Free Faraway Horses by Buck Brannaman, William Reynolds Page A

the metal bull snaps on their halter ropes. When that didn’t work, one of them poured a bucket of water into her ears to try to get her to stand up. The filly did get up, but then she’d fight again and fall back down.
    The filly was insane with fear. She jumped up, but as soon as she felt that tight halter rope, she flipped over again and got hung upside down by her head. If you’ve ever heard young horses in agony make a certain pitiful, desperate sound just before they die, that’s the sound she was making. I shuddered to imagine what it was like for her mother to hear that from a distance and not be able to do a thing about it.
    The next thing I knew, these two brain surgeons were dragging a hose toward her. They were going to douse her real hard to try to get her up and then keep her on her feet.
    I had stayed out of their way until now. They had mocked my way of working with horses. Even though I had more than once bailed them out by helping them with trailer loading, they had dismissed everything I had done for them. But when I saw they were planning to hose water down the filly’s ears, I couldn’t stand it any longer. I unsnapped the lead rope so the filly could get her head down, then I snapped another lead shank to the halter.
    It didn’t take me more than a few seconds of gentle persuasion to get her up. I rubbed on her forehead for a moment or two, and in less than five minutes I had her leading all over the arena.
    These two supposed horse trainers should have been embarrassed or ashamed, but they were so overcome with anger, they weren’t able or chose not to see what they had done to this little filly. And they were upset that I had succeeded.
    I led the filly back to one of the men, the one who owned the operation, and handed him the lead rope. I looked him right in the eye and didn’t say a word. I didn’t have to. He saw my anger and resentment.
    I rolled up my bed, and when he woke up the next morning, I was long gone. There was no way I was going to change him, and I certainly wasn’t going to be around that kind of behavior. I moved to Gallatin Gateway, to another indoor arena up the Gallatin Canyon at Spanish Creek.
    While I was making a living riding colts, I was also pursuing my roping. After Smokie and I had moved in with theShirleys, our trick-roping careers had ground to a halt. Betsy and Forrest knew nothing about the rodeo business, especially how to promote us as Dad had done. In my junior year in high school, one of my teachers asked me to play Santa Claus and do rope tricks in the Christmas play. I hadn’t spun a rope in a while, at least not in a show, but I said I would and started to practice. Everybody in the little town of Harrison was in the school gym that evening, and when I finished, I got a standing ovation.
    I kept on practicing a minimum of three hours a day, seven days a week, even long after I got out of high school. Three years later, after I was reinstated in the Professional Rodeo Cowboys Association (my membership had lapsed), I got good enough at the Texas Skip to set a world record by hopping in and out of the loop 980 jumps in a row. This record was later shattered by my friend Vince Bruce, an Englishman who did something like two or three thousand jumps.
    Thanks to the Santa Claus skit, the show-business bug had taken ahold, and just about the time I got back into the PRCA, I became involved with the State Department’s Friendship Force. That led to travel as a part-time goodwill ambassador helping promote U.S. tourism. My first trip was to Japan as part of a group that included a number of Native American dancers, some country-and-western musicians, and the 1980 Miss Montana, Wendy Holton. The Japanese loved cowboys, and there I was, eighteen years old, now over six feet tall, with blond hair, surrounded by beautiful Japanese girls, and keeping company with MissMontana. I was about as close to being John Wayne as I was ever going to get, and when the tour