The Maker Stamp Under the Saddle Fender

Brandi Haverkamp slid the check across the glass counter with two fingers, the way you would push a dead fly off a kitchen table, and she never looked up from her laptop while she did it.

“Fifteen hundred,” she said. “Same as the others. The dealer in Oklahoma took it Tuesday.”

I had carried that saddle in on my shoulder twenty minutes before, all forty pounds of it, and set it on the rack by the boot wall where the morning sun came through the front window and lit up the tooling.

Number 214. Full basket weave, oak leaves on the corners of the skirts, a rough-out seat, a rawhide horn wrap I had pulled tight with my knee braced against the bench on a cold morning in August.

“There’s ninety hours in that one, Brandi,” I said. “The tree alone was four hundred and sixty dollars. I had a little over eleven hundred in it before I cut the first strap.”

She finally looked up. She is thirty-five, and she has a smile that comes all the way up to her eyes and stops there, like it hit a fence it did not know was there.

“Market’s soft, Tess. I’ve told you. Dealers don’t pay for names. Nobody down there knows your name.”

“Nobody down there knows anybody’s name,” I said. “That’s why it’s a saddle and not a name.”

She went back to her screen. “Then it shouldn’t bother you. Have a good one.”

Clint was in the back by the repair bench, setting a buckle on somebody’s headstall.

He lifted one hand to me the way he lifts it to the feed truck driver. He did not come up front.

That was the eleventh check like that since July of the year before.

I folded it once and put it in my shirt pocket, behind the pencil, and I walked out past the boots and the ropes and the rack of pearl snap shirts.

The bell over the door rang behind me. I had hung that bell myself, nineteen years before, with a drill borrowed from my dad and Clint holding the ladder.

I have built saddles for eighteen years. I learned from an old man south of Ainsworth who had built them for fifty, and who did not want a student, and especially did not want a girl of twenty-six who had never held a swivel knife.

He made me cut straps for four months. Straight straps, the full length of a side of skirting leather, with a draw gauge and then by hand, until I could run a knife down three feet of leather without wandering a sixteenth.

A saddle starts with the tree. That is the frame, wood covered in wet rawhide that shrinks as it dries until it is hard as bone.

I order mine from a maker in Wyoming who has been building trees since before I was born.

Then the leather. I use heavy skirting, thirteen to fifteen ounces, and I can tell good hides from bad ones by the smell and the feel of the flesh side before I ever unroll them.

A good side of leather runs well over two hundred dollars now.

Basket weave is a stamp and a maul. You strike every square by hand, thousands of them, each one lined up off the last.

If you drift, the whole fender drifts. I strike with a rawhide maul because it is quieter on my wrist than a hammer.