The Kill Pen Mare Who Won the County Rodeo

Spring

Through March and April, Josie got up at five thirty every morning to feed before the school bus came.

She fed again when she got home, and again at supper, and again before bed.

She took Ruby’s temperature every morning for thirty days and wrote it on the paper inside the barn door.

The numbers were all normal. Thirty days came and went with no snot and no fever, and on the thirty-first day we turned Ruby out with Dusty’s old gelding in the small pasture.

They sniffed each other and squealed once and then went to grazing side by side.

By the first of May, Ruby had put on about a hundred and fifty pounds. You couldn’t count her ribs anymore unless you put your hand on her.

Her coat came in slick and copper red, and that crooked white blaze looked brighter against it.

Josie started riding her in the round pen at a walk. Then a trot.

Then, in late May, a slow, rocking lope that made my daughter grin so wide I thought her face would split.

And one Saturday in early June, Josie set up three plastic barrels in our hay field, just to see.

She walked Ruby around them in the pattern, right barrel first, then the left, then the far one, and home.

The second time through, at a trot, something changed in the mare. Her ears went forward. Her whole body gathered.

She dropped her hip at the first barrel and rolled around it so tight that Josie lost a stirrup and grabbed the horn.

Dusty was standing beside me at the fence. He let out a low whistle.

“Somebody trained that horse,” he said. “Somebody put a lot of time into that horse, a long time ago.”

We never found out who. No papers, no story, the kill buyer had said.

Somewhere in Ruby’s life, some girl had loved her and taught her the pattern, and somewhere after that, somebody had let her go hungry and sent her through the ring.

I thought about that girl sometimes. I hope she knows, wherever she is, that her work wasn’t wasted.

Summer

Summer in western Nebraska is long and hot and dry, and a fourteen-year-old with a horse is busier than a feedlot hand.

Josie rode every morning before the heat came up, and again in the evening when the shadows got long.

I timed her with the old stopwatch from the school track team, standing at the corner of the hay field with my coffee.

Twenty-two seconds. Twenty-one. Nineteen and a half. It’s not a regulation pattern in a hay field, but it was something to measure.

Our neighbor two miles over, the one who’d loaned Dusty the panels, had an old outdoor arena with good ground.

He told Josie she could use it any day she wanted, and he started leaving the gate open on Saturday mornings without being asked.

He’d sit in a lawn chair at the fence with his dog and watch her run, and he’d say things like “sit back on her” and “you’re pulling her face around, let her do it,” and Josie would nod and try again. He never charged her a dime, either.

On Sundays we went to church, and then Josie rode. I remember one Sunday in July when the pastor asked if anybody had prayers, and Josie raised her hand and asked for prayers for Ruby’s feet, because the ground was so hard that summer.

The whole church said amen. Paige, two pews ahead, didn’t turn around.

In the middle of July there was a little jackpot barrel race at the arena in the next town, the kind they run on a Saturday afternoon for fifteen dollars an entry.

Josie and Ruby went to it. It was their first time in a real arena, with a real announcer and real timing lights.