Originally produced Feburary 2011

Six o'clock in the morinin', I pulled up to the diesel pump at the quickstop. It's dark, the sky is so clear the stars don't even twinkle, and it's so cold that even with the thermal underwear, a bunny suit and insulated gloves, it hurts to crawl out of the truck and handle the diesel pump. Out in the dark it's so quiet in our little one horse town that I can hear someone's rooster blown reveille off in the distance. Words from a Steven Fromholz song run through the clouds in my brain, "six o'clock silence of a new day beginning' is heard in a small Texas town, like a signal from nowhere the people who live there are up an' movin' aroun'…"

So I shuffle through the door in my mud caked boots, into the warmth of the cafe-quick stop. Three men are at scattered tables, reading the newspaper, drinking coffee, waiting for the day to start. The television is blaring news about the blizzard of '11 and pictures of stranded cars in Austin and Waco flip past.

"How's it hangin'?" is the greeting from one.

"Down and a little to the right." answers another.

Conversation ensues about what the cold weather does to various anatomical portions of the human body. Then a well known local cattle buyer slides into a chair.

"Those steers don't look as shiny today as they did last week!"

"Naw, I bet they lost fifty pounds over the last three days. Did they get a lot of snow up there?"

"No, not in Hereford where that lot is located."

"Funny, because they had six weeks in Sweetwater just a hundred miles further southeast."

"Yeah, it's weird. But then I believe the wind blowed all of the snow off east, that IS the panhandle after all!"

"Speakin' of gambling on feeder cattle, who you got for tomorrow's game?"

"Well, I ain't saying' I don't like the Steelers, but I WILL be wearing' a big square of yellow Styrofoam on my head tomorrow."

"'minds me of the guy who went to the hose races. He noticed a priest in the saddlin' paddock making the sign of the cross in front of one of the nags about to run. He had twenty to one odds against, but when they broke out the gate, he actually won by a length. The guy noticed the same priest doing it to another long shot in the second race, so he ran down to the window and put some money on the horse. Again the horse won and paid out big time. This happened several more times, until the last race the padre was making signs of the cross over the eyes and both hooves of a real glue factory nag. The guy says to himself, jeez this must be a real ????leggie???? so he goes down and bets his house, his pension plan and all his money.

The ol' Pony comes in twenty lengths behind dead last and the guy loses everything. Completely disgusted the guy tracks down the priest and asks what the heck happened. The priest answers "That's the problem with you protestants, you can't tell the difference between a blessing and last rites!"

This got a pretty good laugh all around. Then a retired veterinarian came in, shook hands all around, sat down and looked at me and said "say, one of those Braymer bulls you brought in for test was more than a little snorty!"

"Yeah," I said. "When I went to pick him up I was standing kinda close to the fence and he barked and blew snot in my pocket more'n once."

"I believe he's got a bad case of claustrophobia!"

"Yeah, he's not bad out in open country, but boy if you get in a pen with him you'd best not stray too far from a fence you can crawl up on!"

"What you gonna do with him?"

"I believe he needs to find hisself being owned by someone else pretty soon."

"Weighin' bulls bring seventy to eighty cents right now, what'll he weight?" said the cattle buyer.

"Well, about nineteen hundred, but I'm hopin' he can go back to someone's pasture, then I can get a little more for him." I replied.

"You know, I think that's a good plan, 'cause those personality traits tend to be inherited." said the vet.

"Well," started the brings breeder who'd been quiet for a while "while that may be true, I've seen the gentlest Angus cow, bred to a pet Braymer bull that the grand kids could put a halter on and lead, to produce the snottiest, saltiest crossbreeds you ever seen. In fact, an old boy I knew down near Beaumont was killed last week by two old pet Angus cows with calves in a pen.They stomped him jet like they would a coyote, pure Angus, you could just imagine what a couple of tiger stripes would do!"

"Well, generally, if you breed a gentle bull to gentle cows, you will have a tendency to produce gentle calves. I've seen bunches come into the clinic from different ranches for bangs vaccinations. One bunch would be dog gentle, and the next bunch would put you over the fence, and they were all tiger striped Bradfords that looked like sisters!"

This conversation continued for a while, and met with general agreement that if a breeder wanted to develop a reputation for producing manageable crossbred heifers for commercial cattlemen to use, he's be ahead of the game with gentle bulls.

As I paid my bill and headed for the door, the smiling young man at the counter said "more laxmi!" I laughed, for we'd talked before about the Hindi word for money. Then he said "feels like Katmandu outside!" And I remembered he was from Nepal. I realized that there were in fact colder places than Central Texas. As I drove away, the sun was coming up.

Anywhere else it’s a disease. It’s called OCD or obsessive compulsive disorder, someone who counts everything. It becomes such an ingrained habit that you start counting the steps from the kitchen to the bedroom, or how many times you squeeze you left hand with you right when washing your hands. It’s the result of long, arduous training, handed down through the generations of guardians of bovine creatures.
"How many came to cake this ev’en?"
"Thirty eight, grampa."
"That old six-titted cow with the floppy horn come in?"
"Nope."
"Betcha she’s got a calf hid down in the bottom."
"Yep."
You count cows who come into the cake line (other-wise known as a string of 20% protein range cubes.) You count heifers going through the gate, out to pasture. You count mares coming to hay. You count scoops of feed for each working gelding, constantly fearing colic if they get too much and starvation if they get to little and the weather turns bad. You even count how many turns a horse takes around you in the round pen.
Of course you can hardly blame a fellow for being a little neurotic when he daily deals with confrontations from 1000-2000 lb. varmints with an attitude (theirs).
Weather provides another adversary making you count how many round bales are left to make it through the rest of the winter. It’s called a counter at the feed store because you count your hard earned coins across it.
Or used to before everything became either plastic or (worse yet) computerized. Grampa don’t trust ATM’s, he prefers to keep his shekel under the mattress in a smelly old brown Army sock (or was it Navy) beside the colt 45 (well oiled).
So it’s no wonder that one of the worst epithets in cow country is "he’s no-count."

“I’ve never seen anybody use a double bitted bridle before,” she said. “Well, this is the way horses are started in Spain and Portugal.” I knew I’d lost her. I guess going the next step and pointing out that these horses were used to fight bulls would have been as foreign as Mercury or Venus. The years I’d spent working with Fermin, Francisco and George passed by my mind’s eye. What a different world was the in-hand work with the double bridle. We’d come at it through the flexions of the Peruvian horse and the work around the single pillar. Then we discovered the flexions of Bancher, and the wondrous collected work of the Spanish school. Collection of a degree not even dreamed of in my youth. How was I to even begin to explain forty years of labor and discovery at the hands of Maters from around the world?

“Yeah, it’s a little different way of going at it but I feel better about throwing my pink body into the meat grinder when I have some assurance that I may actually survive intact.”

I still don’t think she got it.

As I picked myself up out of the soft dirt of the floor of the big outdoor school I told Earl, “I knew she was getting angry with me, I just didn’t pay enough attention to the signs she was giving me.” I had been trying to start her into the flexion of the loins, otherwise known as yielding the hindquarters away from the leg. The mare had tried rearing a little, then pawing, and darting her head to the ground. I had continued asking with my leg to have her step away, instead of backing up. Suddenly she bucked three times, hard and lightening fast. I was on the ground. Now I know that she has a limit, and when I push the limit she loses her sense of humor and tells me it is no longer fun or play for her. Better I should have stayed a little less serious, and asked a touch less, and allowed her to learn the flexions of the loin a bit more slowly. Making haste slowly.

I was attempting to explain some of our training methods to a young visiting observer last week. She asked if we used natural horsemanship. My mind flew as if in a time machine back through centuries and millennia to a time at the end of the last ice age, and space north of the black Caspian seas, the grass covered steppes of central Asia. There I saw the ancestors of the Scythian horsemen processing an idea for a new method of transportation using horses, which they were watching in herds as they migrated across the grasslands. These Neolithic people observed the behaviors of the horse families, and used the information gathered in that way to begin to domesticate these fleet animals. My mind slowly drifted back to me through increasingly modern times seeing refinements in these early methods. Scythians, Hittites, Simon of Athens, Xenophon, Celtic warriors, right on down to Grisone de la Gueriniere, Baucher, Steinbrecht, Oliveira all passed before my eyes.

"Yes," I said, "we use natural horsemanship," we use methods which grew out of the nature of the horse himself. If it makes sense to the horse, its natural. If it doesn't make sense to the horse, he won't understand, and it just doesn't work. Reminds me of my friend Ramon Becerra who said "I no work with horses anymore." I was distraught until he said, "I just play with them."