Yes, the. Memories make me laugh. That darn horse. I rode it “indian princess” one time. No saddle, no bridle, no shoes for me. Horse took me out to the only sticker patch in the field a reared up so I slipped off his back. and I was stuck. There. On butt and on bare feet.
Where you grow up?
We had 40 acres just outside of a city in Western Washington. My parents now in their 80s still live there. When I was a kid a suburban neighborhood was built behind us. The cows decided on many occassions that the new neighbors’ gardens and yards were better tasting than what was on our side of the fences.
We almost always had one cow that led the rest; if that cow didn’t respect fences we seemed to have trouble until we got rid of it. On the plus side if you got the lead cow moving back toward home the rest usually followed. Since our cows had horns the neighbors thought that they were all bulls and were very afraid of them despite them being hearded by a young kid.
We had a Dairy Dell about a mile and a half away and I used to put a harness on which ever horse I could catch and ride it to get an ice cream cone or hamburger. This system worked pretty well until we started heading back toward the barn and then a lot of times the horse would take off running at full speed, and quite a few times I fall off. But the horse would always come back and check to see if I was alright. The horse knew that it was not suppose to go home alone... I am not sure how they knew this; it wasn’t really something that they were trained to do... they just knew.
A few years after I started working for the fire department in the city I grew up next to we got a call to assist the police with two cows that had kicked open the rear door on the trailer that they had been riding down the freeway in. Miraculously they were not seriously injured when they fell out. They had taken refuge in the brush and black berry bushes behind a Denny’s Restaurant. One of them had given itself up before we arrived. The other was munching on whatever greenery it could find.
When we arrived there were police cars everywhere. The guy who was in charge came over and said that they needed one of our ladders so that a sharp shooter from their SWAT team could get a good shot at the cow. I said let me find a bucket and some gravel and I will get that cow back into the trailer.
He replied, “NO! It’s too late for that! This is a dangerous wild range cow!”
I went over and talked to the lady who had been hauling the cows while my officer and the 3rd man provided the ladder the police had requested. She said that the cows were her neighbor kids’ 4H projects and that they had been raised on the 2 acres behind their house.
The police shot the cow about 10 times with .223 bullets before it finally fell over and died. It was very sad and cruel. I hope that no one ever told the girl that raised it what happened to her pet 4H cow. I am sure that she would have been heart broken.