Free Perfection of the Morning by Sharon Butala

of that wasn’t enough to contend with, I had the additional handicap of being barely five feet tall. Bridling one of Peter’s big, none-too-amenable American Saddlers myself was impossible, andgetting off and on my horse without help or a feed trough or hay bale to stand on was a challenge. Peter taught me to mount as he did, from beside the horse’s head, facing toward his rump, keeping the reins short and toward me, and turning the stirrup toward me, which is how bronc riders mount in order to avoid getting kicked or, should the horse take it into his head to run, to avoid being dragged. To this day this is the only way I can get on the quietest horse.
    Our daily rides were usually a couple of hours, but often they were six or eight and sometimes even ten. Naturally, during such long rides, I had to get off my horse. Dismounting, I slipped my feet out of the stirrups, held on to the saddle and jumped like an Olympic equestrian does from an English saddle, but in order to remount in the field, I had to learn to position my horse in a hollow while I mounted from the high side, or to put him up against a rock so I had something to stand on.
    Peter felt it part of his duties as a husband to catch, bridle and saddle my horse for me, but being by nature laconic he didn’t try to instruct me verbally about how to ride. He believed, as he told me when I asked for instruction, that the best way to learn was as he had as a child: to ride till you were tired out and then, because it was the most comfortable, your body would naturally fall into the right way. I had doubts then and I still do.
    But all these difficulties seemed less important once we were saddled and riding together in some far field. Without roads, miles from not only houses but even power lines or telephone poles, from all signs of human presence, I forgot my fears and even my aches retreated into the background.
    Now the cattle drive I had taken part in before our marriage that had so frightened and exhilarated me became part of my yearly routine too. Every winter we moved the cattle the forty miles from theranch where there was no shelter or feed supply, to the hay farm where, along the breaks of the Frenchman River and against the main irrigation canals, there was plenty of shelter and a winter’s supply of food. As the Butala family had been doing since they’d bought the hay farm in 1949, every spring we moved them back again to the summer pasture—the ranch—where they stayed seven or eight months.
    These were times I learned to both look forward to and to dread—dread because we never knew what we might run into. We’ve moved in the midst of blizzards, extreme cold when the temperatures dropped to forty and even fifty below Fahrenheit (about the same in Celsius), when it rose to plus fifty Fahrenheit (plus ten Celsius) in January so that the cattle were slogging reluctantly through mud, and were so confused by the unseasonable weather that they kept wanting to turn around and go back to the ranch as if it were spring—and that was worse even than fifty below. One year we moved in snow so deep that because I couldn’t handle the truck without getting stuck every two minutes Peter drove and I led his horse, since I didn’t dare ride him. I lost five pounds in one day. We moved in spring winds which were so strong and cold that we actually wore two parkas, one on top of the other to keep warm. There was also the wrath of farmers to contend with, a historic hatred of an opposing way of life sometimes so strong that some of them didn’t like cattle even to walk down the road past their farms, much less cross their unseeded, frozen land.
    The spring we married, the cattle had already been moved. It was not until the next spring, the second year of our marriage, that Peter and I became the typical rancher husband-and-wife team. I’d done the truck driving the first couple of days while Peter and others rode, until we’d gotten the cattle within a few