The Pastures of Beyond (22 page)

Chapter Twenty-One

N
OWDAYS, WITH A NORMAL HUMAN LIFE SPAN
, an old cowboy like me will have said good-bye to about three of his favorite saddle horses or about five of his favorite cowdogs. One of the hardest things for a rodeo cowboy to accept is knowing that one day his body will give up, and that someday he will have to pay for a ticket in the stands instead of having free access to the arena and a seat along the chutes. It's tough sitting there watching from the stands, because you mentally ride each bronc out of the chutes and fight each bull, and your muscles twitch and strain as though you are actually doing it. To compound the problem, you have to watch the new age of cowboys doing things differently, and with a different style. The modern clowns tend to dart around, making fools of the bulls, whereas Slim Pickens and other cape fighters tried to make the bull look good. To be fair, I have to admit that modern cowboys are more talented and the stock rougher than any I ever saw in my youth.

From time to time through the years, I would take my old Mexican bullfighting cape out of the closet and practice on the lawn, noticing how much heavier the cloth seemed from the days I used it in the arena. I would stand there doing veronicas, sweeping imaginary bulls past my body, a little sad that I wasn't headed for a rodeo somewhere, and wishing often that I had done a better job on the last tough Brahma I fought in California, so many years ago.

That last awful bull! He had put me in a cast, that one. On his very first charge he'd jerked the cape right out of my hands with his horns, and when I tried to retrieve the cape off the ground, he'd thrown me like a half-filled sack of spuds right over the arena fence. Had it not been for that barrier, he might have followed through and finished me off.

Night after night, in the months following my injury, I dreamed about that animal, fighting him time and again, trying to figure out where my timing had failed me. Proud as I was, I knew I had to face him again, and by now that bull had been to several more rodeos and learned more tricks. I was just out of the cast and still weak when I got a chance to fight the same animal that hurt me at a rodeo in Petaluma, California.

I could hardly hold up my cape, and I didn't do much more than protect the fallen rider and survive the animal's charges. I swear that animal remembered me. Nervous sweat poured down my back, and I realized right there that, after that performance was done, I was going to have to quit rodeoing. The joy had gone out of something that had always been fun for me.

For the next forty years that bull was often in my dreams. I was busy ranching and writing books, my rodeo days were long past, but sometimes I would wake up in the night all covered with sweat from fighting that animal. What really bothered me was that I'd never get another chance to relive that afternoon. Why hadn't I tried harder and retired on a positive note? Worse yet, as the years passed, I began to wonder if I'd failed because I was scared.

On my sixty-fifth birthday, I happened to be at a rodeo in Portland, Oregon, and was headed for a seat in the stands when I heard someone call my name. It was the old rodeo clown, Mac Berry, who had been a friend of Slim Pickens and had watched me clown with Slim years before. It felt pretty good to be remembered.

Mac grabbed me by the arm and pulled me into the arena. “Have I got plans for you!” he exclaimed. He pointed to a pen on the hillside behind the bucking chutes. “You see that big Brahma bull? He's gentle as a kitten. Why, kids can climb all over him. I'll have Bob Tallman, the announcer, tell the crowd you are coming out of retirement after forty years to fight this two-thousand-pound bull. At your age, everyone in the crowd will expect disaster. I'll turn the bull out of the chute, and he'll walk right up to you. All you have to do is reach out and pet him, and the animal will expect grain and follow you around the arena. The crowd will laugh themselves sick.”

“At my age, I'm pretty happy just sitting in the stands,” I said.

“Please!” Mac pleaded. “For old time's sake. I need to rev up my clown act, and the crowd will get a real chuckle out of this. Do it for Slim.”

I wasn't much dressed to rodeo, but I was tempted. I spotted Mel Lambert along the fence and handed him my wallet, telling him I was going to exhibition a fighting bull. He stared at me and moments later handed me a slip of paper on which he had scrawled:

To whom it may concern. I, Dayton Hyde, hereby bequeath my D. E. Walker saddle, my black sports car, my turquoise ring, and all my earthly possessions to my good friend, Mel Lambert of Salem, Oregon.

“Sign this,” he said. Beneath his levity, I could see he was really angry with me. “You goddam fool!” he snapped suddenly. “The cemeteries are full of cowboys that tried to come out of retirement and rodeo just one more time.”

I wanted to tell Mel that it was all an act, that the bull was gentle, but suddenly there was no more time. Bob Tallman, the rodeo announcer, was out there in the arena with his horse and microphone, giving me a big buildup. Vaguely, I heard him say, “The last time Hyde fought a bull was before I was born. It was at the San Francisco Cow Palace over forty years ago!”

I took off my blue suede sports jacket to use as a cape and stood in front of the chutes, just as I had stood ready so many times, so many years ago.

There was a big uproar behind the chutes as Mac tried to move the big gentle bull through a corral full of rodeo Brahmas, and cowboys had to use electric cattle prods to break up the fight. I yawned as though bored. I could see friends in the audience staring at me, wondering if I had gone out of my mind.

I believe to this day that Mac Berry's plan would have worked had not they used an electric cattle prod on my bull. The chute gate opened, and out roared that big gray Brahma, looking for someone to kill. Instead of charging at me, however, the bull rushed past, leaving me standing stupid and alone in front of the chutes. Instead of a belly laugh from the crowd, there was only a faint, nervous titter of embarrassment. I wanted to crawl under a cow flop and die.

The raging animal put the cowboys out of the arena and came back to center stage, hunting a human body. Usually a flank strap, tightened just in front of a bull's hips, slows him down and makes him easier for a clown to handle. Mac had sent this bull out without a flank, and a chill went up my spine.

I could have made it to the fence, but I seemed to hear Slim Pickens's voice out of the past. “Take him, kid! You can handle him fine! Pretend you're the greatest bullfighter in the world, an' you'll do great.”

The bull's eyes focused on me, his head shook in anger, and he flung up his tail and charged. He was almost upon me when I knew that I was in real trouble. My feet were roots grown down into the arena floor, and my reflexes were all gone. I was going to die! I felt a hand at my back as though Slim were pushing me on to disaster, keeping me from fleeing in terror.

Two strides away, the bull dropped his head to catch me. He was coming like a freight train, and my feet still wouldn't move. He could see my feet under my jacket cape and knew exactly where to hit. Suddenly, it was no longer me out there waiting to die. I was an actor playing the part of a great

bullfighter. Instead of trying to sidestep, I held fast. Then, as the massive head hit my cape, I stepped toward the bull's shoulder.

I felt his smooth skin brush my belly, and he was past. By the time the second charge came, I was enjoying my role. I felt the moist breath of the animal on my face as he rushed past. This time the bull hooked at me, and I sensed I had pushed my luck too far. The bull had me figured now, and the next charge would be my last. In the old days I might have led the animal through a series of a dozen charges. Now I knew that I should quit while I was ahead.

As the bull stopped and stood shaking his head angrily, I turned my back and walked away from him. The crowd gasped, thinking maybe how brave I was, but I was watching the face of a woman in the audience. It was an old trick Slim had taught me. Had her face suddenly tensed with fear, I would have left slippery tracks getting the hell out of there.

Bob Tallman, the announcer, rode up to me on his horse. “Where on earth,” he said, “when and where on earth did you learn to fight Brahmas like that?”

“When I was young,” I said, ripping out what was left of the lining on my sport coat. “When I was young, a long, long time ago.”

As I headed across the arena, I was lost back in the past. I was at a rodeo somewhere, riding Blackhawk through one helluva storm. I could hear the crowd cheering and sensed that I was within seconds of making a qualified ride. In that last instant, as a tribute to that great horse, I threw my bucking rein into the air and stepped hard in my right stirrup.

Sailing through the air, I landed on my feet and watched as Blackhawk found the gate to the catch pens and vanished from sight as my dream faded and was gone.

Mel Lambert met me at the gate as I left the arena. He looked grim and shook his head in disgust, but I knew that he was just a little bit proud. “Damn,” he said. “I was sure hopin' to get back my turquoise ring.”

Chapter Twenty-Two

S
OMETIMES ON LIFE'S LONG ROAD
come sudden turnings. In 1988 I was buying cattle in Nevada to pasture at Yamsi in Oregon, when I passed government-sponsored holding facilities near Lovelock, crowded with hundreds of captured wild horses. I stood outside the fence and saw the hurt and dejection in their eyes. They had been born to the wild and were meant to be free. I had grown up with wild horses on the ranges surrounding Yamsi. I had a feeling that, somehow, I was meant to help the animals escape.

I had an impulse to sneak into the feedlots in the dead of night and open all the gates, but I dismissed the idea as wildly impractical. The horses had been gathered by the Bureau of Land Management in the first place because their numbers on the range had exceeded their food supply. Releasing them wouldn't solve the problem and would only add to their misery.

Instead, once I had shipped cattle to the ranch, I headed off to find a place in the West where there was land enough and grass enough to set up a wild horse sanctuary so that the unadoptable wild horses languishing in feedlots could run wild and free. I had little or no money but lots of enthusiasm, and I hoped there would be some good, caring people somewhere who would embrace my dream and help.

For a time, I awoke every morning in a different motel, hoping to find one with man-sized soap, meditating silently with airline stews in early-morning airport limousines, wishing my mail —
and
my luggage ? would catch up with me, hoping daily that fate wouldn't deal me a talkative seat companion, or another large lady like the one who reached over when I was dozing and ate my lunch right off my tray.

I had sworn that wild horses couldn't drag me away from Yamsi, but they ended up doing just that. I turned the ranch over to a manager and took off to pursue my dream. All too suddenly, I left my friends and livelihood behind to get those wild horses out of the dust, disease, and boredom of the feedlots, and let them run free on better land than they had seen this century. I found that range in South Dakota.

Why me? Because I owed wild horses something! I have one ache and one pain in my body for every horse I ever met, but so many memories and so much joy. I was maybe fourteen when I rode my horse up over a lava rimrock and surprised a wild horse family dozing on a spring meadow near Fuego Mountain south of Yamsi. They were all grullas, blue velvet mares and a blue velvet stallion, all with black dorsal stripes. One moment their hooves rang belllike on the lava table rock, then the next they had vanished into lodgepole thickets, and only the snapping of branches and a pale shroud of pumice dust marked their passing. For years I rode those horses in my dreams.

I spent the next six months in Washington, D.C., talking to every legislator who would listen. The Wild Free- Roaming Horses and Burros Act of 1971 had brought about a population increase beyond the ability of federal lands to support it. Tired of problems with excess wild horses, Congress finally embraced my plan, and instructed the Bureau of Land Management to work with me. I tied up one of the best horse ranges in the West, an eleven-thousand-acre tract of land at the edge of the Black Hills in South Dakota. Soon trucks were rolling in daily, bringing in captured mustangs, most of which had no idea of fences or that they couldn't get back to their home range simply by galloping west. There was one old mare I'll never forget, perhaps because she became a symbol of what brought me here.

The Appaloosa mare came crashing out of the livestock truck, pounded down the loading chute, tried to climb the corral fence, then charged me, yellowed teeth bared, ready to eat the world. As I scrambled over the top rail, she ripped the back pocket off my Levi's, then whirled to kick, blasting a jag of splinters out of the dry juniper logs. The old mustang was shaking with stress, and so bug-eyed with rage that it seemed inconceivable to me that one day we would be friends.

Her one ear chewed off, maybe by her mother in birthing, her odd color, the pink warts on her nose, and an ancient bullet slash across the flat of her right hip made me guess where I'd seen that animal before. She'd maybe come halfway across America from Little High Rock Canyon to haunt me for something that wasn't my doing. In northern Nevada, twenty years back in time, some twelve hundred miles away.

I remember that day. I had borrowed a saddle horse from Butch Powers's outfit,* skirted the Black Rock Desert by night, eased my horse to the sun-baked rim of a canyon, and sat looking down at the shine of water along the bottom, wondering if somewhere amongst that chaos of ancient, fractured rock, there might be an animal trail leading down to the cool.

Even the tiny fans of aspen leaves hung silent, as though painted on a museum tapestry. A rock wren piped from some shaded bower amongst the rims; a lone buzzard patrolled its desolate kingdom; a Townsend's solitaire began its song from a stunted juniper, then gave up, as though singing in that heat were too much trouble.