Fixing Fence on Horses
When greenhorns ride
“I can’t take another day off work,” Dad said at breakfast. “The cattle got into Bud’s again yesterday. Take the horses and fix the fence.”
Even though we were not horsemen, my two sisters and I arrived at the old ranch house later that morning to catch the two mares. We filled the old Chevy hubcap with oats like we had seen Grandpa do and went to the pasture shaking the oats and calling to the mares.
It always worked for Grandpa, but the mares ignored us.
“That didn’t go well,” Nan said. “What else can we do?”
“We could walk,” Sherry suggested. She was not fond of horses. “Do you have any other ideas?”
“Sure,” I said being the oldest and trying to exude an air of confidence. “Nan, you go past the salt lick and circle around the mares and drive them into the sheep pasture. Sherry and I will stand behind the gate and corral them in the narrow space between the gate and the fence.”
Nan circled the horses while Sherry and I stood near the gate in hopes of corralling the horses in the narrow space. Goldie and Little Flicka moved in close to the fence, but when I stepped forward to put my hand on Goldie I forgot about her blind eye.
Startled by the approach from her blind side, Goldie bolted back into the larger pasture with Little Flicka in pursuit.
“Any other bright ideas?” Nan asked in frustration.
“We could still walk,” Sherry said.
“This will work,” I said. “Sherry, you go head them this way.”
That didn’t work either, so we each took turns circling the wary animals, who grew more nervous with each attempt as we tried to get them back into the sheep pasture.
Attempt after attempt failed, and our patience grew thin, but persistence won out. Eventually, we pinned Goldie against the fence. I dropped a rope over her neck to hold her while I slipped the bridle onto her head. Once Goldie was happily eating oats, Little Flicka pushed forward to get her share. I slipped the bridle over her ears while she munched on oats from the hubcap.
We led the horses to the old ranch house and tied the reins to the big tree. Pushing open the sagging door of the house, which now served as a granary and tack room, we dragged out the saddles. We threw the saddle blankets on and hefted the saddles onto the horses’ backs. Once the cinches were tightened, Nan and Sherry mounted and rode up the hill toward the Morgan Place. I drove the green International pickup, loaded with fencing materials, through the fields.
I stopped just above the Morgan Spring and backed the pickup to the edge of the field. While I waited for my sisters, I unloaded a bundle of steel fence posts, a coil of barbed wire, a post driver, and a bucket containing wire stretchers, hammers, staples, and other fencing supplies. I took a sip of water from a plastic jug, just as the girls rode into view. Nan was doing fine, but Sherry was holding on to the saddle horn more than the reins.
The girls were reined in by the fencing supplies, and I handed Sherry the bucket. She slipped the bail over the saddle horn, and I tied the water bottle to Goldie’s saddle before putting our lunch sacks into the saddlebags. I handed the post driver and the small coil of barbed wire up to Nan. She laid the post driver across the front of the saddle and fastened the wire to the saddle in front of her right leg.
“Slide forward so I can get on,” I said.
Nan slid forward in the saddle. “Whoa,” she said as she struggled to keep Little Flicka from side-stepping while I lifted the bundle of posts and laid them in the saddle.
Using the stirrup to mount, I swung myself behind the saddle, a move complicated by the presence of the steel posts. I managed to get myself situated and lifted the bundle of posts out of the saddle and into my lap, but in that motion, my feet dug into the horse’s flanks, like a saddle bronc rider in a rodeo. Little Flicka reared, dumping me and the steel posts onto the rocky ground. I hit hard and instantly lost consciousness.
The next thing I remembered was Nan grabbing me by the front of my shirt and shaking me. “Are you okay?”
Slowly I responded to her less-than-gentle administration and opened my eyes.
The term “concussion protocol” was years in the future, so even though I was a bit woozy, I leaped to my feet and shook the cobwebs from my head like Little Joe Cartwright after a fight. I swung the steel posts over my right shoulder and set off on foot.
“I told you we should walk,” Sherry said.
Several times in the half-mile to the breach in the fence I shifted the load from one shoulder to the other, while Sherry and Nan kept silent as they rode the horses carrying the other supplies. At the edge of the maples, I threw down the posts. Nan and Sherry dismounted and worked their way down the steep slope.
Even though it was early June, the last of the snowdrift was just melting on the north side of the ridge where the fence was down. We spliced and stretched the wire and drove new steel fence posts into the soft soil. It required only three steel posts to fix the fence, but not wanting to carry the extra posts back to the pickup, we replaced a couple of other wooden posts that looked like they might fail sometime in the future. With the fence repaired, we retrieved our sandwiches from the saddlebags and ate lunch sitting on a big rock where the sun warmed us as we watched clouds changing shapes in the deep blue sky.
Without fence posts to encumber us, I swung up behind Nan, and the three of us rode back to the pickup. Not wanting to ride any longer than was necessary, we unsaddled the horses and turned them loose. We loaded the saddles and tack into the truck and drove back to the ranch house where we stored the saddles for another time, and hopefully for other riders.
