Near Wrecks - Of equines, beavers, and bears

YeHaw!

Near Wrecks

Of equines, beavers, and bears

By Stephen L. Wilmeth

            The trade was a doozy.

            I traded Byron a blue roan colt that never quit pitching, and I wound up with a lined back dun that was pretty good … sometimes. He scared me one day on top of Granite Peak. There was little room around the tower for anything, but we tied up to visit Jimmy and his bride. SOB had danced around and hooked the saddle horn over a little clothes line and he panicked. He was lunging and squealing and all I could think of was “Please, wire don’t break” because if he had broken it he would have plunged off the cliff on the south side of the mountain.

            Well, on second thought … that might have precluded a series of even worse crises!

Trail Woes

Another day had started at the Double S and a pitching mule. We packed her only to see her jerk loose and go pitching around the holding trap. Running and skipping in mule fashion, she emptied every last thing from the panniers. It began with her realizing she was untied and got crazy when she bucked enough to get the pack tarp flapping. She then had reason to scare herself and her running pitching fit was controlled only the by perimeter fence.

It took 15 minutes just to gather the spillage. She got little sympathy from us and we doubled tied her when we finished repacking.

She was somewhere in the pack string later that afternoon when the turkey poults sailed by and scared the bejeezus out of Snooper as he churned around a corner on the trail going up Trail Canyon. Back he came lunging through the pack string wild eyed and panicked with Hugh holding on to the horn with the same blank look on his face.

Oh, to have a recording of the sounds of all that!

Mules and horses squealing, grand eruptions of equine exertion driven flatulence, limbs and ropes breaking, lead ropes scraping across canvas, and cans rattling all added to our reclaimed bravery when everything came to a standstill. We then sorted everything out, repacked as necessary, and headed back around the same bend in the trail. Snooper was wary this time and he looked in all directions as he passed through the scene of the near deadly aerial assault.

Time has seasoned the memories of that afternoon. A question now remains. Was the adventure a (real) wreck or does it fit the parlance of (near) wreck in the annals of our life. Of course, the difference between wrecks and near wrecks lies is in the embellishment of the story teller, but. this (near) wreck did have a great punch line.

“How many were there?” was the first thing Hugh coughed up when he got Snooper held up with ropes strung over him like a giant spider web.

            “How many what,” I had asked having not actually having seen the aerial bombardment.

            “Flying alligators (or something similarly descriptive)!” he snapped.

            Of Beavers and Bears

            Terrell’s eyes invariably start dancing when he gets near his punch lines.

            His selected pack string wreck story involved another alligator of sorts. He was leading his string down Turkey Creek after dropping off from Hidden Pasture when, up the trail approaching him, came what he determined to be a red haired lady. When his horse got a good look, it scared him so bad he tried the same tedious swap ends tactic, and, at the same time, the mules went crazy trying to pitch in all directions at once.

            In what had to be an epic ride, Terrell stayed aboard, got things quelled down, and claims to have determined the lady was wearing nothing but her boots, a pack, and sun screen (there was actually conjecture whether she was dobbed with sunscreen). In the midst of the chaos, she continued up the trail through the frantic pack string without saying word or offering a hint of assistance.

            Asked why the red hair part was pertinent, his reaction was somewhat rehearsed. “Cuz’, that was only one of the two or three things I could actually see!” he proclaimed.

            For some reason that reminded me of the unsuccessful attempts to catch one of the monstrous rainbows in the beaver damns just up the creek from the cabin at White Creek. Beautiful fish they were! In an early attempt, I had hooked one on a little spinner only to have him jump and spit it back at me. That started an unending series of stealthy approaches to get another one to do the same thing. The beavers themselves were no help. One night I even duck waddled up the creek from downstream to cast without rising above the level of the dam. Just as I was about to cast, one of the resident beavers slapped its tail on the water just a few feet in front of the dam face. He must have seen the tip of my rod, because I couldn’t see him or the surface of the pond from where I crouched.

            One of the great (near) wrecks of all time, though, happened in the cabin itself.

            Dusty and Randy had ridden into White Creek to spend the night at the cabin. They finished supper dishes, visited, and sacked out with their sleeping bags on the cots in the living room. Sometime later, they were awakened by a crash with Dusty’s immediate assumption a raccoon had climbed onto the wood stacked in the storage under the kitchen window and had collapsed part of the pile.

In a woozy slumber, he was immediately up and headed to investigate only to meet a bear coming out of the kitchen!

“He woofed and blew snot all over me,” Dusty remembers. “His breath reaked!”

“BEAR!”, he yelled, and turned immediately to dive into the only place that was available to him in that dark room … his sleeping bag on the cot.

Simultaneously, Dunivan, carrying his pistol, slipped out the front door in his skivvies. He ran some distance west and away from the cabin and the developing skirmish taking place inside.

Dusty next remembers the bear straddling him on the cot. The bear was obviously as confounded at that point as the human participants. He had probably jumped onto the cot in order to see out of the window trying to figure out where or what the resident humans were doing or where they had gone. It was then he realized there was a body or at least a moveable mass under him. He started rooting at Dusty with such force Dusty was afraid he was going to root him out through the closed end of the sleeping bag.

Returning now to determine the cause of his partner’s absence and silence, Randy approached the living room window to peak inside. Dusty recalls hearing him call his name. “Dusty … Dusty,” he whispered repeatedly.

The bear was working on Dusty with vigor trying to get him out of the sleeping bag. “I wasn’t about to answer him right then,” he remembers.

Dunivan, realizing what he was now seeing, raised his pistol and shot at the bear through the window. The bear whirled, slammed Dusty with force into the log wall, and ran toward the kitchen as a second shot was fired. At least one of the two shots hit him and he crashed back out through the same window he had come through when the two men were awakened.

Silence …

Calmed down enough to think, they moved their bedrolls up into the second story attic. With loaded pistols in hand, they spent what was to be the remainder of a sleepless night.

Still shaken, they saddled, packed their stock and headed the next morning to the Trotter Place. They just wanted to get away from White Creek cabin, and, as their instinct proved, there was reason to worry. That night the bear returned, entered the cabin and literally tore it apart. When the two returned the next day they found the refrigerator overturned, cupboards opened and emptied, and the place just savaged.

Sleeping again upstairs with their pistols ready, the bear failed to return, but the decision was made. They saddled and headed down the creek the next morning to Gila Center to seek the assistance of the Game Department. They returned with dogs, and, for the next several days, they hunted the bear. The bear was never found.

Only a bullet hole remains in the cabin wall to mark the incident.

Stephen L. Wilmeth is a rancher from southern New Mexico. “The next time I saw Byron Donaldson he was lying in a hospital bed with his leg in traction from an incident with that line backed dun … he needed a horse for an elk hunt and I had loaned him that crooked footed looker. He asked me if I knew anybody who wanted to make a horse trade.”