How can it be that Fall is already upon us?  Are those really yellow leaves on the willows, in place of ones that so recently had leafed out green?  It seems it was only yesterday that the willows looked like this, colorful but bare:

Late spring willows

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I am very fortunate to have more acres of pasture than I have horses to eat it. Right now I’m down to only two of my own horses, so thank goodness for good friends with lots of equine mouths to feed. My oldest horse is Scout, a mustang from the Piceance Creek herd near Meeker Colorado, who’s now 16 years old. He was 4 years old when he got caught up in the 1999 round-up of wild horses, and quite the little stallion.  I adopted him through the BLM Wild Horse program, picked him out of a hundred or so stallions in a corral at the Canon City Federal Penitentiary.  Scout’s a very special horse and I’m going to devote more than one post to him, all on his own.

And then there’s Magic, bred by my friend Peg, whose other broodmares, colts and weanlings try their darndest to eat as much of their allocated meadow as they can…but find it impossible to make a dent. Magic’s just 5 and I’ve been riding him since he was 3 years old. Here’s a picture of my two fellows, with my friend Christy’s gelding Ringo in the middle.

Magic, Ringo and Scout

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Now that I think of it, with all the exotic places I travel and thus long periods when I’m away from the ranch, I have more than the ordinary longing for summertime. It’s a period of green-ness and growth, of ease, light and lightness that fills my belly with a satisfaction matched only by an unusually perfect meal.

My friend Peg's broodmares keep the grass trimmed in one of the big meadows.

Low, prickly bushes bejeweled with wild roses line our mile-long dirt driveway. Their smell and color remind me of nothing so much as bygone days when my chubby childhood fingers were sticky with the pink sweetness of county fair cotton candy.

Most mornings I awake at first light (no curtains in our bedroom!) to the joyful concert of foraging robins. They’re at the worm-filled breakfast buffet that is my dewy damp meadow-grass lawn. Any fisherman intent on impaling nightcrawlers on a hook, to fling at the brookies in the river at the edge of the grass, has to compete with these sharp-eyed songsters. Myself I rarely fish. Too stand-entary an occupation for me…except for the swatting of mosquitos. But I’m happy to coat those succulent fish with cornmeal and fry them for dinner.

At this point of the summer, it’s finally haying time. In the barn meadow, grass is now so tall the heavy grass heads tickle the horses’ bellies. A swather creeps along the ditches like a burnt-orange alien bug of monstrous size, chomping the standing waves of grass in front of it. In its wake lies a dense ribbon of cut grass, filling the air as if a thousand neighborhood lawns had been mowed at once. Those swaths will take a couple of days to dry in the sun, helped by a breeze that can be as hot as dragon’s breath. If we get an afternoon shower, which is pretty common this time of year, it’ll take longer.

Peg, aka Brocker Quarterhorses, raises these cuties for sale.

Next I’ll be bringing you more about the horses and some of the wildlife that share summer with me. So check back for more…

TO CONTINUE WHERE I LEFT OFF YESTERDAY…..

Arm resting on my open window, I started my careful cow-pie-avoiding weave.  In desultory fashion, heads wagging and tails switching, the cows moved out of my way.  The calves, like all young ones, took the diversion of my car’s presence as an excuse to wiggle, buck, leap and spring hither and yon.  All was moving along well until I found myself fender to nose with a large black cow. Her thick pink raspy tongue licked her nose.  We were close enough that I could count the long black eyelashes above gentle eyes, which surveyed me with an expression of tender sadness and perplexity.  “Why disturb my reverie by making me move?” she seemed to ask.  “Until you came along I had all day to decide whether to go or left or go right,” I imagined her thinking, if indeed she were capable of such a thought.  “Do you really expect me to make such a crucial decision now, just because you need to get to the other side?   Of me…”

She was right of course.  I couldn’t honk at her to move.  After all, I was transitory.  She lived here.  (more…)

There’s a two-lane blacktop that runs by our ranch headquarters, a throwback to what I imagine Route 66 might have been like fifty years ago. For most of the day it’s empty except for an occasional cattle, hay or logging truck roaring past on its heavily-laden way to the auction barns and lumber mills of the Front Range of Colorado.    The big rigs are passed by sprightly Subarus sporting the requisite mohawk of a bicycle or two sticking up from their roof.  A caravan of RVs may lumber along, towing boats or other vehicles behind, interrupted now and then by the burping chop of a Harley Davidson club.

This highway might seem unique, but it’s not. There’s another even emptier one about 13 miles west of us.  Like two long arms passionately  hugging the rambling sagebrush hills in between, the two highways meet and cross over in our county’s main, and only, town: Walden.  They form two sides of a snaking, skinny triangle, the base of which  is a sparsely used dirt road that just happens to start right across from our hay shed.
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