had an unusually long rainy spell. Ranchers are known for their mantra of "never turn down a rain or a calf," but fighting the mud sometimes challenges their resolve on the "how much" rain issue.

About this time, two new hands had just hired on, green as the grass that had not yet grown and full of enthusiasm and energy.

The deep mud had rendered the feed truck useless, but these two go-getters had seen pictures of ranchers feeding cattle with a wagon in some northern state.

Fortuitously, the ranch had a rubber-tired wagon, painted bright red, which was generally used for hay rides for the boss' kids. Perfect.

All they needed was a team of horses to pull it.

Their gaze turned to the large horse herd that supplied the saddle horses for the cattle operation. It seemed to them that would be a good place to find some wagon horses.

Smart enough to know the saddle horses wouldn't know anything about being hitched to a wagon, they decided a couple green colts would be "trainable" and wouldn't know any different.

So they gathered up the 3-year-old colts, most of which had never been handled in any way.

They tied a back foot up on each colt and maneuvered them up to the wagon, where harnesses and collars were put in place while the colts stood trembling.

A quick inspection of the wagon revealed a small problem. No brakes. The brighter of the two cowboys decided that a colt tied to the back of the wagon would work just fine for a brake.

When the driver (the honor given to the other cowboy) needed to stop, he could just wave his hat in the face of the colt at the back, making him set up and stop the wagon. Seemed like a fine idea, falling just short of brilliance.

The colts were wild-eyed and not happy about the wagon attached at their backsides.

The lad on the ground untied their hind feet and when the driver slapped the reins on their backs, the colts stood momentarily frozen. Then, with a bolt, they left out like scalded hounds.

The driver didn't need a whole lot of time to decide that the use of a brake might be in order.

He stood up on the wagon seat and waved his hat in the face of the colt tied to the back.

As planned, the colt sat back hard. Not as planned, when the hard jerk hit the rope tied to the wagon, it pulled the entire back end out of the wagon and never even offered a moment of slowing to the run-off team.

The driver, still attached to the fast-exiting horses, unwisely held tight to the reins while most of the hide on his face, and all the way south to his boots, was skidded off in the drag.

Finally, the colts managed to lose their dragger and eventually, they ran out of steam. It still took most of the afternoon to get them caught and retrieve the harnesses.

The green hands, not so green anymore, decided that God had created this mud and He would dry it out.

Wisdom is often born of pain or, in this case, rain. At least one cowboy is now a little wiser.