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Show 70 to the top of the mesa, I came to the lower end of their fields and rode up to their house from there, a little over a mile. So I would saddle Ace and swing aboard, galloping down through the fields on the narrow dirt road, through the willows on a trail at full speed up to the big ditch, lifting myself with Ace, lifting his head as he took the ditch and we sailed over it, and on, on to the second gate. There were two: the first was board and I could open and close it from the saddle, Ace cooperative. The other was barbed wire and I would dismount and open it, Ace would skitter through and I would close it up, then get up on him fast because he was already moving, he loved that ride as much as I did. I got to Falsetti's corral ready to go to pitching at seven. Dom watched me gallop up with envy, having no horses to ride himself much less a black stallion, but he could outpitch me in the field and he made sure I knew it. I ate dinner there, worked another five hours in the afternoon till six, then saddled up again, Ace ready, and galloped home in the cooling air to my chores. The previous winter my father had rented the lower pasture to a cowman, who also wintered a string of horses in a small pasture next to the cattle, and early the next spring we rode them all. One I tried last was a big strawberry roan with a slouchy look to him, carrying his head low, but he had been trained as a quarter horse and when I first mounted him, his head came up and his ears forward as if listening for the starting bell, straining at the bit. Too old to race any longer, he could still outrun any horse we had, and he loved to run. It was all I could do to get him stopped. So I was up on him every weekend that late winter and spring, riding those horses with Dom and his younger brother and my brother Davy and a couple of other kids, riding in a band, splashing across the river, trailing through the brush, racing over the meadows, lunging up hillsides so steep the horses could barely make it and us |