A true story...
I woke up this morning with the ghost of an old dream still hanging around the edges of my mind—a memory of being trailed by a pair of coyotes across a lonesome wilderness meadow. It brought back a true piece of trouble from more’n thirty years past, back when the urban tide was just starting to spill heavily into the northwest corner of the San Fernando Valley.
When I first trailed my old palomino, Sunup, out to California, I made the mistake of barnin’ him down on busy Topanga Canyon Boulevard. Now, Sunup was a Montana horse; I’d bought him off the remote reaches of the North Fork Shoshone River near Cody. He was used to grizzly sign, high mountain winds, and deep snow, but fast-moving asphalt traffic was a brand of wild he’d never signed up for. After a right serious equine breakdown right on the edge of a roaring highway, I packed our gear and moved him up to a quiet boarding ranch several miles up Browns Canyon Road in Chatsworth, where the dust settled slow and the oak trees gave a horse room to breathe.
We’d been bunked up in Browns Canyon a couple of years when a new rider showed up on the place. She was a mere wisp of a gal—maybe twenty years off the calf—wearing tight riding breeches, a hard bucket on her head, and leading a high-stepping, heavyweight warmblood jumping horse. First time I laid eyes on her, she was setting up wooden jump standards near six feet high out in the dirt arena. Without a lick of hesitation, she’d put that big horse into a canter and clear those rails over and over, all by her lonesome. She looked completely fearless—or completely blind to danger, which often passes for the same thing in young blood.
Well, English trick-riding wasn’t none of my business, so I threw my dark brown Visalia saddle over Sunup’s back, checked his rawhide bosal and mecate reins, and took off for our usual two-hour trek up Mormon Canyon. That trail followed along the cool, lush riparian habitat of Browns Creek, snaking through cottonwoods, sycamores, and elderberries right into the shadow of the Santa Susana crags.
Now, the ranch had a big, rolling pasture where the turnout herd lived. Most folks stayed clear of it because the good trail headed off the other way up the canyon, but one late evening I pulled up to the barn and spotted that gal’s fancy warmblood inside the pasture wire—fully tacked up, bridle on, and dragging his reins through the wild oat grass.
Figuring she’d been tossed, I climbed through the barbed wire fence, caught her horse by the leather, and started walking toward a small grassy mound that concealed the far side of the field. I walked him on foot rather than swinging up into the leather, because I ain't got much use for those little English postage-stamp saddles. Their iron stirrups look more like a Chinese puzzle box than something a sensible cowboy ought to put his boot into.
I’d covered maybe four hundred yards when I topped the rise and found her sitting in the weeds. She didn't say a word. As soon as I handed over the leather, she grabbed the reins, mounted up, and vanished over the ridge in a flash without so much as a "thank you" or "go to hell."
I turned back toward the fence, thinking to myself how manners had sure gone to seed in the younger generation. But right then, the sun dropped behind the ridge and the dark settled in fast. I realized I had three hundred yards of open pasture to cover back to the wire—and right on my flank, slipping through the sagebrush, was a pair of coyotes.
Now, seeing wild country stock wasn't strange to me; I saw plenty of wildlife up Mormon Canyon. But I was usually sitting high in the saddle on a good cow-horse, not shuffling through the weeds on my own two feet. I checked my courage and reached down for the horseman’s knife clipped to my belt. I was healthy and plenty stout back then, so I figured those brush-wolves were just curious rather than looking for a fight. Still, I was a mighty relieved hand when I slid back through the barbed wire fence and saw those two shadows turn back into the canyon oak brush.
A couple of days later, I was driving my truck up Browns Canyon Road when I rounded a bend and saw the timber guardrails on a small bridge smashed to flinders, strung over with yellow police caution tape.
When I pulled into the ranch, the local boys filled in the rest of the story. That little wisp of a gal had driven her pickup clean through the bridge timbers and dropped straight into the creek bed below. When the sheriff’s deputies fished her out of the cab, they found packets of cocaine scattered all through the wreck.
I never saw her or that big warmblood again. Every now and then, when the evening wind blows cold off the Santa Susanas, I think about that young gal-child and her big horse, soaring six feet in the air, high on devil’s dust. And I offer up a quiet word of thanks that I was riding a steady Montana horse, kept my boots grounded in the stirrups, and let the devil fly right on by.
-- Drifting Cowboy
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