Free Faraway Horses by Buck Brannaman, William Reynolds

As we tiptoed around the corral, I got closer and closer to my coat, and when I was close enough I grabbed it. He didn’t explode, but that hump in his back was so big it looked as if I had left my lunch under the saddle blanket.
    Finally, the time came for me to work on the turnaround. I stuck my coat in Ayatollah’s face, and he turned so fast everything was just a blur. I didn’t realize the centrifugal force of a turning horse could be that strong. I was losing count of the turns he made when suddenly I was flying off the front of him. I’d have hit the ground if my left spur hadn’t hung up on the back of my saddle.
    I found myself looking right into his eyes, and he was as terrified as I was. Dropping the coat never crossed my mind; absolute terror had taken over my entire body, and my hands were paralyzed into clenched fists. The longer I held the coat out there, the harder he spun.
    Ayatollah was spinning and spinning and spinning, and he wouldn’t stop. Although I knew full well that if I could somehow get off him that he would probably kick me before I hit the ground, I decided to do what I could to free my spur from the cantle and take my chances.
    When I finally kicked loose, Ayatollah drove my head into the ground at what felt like a hundred miles an hour. My lower jaw plowed up maybe two pounds of dirt and manure. What I didn’t plow up with my lower jaw, I scooped up with my belt buckle, so the rest of that dirt and manure went down my pants.
    Just as I slammed into the ground like a lawn dart, Ayatollah did indeed kick out at me. His right hind foot landed on my right ear. He didn’t kick me in the head, but my ear swelled up about as big as a mitten.
    As I lay on the ground with Ayatollah bucking around the corral, I remembered one small detail (evidently that bump on my head jogged loose a little memory I should have drawn on prior to getting on Ayatollah): when Ray Hunt did the spins, he reached back with the hand that didn’t have a coat in it and held on to the Cheyenne roll on the cantle of his saddle. That kept him from going over the front of his horse when he started to turn.
    That was quite an important point, and I learned it well. The next time I attempted to turn Ayatollah with my coat, I gave him a very measured, very small, portion of coat, and I gave myself a very large portion of Cheyenne roll to cling to with my free hand. The turns worked out a lot better, and since then I’ve never had to remind myself about preparing for the consequences of a fast turn.
    That lesson was better than any clinic I could have gone to.
    After I left the Madison River Cattle Company in 1982, I went to work for a horse outfit near Bozeman. I had been doing things my teachers had shown me, but I’d also seen that this gentle approach to working horses still had quite a bit of opposition. People were real apt to hang on to their old ways and not try anything new. These days, what I do with horses is very popular, but it sure wasn’t back then.
    I was taking morning classes at Montana State University in Bozeman and then going back to the outfit to ride colts in the afternoon. I didn’t ride the owner’s colts, though. He hadhired other trainers for them, and those guys had their own ideas.
    In the barn one day after class, I saw the owner and one of his trainers trying to halterbreak a filly. They had led the filly and her mare into a stall, jammed the filly into a corner, and muscled the halter over her head any way they could. Then they led the mare out toward a fence, and when the filly followed, they tied her to a post and led the mare away.
    You can imagine the wreck that resulted. The little filly had absolutely no preparation for standing, so naturally she pulled back and fought. She struck out with her feet, and she flipped over. By the time I arrived, she had been upside down who knows how many times. Now two grown men were stomping on her head, kicking her in the belly, and beating her with