The Hat She Wore For Horsemanship

“I got a saddle in my shop,” Gentry said. “Made up north in 1974. It’s old, and it’s worn, but it’s good leather and it fits a mare like Dot.”

He looked out at Dot in the round pen. “My wife rode it in the grand entry when she carried the flag. Her hip quit her ten years ago, and it ain’t done anything but hang on a rack since. I’d like to see it in an arena again.”

He brought it over the next day in the back of his pickup. It was old and worn, just like he said, with the seat rubbed smooth and dark from his wife’s years of riding.

But it was sound. Every stitch was good. Kaycee rubbed oil into it every week that July until the leather looked like dark honey.

She practiced every morning before chores, while it was still cool. The queen contest horsemanship has a pattern you ride for the judges, circles and lead changes and a stop, and then there’s the queen run, which is the part everybody waits for.

The queen run is a fast lope all the way around the arena, waving to the crowd with one hand and riding with the other.

The whole point is to look easy doing something that isn’t. And if your hat comes off, you lose points.

Every girl in the county knows somebody who lost a crown to the wind.

So Kaycee ran Dot around our hay meadow with that hat on her head until she could do it without thinking. Dot didn’t mind.

That mare has always liked to run when you let her, and she had been half retired for two years.

The speech was the other part. Each girl gives a short speech to the judges, and Kaycee wrote hers about the ranch.

She wrote about calving in a blizzard and branding in May, about the neighbors who come help and the dinner after, and about how the county was built by people who didn’t wait for anybody to tell them they could.

She practiced her speech to Dot every morning. I’d come out with the coffee and hear her in the barn, talking low and clear to that old mare, and Dot would stand with one hind foot cocked and her ears turned back like she was the most patient judge in Wyoming.

There’s also the appearance and interview part, where the judges ask about rodeo, about horses, about current events and the history of the sport.

Kaycee studied the rule book at the kitchen table at night and asked her daddy questions about bronc riding that he answered with more words than I’d heard him say in a year.

The entry form was due on the first of July, and I could have mailed it. I didn’t.

I drove it in to the fairgrounds office myself on a bright Tuesday morning, because I wanted to put it in Renee’s hand and look at her while I did it.

She was at the desk in the little cinderblock office by the livestock barns, with a box fan going and a stack of sponsor letters in front of her.