Ranch Horse Quotes

When I ride a horse, it just makes my blood wiggle! [Cole, age 5]

Son, not everbody thinks that life on a cattle ranch in west Texas is the second best thing to dyin and goin to heaven.

As I sat down, though, I realized that you can get used to certain luxuries that you start to think they're necessities, but when you have to forgo them, you come to see that you don't need them after all. There was a big difference between needing things and wanting things--though a lot of people had trouble telling the two apart--and at the ranch, I could see, we have pretty much everything we'd need but precious little else.

Well, being a perfectionist seems okay from the outside, but a perfectionist never enjoys anything, no matter how well it goes, because nothing is ever perfect.

The way Mom saw it, women should let menfolk do the work because it made them feel more manly. That notion only made sense if you had a strong man willing to step up and get things done, and between Dad's gimp, Buster's elaborate excuses, and Apache's tendency to disappear, it was often up to me to keep the place from falling apart. But even when everyone was pitching in, we never got out from under all the work. I loved that ranch, though sometimes it did seem that instead of us owning the place, the place owned us.

Cowgirl Courage isn't the lack of fear, but the courage to take action in the face of fear.

Quinn and Lisa He pulled her to her feet. "Let's go home." "Sure." "Want to ride double?" "On your horse?" "I promise Thunder will be on his best behavior." "Quinn, he has no manners. He tried to take a nip out of my hat yesterday." He groaned. "He didn't." She held it out. "Look at it. You can see the teeth marks." "Lizzy, you promised not to make a pet out of my horse." "What?" "He's falling in love with you." She burst out laughing at his grim pronouncement. "I'm serious," Quinn insisted. "What have you been feeding him?" "I wasn't supposed to?" "Lizzy." "Sugar cubes. He likes them." "You're hopeless, you know that?" "I didn't mean to." He wrapped his arm around her shoulders. "Sure you didn't. Please remember the cattle are sold as beef. This is a working ranch." "Quinn-" she couldn't resist-"even the pretty little ones?

Sacrificing her own safety and comfort, a broken young woman lay down in the snow, side by side with a broken young horse.

Again the ranch is on the market and they’ve shipped out the last of the horses, paid everybody off the day before, the owner saying, ‘Give them to the real estate shark, I’m out a here,” dropping the keys in Ennis’s hand. He might have to stay with his married daughter until he picks up another job, yet he is suffused with a sense of pleasure because Jack Twist was in his dream.

The tree burst into color and we all gasped at the red, yellow, green, white and the blue lights boldly growing in the cold night, the only lights for miles around in the inmense darkness of the range.

When you turn around, you'll see something I bet you've never seen before. If it takes your breath away, then you'll fit in nicely. If you don't feel anything, then maybe you don't belong here.

I ride over my beautiful ranch. Betwen my legs is a beautiful horse. The air is wine. The grapes on a score of rolling hills are red with autumn flame. Across Sonoma Mountain, wisps of sea fog are stealing. The afternoon sun smolders in the drowsy sky. I have everything to make me glad I am alive.

I realized that you can get so used to certain luxuries that you start to think they’re necessities, but when you have to forgo them, you come to see that you don’t need them after all. There was a big difference between needing things and wanting things—though a lot of people had trouble telling the two apart—and at the ranch, I could see, we’d have pretty much everything we’d need but precious little else.

War is inevitable when the world is fallen. If you stop one, another will start. Redemption is the only path away from war.

One of the few freedoms that we have as human beings that cannot be taken away from us is the freedom to assent to what is true and to deny what is false. Nothing you can give me is worth surrendering that freedom for. At this moment I'm a man with complete tranquillity...I've been a real estate developer for most of my life, and I can tell you that a developer lives with the opposite of tranquillity, which is perturbation. You're perturbed about something all the time. You build your first development, and right away you want to build a bigger one, and you want a bigger house to live in, and if it ain't in Buckhead, you might as well cut your wrists. Soon's you got that, you want a plantation, tens of thousands of acres devoted solely to shooting quail, because you know of four or five developers who've already got that. And soon's you get that, you want a place on Sea Island and a Hatteras cruiser and a spread northwest of Buckhead, near the Chattahoochee, where you can ride a horse during the week, when you're not down at the plantation, plus a ranch in Wyoming, Colorado, or Montana, because truly successful men in Atlanta and New York all got their ranches, and of course now you need a private plane, a big one, too, a jet, a Gulfstream Five, because who's got the patience and the time and the humility to fly commercially, even to the plantation, much less out to a ranch? What is it you're looking for in this endless quest? Tranquillity. You think if only you can acquire enough worldly goods, enough recognition, enough eminence, you will be free, there'll be nothing more to worry about, and instead you become a bigger and bigger slave to how you think others are judging you.

Liking something and wanting to take it for a ride are two very different things', Joslyn sais, climbing out of the truck to stand on the ground. Hutch's eyes sparkled as he came around to face her. 'I'm not touching that one with a ten-foot pole,' he told her.

It reminds me of something Hank told me a long time ago, about growing up on a ranch, training new horses. He'd been good at it, apparently, and attributed that to his patience. He could wait out any bad mood. The anger of an animal didn't make him angry. It helps you understand them better, he told me. You don't want that anger becoming fear. You want it turning into trust.

Suddenly,I could picture Tinker on the back of a horse somewhere: at the edge of the treeline under a towering sky...at his college roommate's ranch, perhaps...where rhey hunted deer with antique rifles and with dogs that were better bred than me.

Cowgirl Courage isn't the lack of fear, but the courage to take action in the face of fear.

Maybe I’ve finally found what I’ve been searching for. These people. This place. That horse. Sitting together on a hay bale beside the man I love. What could be better?

Once a horse girl, always a horse girl.

To step inside a sealed, twelve-by-twelve-foot space with a wild animal that is many times your size is extremely hazardous to say the least. Yet sending these frightened animals out into the real world without giving them tools to safely deal with a new environment...could be disastrous. It would not be unlike sending a soldier on a mission without any training. Clearly, it was not a scenario lending itself toward safety or success for either horse or new owner.

I listened to the static echoing in my ear and thought of those herds of horses you get in the vast wild spaces of America and Australia, the ones running free, fighting off bobcats or dingoes and living lean on what they find, gold and tangled in the fierce sun. My friend Alan from when I was a kid, he worked on a ranch in Wyoming one summer, on a J1 visa. He watched guys breaking those horses. He told me that every now and then there was one that couldn't be broken, one wild to the bone. Those horses fought the bridle and the fence till they were ripped up and streaming blood, till they smashed their legs or their necks to splinters, till they died of fighting to run.

don’t hate horses.” Pippy snorts and bats her eyelashes at him. Another one down, apparently. “Okay. You said you don’t like horses.” “Yup.” He grunts as he turns his back on me and crouches down to line up two boards. “But I like you.

white tank top, currently covered by my beloved shearling-lined denim jacket, and a black satin skirt from Teddy’s closet. The slit went a little higher than I was used to—right above mid-thigh—but I loved the way it made me feel. Sultry. I was wearing black cowboy boots that should never be within a ten-foot radius of a horse, but they were perfect for a night at the bar.

remembered something Blue Horse said to me back before Gilbert was born. He said wisdom is not a path, it is a tree. At the time I was too busy to give it much thought, so I nodded politely but didn’t pay much attention. Now I see that he was surely right. I have been sad almost a whole year, thinking that taking that test was somehow the end of my learning and that not having that as a possibility in my future left a big empty spot in my life that the children and the ranch didn’t fill. But my life is not like that, it is a tree, and I can stay in one place and spread out in all directions, and I can do more learning shading this brood of mine than if I was all alone.

I was asked to talk to a roomful of undergraduates in a university in a beautiful coastal valley. I talked about place, about the way we often talk about love of place, but seldom how places love us back, of what they give us. They give us continuity, something to return to, and offer familiarity that allows some portion of our lives to remain collected and coherent. They give us an expansive scale in which our troubles are set into context, in which the largeness of the world is a balm to loss, trouble, and ugliness. And distant places give us refuge in territories where our own histories aren't so deeply entrenched and we can imagine other stories, other selves, or just drink up quiet and respite. The bigness of the world is redemption. Despair compresses you into a small space, and a depression is literally a hollow in the ground. To dig deeper into the self, to go underground, is sometimes necessary, but so is the other route of getting out of yourself, into the larger world, into the openness in which you need not clutch your story and your troubles so tightly to your chest. Being able to travel in both ways matters, and sometimes the way back into the heart of the question begins by going outward and beyond. This is the expansiveness that comes literally in a landscape or that tugs you out of yourself in a story..... I told the student that they were at an age when they might begin to choose the places that would sustain them the rest of their lives, that places were much more reliable than human beings, and often much longer-lasting, and I asked each of them where they felt at home. They answered, each of them, down the rows, for an hour, the immigrants who had never stayed anywhere long or left a familiar world behind, the teenagers who'd left the home they'd spent their whole lives in for the first time, the ones who loved or missed familiar landscapes and the ones who had not yet noticed them. I found books and places before I found friends and mentors, and they gave me a lot, if not quite what a human being would. As a child, I spun outward in trouble, for in that inside-out world [of my family], everywhere but home was safe. Happily, the oaks were there, the hills, the creeks, the groves, the birds, the old dairy and horse ranches, the rock outcroppings, the open space inviting me to leap out of the personal into the embrace of the nonhuman world.

I am not a cowboy with a ranch and cattle, but I have this stable with some of the most beautiful horses in the world. I am not a farmer with a hundred-year-old farmhouse and acres of crops, but I have an island with acres of fertile land. I am not a mechanic with grease under my fingernails, but I know how to fix a flat tire. I am not your everyday average guy. I do not know if I can be one. But if you marry me, I will do my best to make your life as ordinary as you'd like.

he wasn’t a cowboy. He’d never even been on a horse.

If you ever use me or my horses to win brownie points in your billionaire-baby sandbox, I will bury you there myself. Are we clear?

The barn was dark from the storm, and we couldn’t find the harness, which no one had used in years. Old Jake, who had sprained his good foot falling off a horse and was hobbling around worse than ever, started getting panicky at the idea of the dam giving out and washing away the cattle, but I told him to hush his mouth. We all knew what was at stake, and if we were going to save the ranch, we needed clear heads.

This is Doctor Norton. Who's calling?" "Step N’Wolfe- the owner of the Emerald Cascade Ranch on Green Valley Road. I have a horse in labor and the baby's already coming out of the horse's ass." "You should of called sooner.

Bevve un sorso di caffè e si sporse in avanti per ravvivare il fuoco, poi prese un libro dal tavolino e cercò di concentrarsi nella lettura. Tentativo patetico e inutile. Pensò allora a come sarebbe stato condividere il ranch con una donna, un pensiero che negli ultimi tempi ritornava spesso. Pensò a Renée che se ne era andata con Craig Haas. Pensò a Rosalyn, che gli riscaldava il corpo ma non il cuore. Poi pensò a Maggie. A come si era sciolta tra le sue braccia e a come si era sciolto lui quando l’aveva sentita fremere contro di sé.

Wheeler, I just took you on a tour of my family’s working cattle ranch. We saw cows, horses, snakes, and a freaking bald eagle. Not to mention the Colorado River. But all you can talk about is cowboys?” Wheeler blinks. “Yes, cowboys are what interest me most. What’s wrong with that?

Bess frowned, bit her lip, and managed to get a noose twirling. Then plop—it dropped over the head of her own horse! Tex gave a piercing whistle. George and Nancy burst into laughter while the “steer” helped blushing Bess to dismount. “Never mind,” said Nancy. “You didn’t want to be a cowboy, anyway!

The mythic American character is made up of the virtues of fairness, self-reliance, toughness, and honesty. Those virtues are generally stuffed into a six-foot-tall, dark-haired, can-do kind of guy who is at once a family man, attractive to strange women, carefree, stable, realistic, and whimsical. in the lore of America, that man lives on the Great Plains. he's from Texas, Dodge City, Cheyenne, the Dakotas, or somewhere in Montana. In fact, the seedbed of this American character, from the days of de Tocqueville through Andrew Jackson, Wyattt Earp, Pony Express riders, pioneers, and cowboys to modern caricatures played by actors such as Tom Mix, Gary Cooper, and John Wayne has aways been the frontier. It's a place with plenty of room to roam, great sunsets, clear lines between right and wrong, and lots of horses. It's also a place that does not exist and never has. The truth is that there has never been much fairness out here.

I sat this afternoon to read during the boys’ nap. I was going through the botanical theory book, and while I was reading I remembered something Blue Horse said to me back before Gilbert was born. He said wisdom is not a path, it is a tree. At the time I was too busy to give it much thought, so I nodded politely but didn’t pay much attention. Now I see that he was surely right. I have been sad almost a whole year, thinking that taking that test was somehow the end of my learning and that not having that as a possibility in my future left a big empty spot in my life that the children and the ranch didn’t fill. But my life is not like that, it is a tree, and I can stay in one place and spread out in all directions, and I can do more learning shading this brood of mine than if I was all alone. I declare, it is like some other part of me made up some rules about happiness and I just went along with them without thinking. My heart is lightened so much that I am amazed at how sad I felt for so long.

Daniel!" She waved the letter. "I have news," she called in the English she always used with him. Her son straightened up from the horse. "What, Mama?" Eager expectancy glowed in his blue eyes, and for a moment he looked so much like his father that a familiar pain pierced her heart and tempered her excitement. From long practice, she shoved her sadness aside. "I've inherited Uncle Ezra's ranch in Montana.

Wyatt. I've just received a letter from Mrs. Samantha Sawyer Rodriguez. She's Ezra's niece and has inherited his ranch." ... "She lives in Argentina." ... She's a widow with one son." ... "She's moving out here." ... "Going to breed horses and take in orphan boys to raise up as God-fearing citizens." "You say this Rodriguez woman is goin' to raise horses?" ... "Horses from Argentina?" "A stallion and five mares. Falabellas. Must be some South American breed.

With Nancy in the lead, the riders cut across the big meadow at a gallop and started up the mountain trail. Nancy followed Aunt Bet’s map, and after a long, hot climb, the girls sighted a group of weather-beaten frame buildings clinging to the slope above. As they rode into the streets of the ghost town they were struck by the silence and the bleached look of the sagging buildings. In front of a dilapidated hotel they dismounted and tied their horses to an old hitching rail.

Earlier, when I drove to Gray Horse, I’d been startled by the sight of bison roaming through the prairie with their bowed heads and massive woolly bodies supported seemingly impossibly on narrow legs. In the nineteenth century, bison were extinguished from the prairie, but in recent years they have been reintroduced by conservationists. The media mogul Ted Turner had been raising bison on a forty-thousand-acre ranch between Fairfax and Pawhuska—a ranch that in 2016 was bought by the Osage Nation.

Wander with me through one mood of the myriad moods of sadness into which one is plunged by John Barleycorn. I ride out over my beautiful ranch. Between my legs is a beautiful horse. The air is wine. The grapes on a score of rolling hills are red with autumn flame. Across Sonoma Mountain wisps of sea fog are stealing. The afternoon sun smoulders in the drowsy sky. I have everything to make me glad I am alive. I am filled with dreams and mysteries. I am all sun and air and sparkle. I am vitalised, organic. I move, I have the power of movement, I command movement of the live thing I bestride. I am possessed with the pomps of being, and know proud passions and inspirations. I have ten thousand august connotations. I am a king in the kingdom of sense, and trample the face of the uncomplaining dust.... And yet, with jaundiced eye I gaze upon all the beauty and wonder about me, and with jaundiced brain consider the pitiful figure I cut in this world that endured so long without me and that will again endure without me. I remember the men who broke their hearts and their backs over this stubborn soil that now belongs to me. As if anything imperishable could belong to the perishable! These men passed. I, too, shall pass. These men toiled, and cleared, and planted, gazed with aching eyes, while they rested their labour-stiffened bodies on these same sunrises and sunsets, at the autumn glory of the grape, and at the fog-wisps stealing across the mountain. And they are gone. And I know that I, too, shall some day, and soon, be gone.

They sang as they came into camp. Fifty men all singing of what they had done and how they had charged into the farms and ranches of the enemy. And somebody started up a mourning song for Eaten Alive’s little brother, ah, it made me cry to hear them singing as they rode. You could hear their voices for a mile. They had a red scalp and two blond scalps, very long ones that waved and shook in the wind, and in that hair was the soul of the enemy held tight, tight. There was light all around them and all around their war horses and it was as beautiful and dangerous as the color of lightning.

Early the next morning, I was driving westward toward the ranch. Marlboro Man had called the night before--a rare evening we’d spent apart--and had asked me to come out early. I’d just turned onto the highway that led out of my hometown when my car phone rang. It was dewy outside, foggy. “Hurry up,” Marlboro Man’s voice playfully commanded. “I want to see my future wife.” My stomach lurched. Wife. It would take me a while to get used to that word. “I’m coming,” I announced. “Hold your horses!” We hung up, and I giggled. Hold your horses. Heh-heh. I had a lifetime of these jokes ahead. This was going to be loads of fun.

As Americans embraced Wild West mythology by ignoring inconvenient facts and exaggerating or inventing more palatable ones, they also altered the meaning of a traditionally negative term. In Wyatt’s real West, anyone referred to as a cowboy was most likely a criminal. But in movies the word was used first to describe hardworking ranch hands and then, generically, those who rode horses, toted six-guns, and, when necessary (and it always became necessary) fought to uphold justice at the risk of their own lives. Cowboys were heroes, and their enemies were outlaws. So far as his growing legion of fans was concerned, Wyatt Earp was a cowboy in the new, best sense of the word. B

What are you smiling about?" Rider asked. Willow glanced at him and flushed. "That must have been some daydream you were having." If you only knew, Willow thought. "Come on, Freckles, it's time you get back to the ranch. I have work to do." His big work-roughened hand swallowed hers as he helped her to her feet. Against her will, her body responded to its warmth. She snatched her hand away, garnering a searching expression in his dark brown eyes. She quickly excused her reaction with a flirty smile. "I promised not to touch you, remember?" "Yes,but I dont't recall promising not to touch you." He wiggled his brows in a comical imitation of an evil villain in a bad play. She laughed and shook her head. "Help me mount Sugar before I decide to wipe that grin off your face." "And how do you propose to do that?" he asked, retrieving the horses and returning to he side. He bent down, cupped his hands, and boosted her into the mare's saddle. "You weren't planning on slapping my face again, I hope," he said, reaching for Sultan's reins. "Oh,no, nothing like that." She batted her lashes coquettishly, the affect intensified by the naughty twinkle in her eyes. "You better stop looking at me like that, or I'll have to follow Sultan's example and break down your door tonight." "I don't think Juan would be too happy about making me two new doors. It wasn't easy explaining what happened to the first one!

Grinning to himself, Blue went out the door pulling out on his T-shirt. So sue him, he had changed his mind, but he sure wasn’t going to quite admit it. She’d laugh like a hyena, and he had some pride. He found his hat, made sure to clean up Roy’s kitchen, and went out to see to the horses. God, had he ever had so much fun in a relationship before? Most of them had been just about sex, and he and Jenna still hadn’t even done that. Maybe that was the secret. Liking someone first and then realizing you wanted to make love to them made a lot more sense. Blue put on his hat. And he would be making love with Jenna, he was damned sure about that. Sometimes even a Marine had to reassess his priorities. 44%

A few months back, Meredith and I took our sons to an evening of modern dance. It was an outdoor performance, in a horse paddock on a ranch in central Texas, and the dance involved nine young women and a very large horse. There was a great deal of spinning in the dirt. There was swift running, much kicking, many horse-like movements of the head and shoulders. It was strange and very beautiful. At one point, midway through the performance, Meredith leaned over to Timmy and asked if he understood what the dancing was all about. Timmy said no. Meredith said, “Well, right now, for instance, that dancer over there, she’s like a baby horse—a foal—trying to stand up for the first time. Can you see that?” Timmy nodded. He looked puzzled. “Well, yes,” he said, “but what about all the other shenanigans?

But here through the dusk comes one who is not glad to be at rest. He is a workman on the ranch, an old man, an immigrant Italian. He takes his hat off to me in all servility, because, forsooth, I am to him a lord of life. I am food to him, and shelter, and existence. He has toiled like a beast all his days, and lived less comfortably than my horses in their deep-strawed stalls. He is labour-crippled. He shambles as he walks. One shoulder is twisted higher than the other. His hands are gnarled claws, repulsive, horrible. As an apparition he is a pretty miserable specimen. His brain is as stupid as his body is ugly. "His brain is so stupid that he does not know he is an apparition," the White Logic chuckles to me. "He is sense-drunk. He is the slave of the dream of life. His brain is filled with superrational sanctions and obsessions. He believes in a transcendent over-world. He has listened to the vagaries of the prophets, who have given to him the sumptuous bubble of Paradise. He feels inarticulate self-affinities, with self-conjured non-realities. He sees penumbral visions of himself titubating fantastically through days and nights of space and stars. Beyond the shadow of any doubt he is convinced that the universe was made for him, and that it is his destiny to live for ever in the immaterial and supersensuous realms he and his kind have builded of the stuff of semblance and deception. "But you, who have opened the books and who share my awful confidence—you know him for what he is, brother to you and the dust, a cosmic joke, a sport of chemistry, a garmented beast that arose out of the ruck of screaming beastliness by virtue and accident of two opposable great toes. He is brother as well to the gorilla and the chimpanzee. He thumps his chest in anger, and roars and quivers with cataleptic ferocity. He knows monstrous, atavistic promptings, and he is composed of all manner of shreds of abysmal and forgotten instincts." "Yet he dreams he is immortal," I argue feebly. "It is vastly wonderful for so stupid a clod to bestride the shoulders of time and ride the eternities." "Pah!" is the retort. "Would you then shut the books and exchange places with this thing that is only an appetite and a desire, a marionette of the belly and the loins?" "To be stupid is to be happy," I contend. "Then your ideal of happiness is a jelly-like organism floating in a tideless, tepid twilight sea, eh?

And her love for her ranch turned sometimes into a certain repulsion. The underlying rat-dirt, the everlasting bristling tussle of the wild life, with the tangle and the bones strewing: Bones of horses struck by lightning, bones of dead cattle, skulls of goats with little horns: bleached, unburied bones. Then the cruel electricity of the mountains. And then, most mysterious but worst of all, the animosity of the spirit of place: the crude, half-created spirit of place, like some serpent-bird for ever attacking man, in a hatred of man's onward struggle towards further creation. The seething cauldron of lower life, seething on the very tissue of the higher life, seething the soul away, seething at the marrow. The vast and unrelenting will of the swarming lower life, working forever against man's attempt at a higher life, a further created being.

On the road leading from his ranch to Samantha's, Wyat t drove his surrey up a small hill and caught his breath as the beauty of the large crescent moon dangling just out of reach over the crest A full moon would have been plump with luminescence, yet the pearly surface of the sickle still cast enough light to shadow his surroundings and seemed close enough that once he drove to the top of the hill, he'd be able to touch the bottom horn or at least toss a rope around it. He slackened the reins, slowing the horse, knowing that the higher he climbed, the sooner the illusion of closeness would disappear and he wanted to preserve for a moment the fantasy that the moon was within his grasp. The stars, by contrast, were distant pricks of diamond light farther out than a man could dream. He sighed. Life as a rancher or as a rancher's wife was not moon and stars easy or romantic. What would put stars in Samantha's eyes?

Rider was still cursing the incident back at the ranch, when riding north, he spied an outlandish sight. As he drew closer, he realized his eyes weren't playing a joke on him. Coming toward him was Hick's gunslinger, stark naked but for his hat and boots. "Well, I'll be damned," he whispered to himself. "Even his shooting iron is burnt!" The moment Scofield heard Rider's horse, he jerked his hat off his head and covered his privates. "What happened, man?" Rider asked. "Where's your clothes, your horse?" Scofield lifted rage-filled eyes to the foreman. "The Vaughn slut, she did this to me. When I get my hands on her, me and the boys are gonna have a party and she's gonna be the entertainment. After I'm done with 'er-" "Hold on there, Scofield," Rider interrupted. "Are you talking about Willow Vaughn? Why would she do a thing like this?" "How should I know! She just lost her temper sudden-like. Then she pulled that gun of hers and ordered me off my horse and made me strip down.

What are you doing?” “Coming to pick you up in a little bit,” he said. I loved it when he took charge. It made my heart skip a beat, made me feel flushed and excited and thrilled. After four years with J, I was sick and tired of the surfer mentality. Laid-back, I’d discovered, was no longer something I wanted in a man. And when it came to his affection for me, Marlboro Man was anything but that. “I’ll be there at five.” Yes, sir. Anything you say, sir. I’ll be ready. With bells on. I started getting ready at three. I showered, shaved, powdered, perfumed, brushed, curled, and primped for two whole hours--throwing on a light pink shirt and my favorite jeans--all in an effort to appear as if I’d simply thrown myself together at the last minute. It worked. “Man,” Marlboro Man said when I opened the door. “You look great.” I couldn’t focus very long on his compliment, though--I was way too distracted by the way he looked. God, he was gorgeous. At a time of year when most people are still milky white, his long days of working cattle had afforded him a beautiful, golden, late-spring tan. And his typical denim button-down shirts had been replaced by a more fitted dark gray polo, the kind of shirt that perfectly emphasizes biceps born not from working out in a gym, but from tough, gritty, hands-on labor. And his prematurely gray hair, very short, was just the icing on the cake. I could eat this man with a spoon. “You do, too,” I replied, trying to will away my spiking hormones. He opened the door to his white diesel pickup, and I climbed right in. I didn’t even ask him where we were going; I didn’t even care. But when we turned west on the highway and headed out of town, I knew exactly where he was taking me: to his ranch…to his turf…to his home on the range. Though I didn’t expect or require a ride from him, I secretly loved that he drove over an hour to fetch me. It was a throwback to a different time, a burst of chivalry and courtship in this very modern world. As we drove we talked and talked--about our friends, about our families, about movies and books and horses and cattle.

When we came out of the cookhouse, we found the boy's father, the Indian man who had been grazing the horses in the pasture, waiting for us. He wanted someone to tell his troubles to. He looked about guardedly, afraid that the Señora might overhear him. 'Take a look at me' he said. I don't even know how old I am. When I was young, the Señor brought me here. He promised to pay me and give me a plot of my own. 'Look at my clothes' he said, pointing to the patches covering his body. 'I can't remember how many years I've been wearing them. I have no others. I live in a mud hut with my wife and sons. They all work for the Señor like me. They don't go to school. They don't know how to read or write; they don't even speak Spanish. We work for the master, raise his cattle and work his fields. We only get rice and plantains to eat. Nobody takes care of us when we are sick. The women here have their babies in these filthy huts.' 'Why don't you eat meat or at least milk the cows?' I asked. 'We aren't allowed to slaughter a cow. And the milk goes to the calves. We can't even have chicken or pork - only if an animal gets sick and dies. Once I raised a pig in my yard' he went on. 'She had a litter of three. When the Señor came back he told the foreman to shoot them. That's the only time we ever had good meat.' 'I don't mind working for the Señor but I want him to keep his promise. I want a piece of land of my own so I can grow rice and yucca and raise a few chickens and pigs. That's all.' 'Doesn't he pay you anything?' Kevin asked. 'He says he pays us but he uses our money to buy our food. We never get any cash. Kind sirs, maybe you can help me to persuade the master . Just one little plot is all I want. The master has land, much land.' We were shocked by his tale. Marcus took out a notebook and pen. 'What's his name?'. He wrote down the name. The man didn't know the address. He only knew that the Señor lived in La Paz. Marcus was infuriated. 'When I find the owner of the ranch, I'll spit right in his eye. What a lousy bastard! I mean, it's really incredible'. 'That's just the way things are,' Karl said. 'It's sad but there's nothing we can do about it.

Despite the rocky start, I wound up enjoying a beautiful day on the ranch with Marlboro Man and his parents. I didn’t ride a horse--my legs were still shaky from my near-murder of his mother earlier in the day--but I did get to watch Marlboro Man ride his loyal horse Blue as I rode alongside him in a feed truck with one of the cowboys, who gifted me right off the bat with an ice-cold Dr. Pepper. I felt welcome on the ranch that day, felt at home, and before long the memory of my collision with a gravel ditch became but a faint memory--that is, when Marlboro Man wasn’t romantically whispering sweet nothings like “Drive much?” softly into my ear. And when the day of work came to an end, I felt I knew Marlboro Man just a little better. As the four of us rode away from the pens together, we passed the sad sight of my Toyota Camry resting crookedly in the ditch where it had met its fate. “I’ll run you home, Ree,” Marlboro Man said. “No, no…just stop here,” I insisted, trying my darnedest to appear strong and independent. “I’ll bet I can get it going.” Everyone in the pickup burst into hysterical laughter. I wouldn’t be driving myself anywhere for a while.

It takes energy to rule Russia. The corollary is that, the tougher a country's régime, the more appropriate it is that equity and justice should be practised there. The horse that is not kept constantly under control forgets in the wink of an eye the rudiments of training that have been inculcated into it. In the same way, with the Russian, there is an instinctive force that invariably leads him back to the state of nature. People sometimes quote the case of the horses that escaped from a ranch in America, and by some ten years later had formed huge herds of wild horses. It is so easy for an animal to go back to its origins ! For the Russian, the return to the state of nature is a return to primitive forms of life. The family exists, the female looks after her children, like the female of the hare, with all the feelings of a mother. But the Russian doesn't want anything more. His reaction against the constraint of the organised State (which is always a constraint, since it limits the liberty of the individual) is brutal and savage, like all feminine reactions. When he collapses and should yield, the Russian bursts into lamentations. This will to return to the state of nature is exhibited in his revolutions. For the Russian, the typical form of revolution is nihilism.

Get off your horse, Jack." "Why don't you just ride outta here, missy, and I'll forget this ever happened." Willow's voice trembled with fury. "Get off your horse," she repeated. "Slow and easy." Still grinning his contempt, he did as he asked. "That's good. Now, real slow like, take your gunbelt off and toss it my way." "Like hell!" A shot rang out and nicked a chunk of leather from his boot. Cursing, he unbuckled his gun and tossed it at her mare's feet. "Now,strip them britches off, underwear, too," she ordered. "You little shi-" Bang! Jack's hat whizzed off his head. He dropped his pants in a puddle over his boots, trying his best to shelter his privates from her view. "My,my,Jack." Willow laughed humorlessly. "Is that puny thing you're trying to hide the same thing you were threatening me with?" If looks could kill, Willow would have been dead and buried ten times over, then and there. "Take them confounded boots off so's you can get your pants clear off," she ordered in mock exasperation. He wheeled around, gaining a modicum of privacy while he complied. "You're puny all over, Jack. You got the boniest bee-hind I ever did see. You sure you ain't picked up a worm somewheres?" "You're gonna pay for this,you little slut!" "Shut your filthy mouth and pick them pants off the ground and toss 'em over here at my horse's feet. Then you can put your boots back on." He gave the pants a toss, put his boots on, and turned around to face her, cuping his privates in his hands. "Okay,Jack, finish the job. You've been real generous but I'm a greedy cuss. Give me the shirt off your back, too." Cursing, he again turned around and obeyed. "Oh,ah,Jack, you better reach behind you there,and get your hat. I'll let you keep it. We wouldn't want your bald spot to get sunburned." Scofield now stood in nothing but his boots, using his hat to shield his lower half. Humiliated, the gunslinger's eyes burned with bloody intent. Willow suddenly regretted her damnable quick temper and realized the folly of her reckless retaliation. No doubt,the heinous man would seek revenge. But the damage was done and the man was so mad that backing off now would be the same as signing her death warrant. "Step away from your horse and start walking toward the ranch, Scofield." "You're out of your mind!" "Maybe,but I bet you'll think twice before threatening to poke that puny thing at another lady." "You? A lady? Ha!" Willow's temper flared anew. "Walk, Jack. Real fast. Cuz if you don't, I'm gonna use your puny thing for target practice." Her bullet kicked up the dust at his feet and started him on his way.

As Marlboro Man slid open the huge barn doors and flipped on the enormous lights mounted to the beams, my heart began beating quickly. I couldn’t wait to smell its puppy breath. “Happy wedding,” he said sweetly, leaning against the wall of the barn and motioning toward the center with his eyes. My eyes adjusted to the light…and slowly focused on what was before me. It wasn’t a pug. It wasn’t a diamond or a horse or a shiny gold bangle…or even a blender. It wasn’t a love seat. It wasn’t a lamp. Sitting before me, surrounded by scattered bunches of hay, was a bright green John Deere riding lawn mower--a very large, very green, very mechanical, and very diesel-fueled John Deere riding lawn mower. Literally and figuratively, crickets chirped in the background of the night. And for the hundredth time since our engagement, the reality of the future for which I’d signed up flashed in front of me. I felt a twinge of panic as I saw the tennis bracelet I thought I didn’t want go poof, disappearing completely into the ether. Would this be how presents on the ranch would always be? Does the world of agriculture have a different chart of wedding anniversary presents? Would the first anniversary be paper…or motor oil? Would the second be cotton or Weed Eater string? I would add this to the growing list of things I still needed to figure out.

The boy shows talent. The overheard words still rankled. Boy! At twenty-four! He’d like to see that banker do a man’s work around a ranch. He’d have blisters on those smooth hands inside of two hours. Not to mention how he’d feel after a long day in the saddle. Elizabeth wouldn’t be happy with Livingston. He knew it. True, the man had money, a large house, and a purebred pedigree—all the things she probably wanted in a man. But it wouldn’t be enough. He had instincts about her in the same way he knew horses—what they needed, how to touch them. In the last week, there’d been times when she’d thawed and shown her feelings. He’d bet anything a special woman lurked beneath her proper Boston exterior. With Livingston, that woman would never emerge. He straightened and ground a fist into his palm. He couldn’t step back and let Livingston waltz away with her. It wouldn’t be right. He’d have to change. Force himself past his shyness. Force himself to open up. Nick wasn’t sure how he’d do it. Aside from what he’d learned from Miz Carter, he’d not had any training in proper society manners. Now, he’d seen for himself how different things were in the East. But something in Elizabeth had touched him, something that went beyond social barriers, and he knew she’d sensed it too. He might not have much wealth to offer, but there were other things he could do to make her happy, and he’d love her with all his heart.

Early the next morning, I was driving westward toward the ranch. Marlboro Man had called the night before--a rare evening we’d spent apart--and had asked me to come out early. I’d just turned onto the highway that led out of my hometown when my car phone rang. It was dewy outside, foggy. “Hurry up,” Marlboro Man’s voice playfully commanded. “I want to see my future wife.” My stomach lurched. Wife. It would take me a while to get used to that word. “I’m coming,” I announced. “Hold your horses!” We hung up, and I giggled. Hold your horses. Heh-heh. I had a lifetime of these jokes ahead. This was going to be loads of fun. He met me at my car, wearing jeans, boots, and a soft, worn denim shirt. I climbed out of the car and stepped right into his arms. It was just after 8:00 A.M., and within seconds we were leaning against my car, sharing a passionate, steamy kiss. Leave it to Marlboro Man to make 8:00 A.M. an acceptable time to make out. I never would have known this if I hadn’t met him. “So…what are we gonna do today?” I asked, trying to remember what day it was. “Oh, I thought we’d drive around for a while…,” he said, his arms still grasping my waist, “and talk about where we might want to live.” I’d heard him mention before, in passing, that someday he wanted to move to a different spot on the ranch, but I’d never paid much attention to it. I’d never really cared much where he lived, just as long as he took his Wranglers with me. “I want it to be your decision, too.

Rider's head snapped up at the sound of gravel crunching under Willow's boots. The sight of the girl in boy's garb birthed an oath. Beneath her cotton shirt, her breasts bounced freely with each step. And within the tight mannish pants, her hips swung in an unconscious rhythm, clearly proclaiming her all woman. Hell, she might as well be naked! His body's reaction was immediate. Cursing his lack of control, he turned sideways, facing her horse, and pretended to adjust the saddle straps. Willow took Sugar's reins and waited for Rider to move aside. He didn't budge an inch. Instead, he tipped his hat back on his head, revealing undisguised disapproval. "Is that the way you always dress?" he bit out. Willow stiffened, immediately defensive. Criticizing herself was one thing; putting up with Sinclair's disdain was another! "If you were expecting a dress, you're crazy!" she snapped. "It would be suicide in this country." "Haven't you ever heard of riding skirts?" "Yes. I'm not as dumb as you seem to think. But fancy riding skirts cost money I don't have. 'Sides, pants are a hell of a lot more useful on the ranch than some damn riding skirt! Now, if you're done jawing about my clothes, I'd like to get a move on before dark." "Somebody ought to wash that barnyard mouth of yours,woman." Willow rested her hand on her gun. "You can try, if you dare." As if I'd draw on a woman, Rider cursed silently, stepping out of her way. As she hoisted herself into the saddle, he was perversely captivated by the way the faded demin stretched over her round bottom. He imagined her long slender legs wrapped around him and how her perfect heart-shaped buttocks would fill his hands and...Oh,hell, what was he doing standing here, gaping like some callow youth? Maybe the girl was right.Maybe he was crazy. One moment he was giving the little witch hell for wearing men's pants; the next he was ogling her in them. He started to turn away, then reached out and gave her booted ankle an angry jerk. "Now what?" Icy turquoise eyes met his, dark and searing. "Do you have any idea what you look like in that get-up? No self-respecting lady would dress like that. It's an open invitation to a man. And if you think that gun you're wearing is going to protect you, you're badly mistaken." Willow gritted her teeth in mounting ire. "So what's it to you, Sinclair? You ain't my pa and you ain't my brother. Hell,my clothes cover me just as good as yours cover you!" She slapped his hand from her ankle, jerked Sugar around, and spurred the mare into a brisk gallop. Before the fine red dust settled, Rider was on his horse, racing after her. Dammit, she's right.Why should I care how she dresses? Heaven knows it certainly has no bearing on my mission. No, agreed a little voice in his head, but it sure is distacting as hell! He'd always prided himself on his cool control; it had saved his backside more than once. But staying in any kind of control around Willow Vaughn was like trying to tame a whimsical March wind-impossible!

In the evening he saddled his horse and rode out west from the house. The wind was much abated and it was very cold and the sun sat blood red and elliptic under the reefs of bloodred cloud before him. He rode where he would always choose to ride, out where the western fork of the old Comanche road coming down out of the Kiowa country to the north passed through the westernmost section of the ranch and you could see the faint trace of it bearing south over the low prairie that lay between the north and middle forks of the Concho River. At the hour he'd always choose when the shadows were long and the ancient road was shaped before him in the rose and canted light like a dream of the past where the painted ponies and the riders of that lost nation came down out of the north with their faces chalked and their long hair plaited and each armed for war which was their life and the women and children and women with children at their breasts all of them pledged in blood and redeemable in blood only. When the wind was in the north you could hear them, the horses and the breath of the horses and the horses' hooves that were shod in rawhide and the rattle of lances and the constant drag of the travois poles in the sand like the passing of some enormous serpent and the young boys naked on wild horses jaunty as circus riders and hazing wild horses before them and the dogs trotting with their tongues aloll and footslaves following half naked and sorely burdened an above all the low chant of their traveling song which the riders sang as they rode, nation and ghost of nation passing in a soft chorale across that mineral waste to darkness bearing lost to all history and all remembrance like a grail the sum of their secular and transitory and violent lives.

Now, did you really mean that about not wanting to do this the rest of your life?” he asked. That familiar, playful grin appeared in the corner of his mouth. I blinked a couple of times and took a deep breath, smiling back at him and reassuring him with my eyes that no, I hadn’t meant it, but I did hate his horse. Then I took a deep breath, stood up, and dusted off my Anne Klein straight-leg jeans. “Hey, we don’t have to do this now,” Marlboro Man said, standing back up. “I’ll just do it later.” “No, I’m fine,” I answered, walking back toward my horse with newfound resolve. I took another deep breath and climbed back on the horse. As Marlboro Man and I rode back toward the thicket of trees, I suddenly understood: if I was going to marry this man, if I was going to live on this isolated ranch, if I was going to survive without cappuccino and takeout food…I sure wasn’t going to let this horse beat me. I’d have to toughen up and face things. As we rode, it became even more clear. I’d have to apply this same courage to all areas of my life--not just the practical, day-in and day-out activities of ranch life, but also the reality of my parents’ marital collapse and any other problems that would arise in the coming years. Suddenly, running off and getting married no longer seemed like the romantic adventures I was trying to convince myself it would be. Suddenly I realized that if I did that, if I ran away and said “I do” in some dark, hidden corner of the world, I’d never be able to handle the rigors and stresses of country life. And that wouldn’t be fair to Marlboro Man…or myself. As we started moving, I noticed that Marlboro Man was riding at my pace. “The horses need to be shod,” he said, grinning. “They didn’t need to trot today anyway.” I glanced in his direction. “So we’ll just go slow and easy,” he continued. I looked toward the thicket of trees and took a deep, calming breath, grabbing on to the saddle horn so firmly my knuckles turned pasty white.

For fifteen years, John and Barbara Varian were furniture builders, living on a ranch in Parkfield, California, a tiny town where the welcome sign reads “Population 18.” The idea for a side business came about by accident after a group of horseback riding enthusiasts asked if they could pay a fee to ride on the ranch. They would need to eat, too—could John and Barbara do something about that? Yes, they could. In the fall of 2006, a devastating fire burned down most of their inventory, causing them to reevaluate the whole operation. Instead of rebuilding the furniture business (no pun intended), they decided to change course. “We had always loved horses,” Barbara said, “so we decided to see about having more groups pay to come to the ranch.” They built a bunkhouse and upgraded other buildings, putting together specific packages for riding groups that included all meals and activities. John and Barbara reopened as the V6 Ranch, situated on 20,000 acres exactly halfway between Los Angeles and San Francisco. Barbara’s story stood out to me because of something she said. I always ask business owners what they sell and why their customers buy from them, and the answers are often insightful in more ways than one. Many people answer the question directly—“We sell widgets, and people buy them because they need a widget”—but once in a while, I hear a more astute response. “We’re not selling horse rides,” Barbara said emphatically. “We’re offering freedom. Our work helps our guests escape, even if just for a moment in time, and be someone they may have never even considered before.” The difference is crucial. Most people who visit the V6 Ranch have day jobs and a limited number of vacation days. Why do they choose to visit a working ranch in a tiny town instead of jetting off to lie on a beach in Hawaii? The answer lies in the story and messaging behind John and Barbara’s offer. Helping their clients “escape and be someone else” is far more valuable than offering horse rides. Above all else, the V6 Ranch is selling happiness.

The emphasis was on “soft.” No matter what else happened, the wranglers were to stay soft while riding the horses. Soft hands, soft seat, and soft legs. There was to be absolutely no hitting, kicking, slapping, or yelling at any time for any reason. The penalty for doing such things was to be placed on a two-day suspension. A second offense would lead to termination. Neither penalty was ever needed. At times it wasn’t easy to stay quiet with the horses because so many of them had been “used up” over the years, dulled to any form of cue. However, we remained consistent in our focus and the horses responded. The wranglers were instructed to ride the horses with the softest cues possible, often using nothing more than a light squeeze to get forward movement and a shift of weight in the saddle, along with light pressure on the reins, for a stop. They were also instructed to look for, find, and then release their cues at the slightest try from the horse—something they all became very adept at doing. With everyone riding in the same manner from one day to the next, all the horses began to respond within a few weeks. Before we knew it, all of our horses, including the very old ones that had been in the program for years and years, became responsive to the lightest of cues. We’d taught our horses to be responsive to these light cues, but a question remained. How could we keep them that way, particularly with the hundreds of different people who would be riding each horse over the summer? The answer was simple. Everyone needed to remain consistent. So, instead of expecting our horses to respond to the conflicting cues that each new rider was bound to give, we taught each rider how to communicate with our horses. Each week when a new batch of guests arrived at the ranch, we held an orientation in the riding arena. During this orientation, we explained how our horses were trained and what was expected of them as a rider of one of our horses. We gave them a demonstration in the saddle of proper seat and hand position, so they could keep their balance. We showed them the cues for walk, stop, trot, lope, and turn, using a horse right out of the string. Once we had demonstrated how our horses worked, we got everyone on horseback in the arena and helped them to practice giving the cues, allowing the horse to respond, and releasing the cues so that the horse would remain responsive. Of note is the fact that after

Well, how come you didn’t just have Carl drop you off there?” I asked. Mike didn’t always take the most reasonable course. “Because I t-t-t-told him my sister would be glad to take me!” Mike replied. Mike liked to sign me up for things without my consent. I wasn’t budging, though; I wasn’t going to let Mike bully me. “Well, Mike,” I said, “I’ll take you to the mall in a little bit, but I’ve got to finish getting dressed. So just chill out, dude!” I loved telling Mike to chill out. Marlboro Man had been watching the whole exchange, clearly amused by the Ping-Pong match between Mike and me. He’d met Mike several times before; he “got” what Mike was about. And though he hadn’t quite figured out all the ins and outs of negotiating him, he seemed to enjoy his company. Suddenly, Mike turned to Marlboro Man and put his hand on his shoulder. “C-c-c-can you please take me to the mall?” Still grinning, Marlboro Man looked at me and nodded. “Sure, I’ll take you, Mike.” Mike was apoplectic. “Oh my gosh!” he said. “You will? R-r-r-really?” And with that he grabbed Marlboro Man in another warm embrace. “Okeydoke, Mike,” Marlboro Man said, breaking loose of Mike’s arms and shaking his hand instead. “One hug a day is enough for guys.” “Oh, okay,” Mike said, shaking Marlboro Man’s hand, apparently appreciating the tip. “I get it now.” “No, no, no! You don’t need to take him,” I intervened. “Mike, just hold your horses--I’ll be ready in a little bit!” But Marlboro Man continued. “I’ve gotta get back to the ranch anyway,” he said. “I don’t mind dropping him off.” “Yeah, Ree!” Mike said belligerently. He stood beside Marlboro Man in solidarity, as if he’d won some great battle. “M-m-m-mind your own beeswax!” I gave Mike the evil eye as the three of us walked downstairs to the front door. “Are we gonna take your white pickup?” Mike asked. He was about to burst with excitement. “Yep, Mike,” Marlboro Man answered. “Wanna go start it?” He dangled the keys in front of Mike’s face. “What?” Mike said, not even giving Marlboro Man a chance to answer. He snatched the keys from his hand and ran to the pickup, leaving Marlboro Man and me alone on our old familiar front step. “Well, uh,” I said playfully. “Thanks for taking my brother to the mall.” Mike fired up the diesel engine. “No problem,” Marlboro Man said, leaning in for a kiss. “I’ll see you tonight.” We had a standing date. “See you then.” Mike laid on the horn. Marlboro Man headed toward his pickup, then stopped midway and turned toward me once again. “Oh, hey--by the way,” he said, walking back toward the front step. “You wanna get married?” His hand reached into the pocket of his Wranglers. My heart skipped a beat.

You okay?” Marlboro Man called out. I didn’t answer. I just kept on walking, determined to get the hell out of Dodge. It took him about five seconds to catch up with me; I wasn’t a very fast walker. “Hey,” he said, grabbing me around the waist and whipping me around so I was facing him. “Aww, it’s okay. It happens.” I didn’t want to talk about it. I didn’t want to hear it. I wanted him to let go of me and I wanted to keep on walking. I wanted to walk back down the hillside, start my car, and get out of there. I didn’t know where I’d go, I just knew I wanted to go. I wanted away from all of it--riding horses, saddles, reins, bridles--I didn’t want it anymore. I hated everything on that ranch. It was all stupid, dumb…and stupid. Wriggling loose of his consoling embrace, I squealed, “I seriously can’t do this!” My hands trembled wildly and my voice quivered. The tip of my nose began to sting, and tears welled up in my eyes. It wasn’t like me to display such hysteria in the presence of a man. But being driven to the brink of death had brought me to this place. I felt like a wild animal. I was powerless to restrain myself. “I don’t want to do this for the rest of my life!” I cried. I turned to leave again but decided instead to give up, choosing to sit down on the ground and slump over in defeat. It was all so humiliating--not just my rigid, freakish riding style or my near collision with the ground, but also my crazy, emotional reaction after the fact. This wasn’t me. I was a strong, confident woman, for Lord’s sake; I don’t slump on the ground in the middle of a pasture and cry. What was I doing in a pasture, anyway? Knowing my luck, I was probably sitting on a pile of manure. But I couldn’t even walk anymore; my knees were even trembling by now, and I’d lost all feeling in my fingertips. My heart pounded in my cheeks. If Marlboro Man had any sense, he would have taken the horses and gotten the hell out of there, leaving me, the hysterical female, sobbing on the ground by myself. She’s obviously in the throes of some hormonal fit, he probably thought. There’s nothing you can say to her when she gets like this. I don’t have time for this crap. She’s just gonna have to learn to deal with it if she’s going to marry me. But he didn’t get the hell out of there. He didn’t leave me sobbing on the ground by myself. Instead he joined me on the grass, sitting beside me and putting his hand on my leg, reassuring me that this kind of thing happens, and there wasn’t anything I did wrong, even though he was probably lying. “Now, did you really mean that about not wanting to do this the rest of your life?” he asked. That familiar, playful grin appeared in the corner of his mouth. I blinked a couple of times and took a deep breath, smiling back at him and reassuring him with my eyes that no, I hadn’t meant it, but I did hate his horse. Then I took a deep breath, stood up, and dusted off my Anne Klein straight-leg jeans. “Hey, we don’t have to do this now,” Marlboro Man said, standing back up. “I’ll just do it later.” “No, I’m fine,” I answered, walking back toward my horse with newfound resolve.

I hadn’t noticed, through all my inner torture and turmoil, that Marlboro Man and the horses had been walking closer to me. Before I knew it, Marlboro Man’s right arm was wrapped around my waist while his other hand held the reins of the two horses. In another instant, he pulled me toward him in a tight grip and leaned in for a sweet, tender kiss--a kiss he seemed to savor even after our lips parted. “Good morning,” he said sweetly, grinning that magical grin. My knees went weak. I wasn’t sure if it was the kiss itself…or the dread of riding. We mounted our horses and began walking slowly up the hillside. When we reached the top, Marlboro Man pointed across a vast prairie. “See that thicket of trees over there?” he said. “That’s where we’re headed.” Almost immediately, he gave his horse a kick and began to trot across the flat plain. With no prompting from me at all, my horse followed suit. I braced myself, becoming stiff and rigid and resigning myself to looking like a freak in front of my love and also to at least a week of being too sore to move. I held on to the saddle, the reins, and my life as my horse took off in the same direction as Marlboro Man’s. Not two minutes into our ride, my horse slightly faltered after stepping in a shallow hole. Having no experience with this kind of thing, I reacted, shrieking loudly and pulling wildly on my reins, simultaneously stiffening my body further. The combination didn’t suit my horse, who decided, understandably, that he pretty much didn’t want me on his back anymore. He began to buck, and my life flashed before my eyes--for the first time, I was deathly afraid of horses. I held on for dear life as the huge creature underneath me bounced and reared, but my body caught air, and I knew it was only a matter of time before I’d go flying. In the distance, I heard Marlboro Man’s voice. “Pull up on the reins! Pull up! Pull up!” My body acted immediately--it was used to responding instantly to that voice, after all--and I pulled up tightly on the horse’s reins. This forced its head to an upright position, which made bucking virtually impossible for the horse. Problem was, I pulled up too tightly and quickly, and the horse reared up. I leaned forward and hugged the saddle, praying I wouldn’t fall off backward and sustain a massive head injury. I liked my head. I wasn’t ready to say good-bye to it. By the time the horse’s front legs hit the ground, my left leg was dangling out of its stirrup, even as all my dignity was dangling by a thread. Using my balletic agility, I quickly hopped off the horse, tripping and stumbling away the second my feet hit the ground. Instinctively, I began hurriedly walking away--from the horse, from the ranch, from the burning. I didn’t know where I was going--back to L.A., I figured, or maybe I’d go through with Chicago after all. I didn’t care; I just knew I had to keep walking. In the meantime, Marlboro Man had arrived at the scene and quickly calmed my horse, who by now was eating a leisurely morning snack of dead winter grass that had yet to be burned. The nag. “You okay?” Marlboro Man called out. I didn’t answer. I just kept on walking, determined to get the hell out of Dodge. It took him about five seconds to catch up with me; I wasn’t a very fast walker. “Hey,” he said, grabbing me around the waist and whipping me around so I was facing him. “Aww, it’s okay. It happens.

Barbara Stanwyck and I began our relationship on Titanic, although we had actually met years before. For a time, my father had an eight-acre ranch in Chatsworth, across from the racetrack. Martha Scott also lived there, and I used to take care of her horse. We'd go riding, and I would see Barbara and her husband, Robert Taylor, riding. I would go trotting along with them, never thinking I'd be involved with her someday. Later, Barbara had a beautiful ranch at the corner of Devonshire and Reseda, with her agent, Zeppo Marx. It's now a shopping center, but when Barbara owned the ranch, it had paddocks that were impeccably maintained and run, like everything Barbara touched.

Stallions," Frank said, "they're fightin' over a girl. - DANIEL'S ESPERANZA

In sum, until April 12, Governor Barber, apparently assumed that his friends were faring well, and took no action whatsoever. Governor Barber’s friends, however, were not faring well at all. From the beginning of the siege, the weather had been bad. A cold rain began to fall shortly after men from Buffalo first arrived at the T. A., about midnight the evening of April 10, and during that night the rain turned to snow, meaning that the invaders in the cramped quarters of their fort “suffered intensely.”34 The peril of the invaders was obvious, and knowing that the telegraph lines were probably still down, they wanted to get a message to the governor in Cheyenne “stating their predicament and asking for immediate help.”35 A young man named Dowling stepped forward and offered to try to get through the lines around the ranch to Buffalo. His offer was immediately accepted, and H. E. Teschemacher wrote a telegram to Governor Barber, which was signed by Major Wolcott. It was an especially dark evening, and Dowling had a harrowing adventure, wading through the icy creek and then briefly falling in with some of the besieging men. In the darkness nobody identified him, however, and he managed to split off from them. He was then able to “commandeer a horse” and ride to Buffalo.

The average Texas cattle herd driven northward numbered 2,500 cows, composed primarily of hardy Texas longhorns, a breed that could travel long distances without water. A dozen cowboys, including a trail boss, along with 50–60 horses, four mules, and a chuck wagon (sometimes called a mess wagon) that hauled the food and bedding, accompanied the herd. Starting shortly after dawn, with a noon break, they moved about 15 miles a day. The trip could take from four to six months.

Q: A cowboy arrives at the ranch on a Sunday, stays three days, and leaves on Friday. How is that possible? A: His horse’s name is Friday.

D’you think you might be able to find your way?” “Of course we can,” Liv told her. “Guess we’ll have to have that lunch and massage some other time.” “Sure thing.” Dayna promised. She flashed Liv a wicked grin. “I’ll say hi to Temo for you.” She mounted Champagne in one smooth motion and rode away, leading the other horses. Heading off in the opposite direction, Sophie squirmed in her saddle as if a burr of jealousy was stuck under her jeans. Did Shane just forget about her when he was with Cheyenne and Hailey? She hadn’t had a chance to tell him about the coyote’s attack on Diego’s colt. He could at least have said goodbye instead of speeding off that way in his truck. She’d never seen him drive. Up to now he’d always appeared at the Lucky Star Ranch riding Navajo. I like him a hundred times better on horseback, Sophie thought.

As they rode into the Lucky Star ranch yard an hour later, Liv wished she hadn’t mentioned Temo to Dayna. She’s going to tease him about me, for sure, Liv thought and he’ll be embarrassed and think I’m a dumb little kid. Liv remembered the first time she had seen Temo. He was more handsome than Shane, she decided, with chiseled lips, a straight nose and flashing dark eyes full of laughter. Where Shane was thin as a desert fence post, Temo was solid--strong, but tender underneath. She remembered how he had risked his job at the Silver Spur to help them save their grandparents’ horses, how he had brought them blankets and food when they were hiding on the ranch, how he smiled when he called her muchacha, little girl, how he rode like the wind on his black-and-white paint horse, so at home in this big wild country. She wondered about his life--why he stayed on working for Sam Regis when he didn’t like or respect him. His family worked there; that was part of the reason, she knew. She had been hoping to find out more about him at lunch today. “I’m glad we didn’t have to stay for lunch.” Sophie slipped from Cisco’s saddle in front of the low wooden barn. “I didn’t want to face Dayna’s father again.” Liv dismounted with a sigh. As usual, she and Sophie had been thinking about the same thing in totally different ways. Sophie hated the thought of lunch at the Silver Spur, while Liv was longing for the chance to see Temo and his family. It was as if she and Sophie were two sides of the same coin.

You don’t have to stay in town,” Liv said. “You could sleep in Gran’s and Granddad’s room until they get back.” “No, I couldn’t do that.” Shane shook his head violently. “Wouldn’t be respectful.” “There’s a bunkhouse near the barn,” Sophie pointed through the window. “You could move in there.” “That’s an excellent idea.” Jess beamed. “At least for this week while you’re not in school.” “I don’t like to put my troubles on you.” Shane shook his head again. “Never know what Pa’s likely to do.” “We’ll share our troubles,” Jess said gently. “The girls’ grandfather called, and he thinks we should bring the horses up to the ranch. I agree, especially after the girls told me about the foal being attacked by a coyote yesterday.” “I hear you,” Shane said. “I guess I’d better round ’em up and bring ’em in.” Jess nodded. “Take Cactus Jack or Cisco for now. When you bring in the herd, choose another horse to ride till Navajo is better.” “You can take Cactus Jack,” Liv volunteered. “Then Sophie can go with you.” Sometimes Sophie felt as if Liv really did understand her, after all. Liv loved riding Cactus Jack in the desert, and she was giving her a chance to be alone with Shane.

Did you know that Shane is moving in with Cheyenne?” she asked, her head tipped to one side. “Why’s that?” Liv pretended innocence. “Because his aunt is married to my dad, and he needs a place to stay.” Cheyenne said with a shrug. “It’ll be pretty tight at our place, but we’ll manage to squeeze him in somewhere.” “Don’t worry,” Liv told her. “You won’t have to squeeze him in. He’s staying in the bunkhouse at the Lucky Star. He’s working at our place this week, anyway.” “Oh!” Cheyenne gulped. “But maybe he’d rather stay with relatives--family.” “Maybe,” Liv agreed. “He’s old enough to make up his own mind where he wants to live.” She took a deep breath. “There’s my mom. Looks like we’d better get going--got to get back to the ranch and make that bunkhouse nice and cozy--for Shane.” She wished Sophie was there to see the disappointed frown on Cheyenne’s face. “Drop by and see us sometime.” Liv waved goodbye. “If you’re out near the Lucky Star ranch.” “Uh…sure.” Cheyenne gave a fake little wave back. She looked as though she’d just bitten into a lemon, Liv thought to herself, grinning.

Where in tarnation did Dayna and Cheyenne ride off to?” he shouted at Temo. Temo came out of a stall with an empty feed bucket. “I think they rode over to the Lucky Star ranch, Señor.” He spoke politely to the older man. Sam Regis grew red in the face. “How many times have I told Dayna I don’t want her hangin’ around Ted Starr’s spread,” he yelled. “And I especially don’t want my purebred mares anyplace near that worthless Spanish stallion of his.” “Si, Señor,” Temo agreed, but this time there was a smile on his handsome face that Sam couldn’t see in the darkening barn. The idea of calling Diego worthless was a joke to Temo. There never was a finer horse; a true throwback to the brave stallions brought by the Spanish explorers and bred for years to withstand the worst the desert could throw at them. In Temo’s opinion, Diego was worth a hundred of Señor Regis’s horses.

It had taken Cyrus a while to come out of his shell. One of those “aw shucks, ma’am” kind of cowboys, he was so darned shy she thought she was going to have to throw herself on the floor at his boots for him to notice her. But once he had opened up a little, they’d started talking, joking around, getting to know each other. Before he left, they’d gone for a horseback ride through the snowy foothills up into the towering pines of the forest. It had been Cyrus’s idea. They’d ridden up into one of the four mountain ranges that surrounded the town of Gilt Edge – and the Cahill Ranch. It was when they’d stopped to admire the view from the mountaintop that overlooked the small western town that AJ had hoped Cyrus would kiss her. He sure looked as if he’d wanted to as they’d walked their horses to the edge of the overlook. The sun warming them while the breeze whispered through the boughs of the nearby snow-laden pines, it was one of those priceless Montana January days between snowstorms. That’s why Cyrus had said they should take advantage of the beautiful day before he left for Denver. Standing on a bared-off spot on the edge of the mountain, he’d reached over and taken her hand in his. “Beautiful,” he’d said. For a moment she thought he was talking about the view, but when she met his gaze she’d seen that he’d meant her. Her heart had begun to pound. This was it. This was what she’d been hoping for. He drew her closer. His mouth was just a breath away from hers – when his mare nudged him with her nose. She could laugh about it now. But if she hadn’t grabbed Cyrus he would have fallen down the mountainside. “She’s just jealous,” Cyrus had said of his horse as he’d rubbed the beast’s neck after getting his footing under himself again. But the moment had been lost. They’d saddled up and ridden back to Cahill Ranch. AJ still wanted that kiss more than anything.

This was a media beat-up at its very worst. All those officials reacting to what the media labeled “The Baby Bob Incident” failed to understand the Irwin family. This is what we did--teach our children about wildlife, from a very early age. It wasn’t unnatural and it wasn’t a stunt. It was, on the contrary, an old and valued family tradition, and one that I embraced wholeheartedly. It was who we were. To have the press fasten on the practice as irresponsible made us feel that our very ability as parents was being attacked. It didn’t make any sense. This is why Steve never publicly apologized. For him to say “I’m sorry” would mean that he was sorry that Bob and Lyn raised him the way they did, and that was simply impossible. The best he could do was to sincerely apologize if he had worried anyone. The reality was that he would have been remiss as a parent if he didn’t teach his kids how to coexist with wildlife. After all, his kids didn’t just have busy roads and hot stoves to contend with. They literally had to learn how to live with crocodiles and venomous snakes in their backyard. Through it all, the plight of the Tibetan nuns was completely and totally ignored. The world media had not a word to spare about a dry well that hundreds of people depended on. For months, any time Steve encountered the press, Tibetan nuns were about the furthest thing from the reporter’s mind. The questions would always be the same: “Hey, Stevo, what about the Baby Bob Incident?” “If I could relive Friday, mate, I’d go surfing,” Steve said on a hugely publicized national television appearance in the United States. “I can’t go back to Friday, but you know what, mate? Don’t think for one second I would ever endanger my children, mate, because they’re the most important thing in my life, just like I was with my mum and dad.” Steve and I struggled to get back to a point where we felt normal again. Sponsors spoke about terminating contracts. Members of our own documentary crew sought to distance themselves from us, and our relationship with Discovery was on shaky ground. But gradually we were able to tune out the static and hear what people were saying. Not the press, but the people. We read the e-mails that had been pouring in, as well as faxes, letters, and phone messages. Real people helped to get us back on track. Their kids were growing up with them on cattle ranches and could already drive tractors, or lived on horse farms and helped handle skittish stallions. Other children were learning to be gymnasts, a sport which was physically rigorous and held out the chance of injury. The parents had sent us messages of support. “Don’t feel bad, Steve,” wrote one eleven-year-old from Sydney. “It’s not the wildlife that’s dangerous.” A mother wrote us, “I have a new little baby, and if you want to take him in on the croc show it is okay with me.” So many parents employed the same phrase: “I’d trust my kids with Steve any day.

I have a killer loose on the ranch and all I can think about is kissing you again.

When they reached the ranch, Dave parked the truck at the stable. The girls heard laughter coming from the corral and saw Tex Britten perched on the fence. Bess was mounted on a brown quarter horse and holding a coiled lariat. “Watch me!” she called. “I’m learning to rope a steer.” Nancy and George walked over and saw Bud Moore put his hands on his head like horns and prance in front of Bess’s horse. “Come on and rope me, pardner!” he said.

Keel writes in Operation Trojan Horse, “the phenomenon had zeroed in on me, just as it had done with the British newspaper editor Arthur Shuttle-wood, and so many others.

It was still the Wild West in those days, the Far West.… It was a land of vast silent spaces, of lovely rivers, and of plains where the wild game stared at the passing horseman. It was a land of scattered ranches, of herds of long-horned cattle, and reckless riders who unmoved looked in the eyes of life or of death. In that land we lived a free and hardy life, with horse and with rifle. We worked under the scorching midsummer sun, when the wide plains shimmered and wavered in the heat; and we knew the freezing misery of riding night guard round the cattle in the late fall round-up. In the soft springtime the stars were glorious in our eyes each night before we fell asleep; and in the winter we rode through blinding blizzards, when the driven snow-dust burnt our faces.… We knew toil and hardship and hunger and thirst; and we saw men die violent deaths as they worked among the horses and cattle, or fought in evil feuds with one another; but we felt the beat of hardy life in our veins, and ours was the glory of work and the joy of living.

It’s got a grumpy, damaged hero. The heroine is tough. She’s a horse jockey and she works for him. The tension is so hot. Plus, I didn’t see the big twist coming, which adds major points.

The gist of it was that I’d been such an ass that I’d driven a woman I hardly know to drink wine straight from the bottle and hash her day out with a horse in the dark. That’s a new low, even for me.

The only thing I've ever done with flowers is braid them into my horse's hair.

I thought you hated horses?” “I don’t hate horses.” Pippy snorts and bats her eyelashes at him. Another one down, apparently. “Okay. You said you don’t like horses.” “Yup.” He grunts as he turns his back on me and crouches down to line up two boards. “But I like you.

up. Pony horses go around us to grab excited racehorses.

No. You are. Don’t lie to me and pretend you’re not. Take the demons by the horns. I don’t need you better. What is better anyway? That’s not a goal. That’s not quantifiable. Pick something you can do, and fucking do it. I don’t need you down at track level. I don’t even need you at every race. I don’t need you to love horses, but I need you to love me.

In 1973, the Kenyan government banned elephant hunting and the club fell on hard times. Holden brought in two minority partners, Don Hunt and Julian McKeand. Together they created the Mount Kenya Game Ranch with captive breeding programs for thirty-seven African species, and an orphanage for rescued animals. There were fifty types of exotic birds, including sacred ibises, marabou storks, peacocks and Egyptian geese. One of the rarest species at the game ranch was the East African Bongo – a critically endangered red and white-striped antelope, which became the ranch’s mascot. Holden showed Powers the club’s first-class amenities. They visited the Arabian horse stables, and walked down a garden path to the guest cottages, dubbed Millionaire’s Row.

Luke Brooks did a lot of sexy things, which was getting less annoying, but I don’t think there was anything quite as sexy as watching him, in his backward baseball hat and muscle tee, mount his horse. Damn.

So, the five horses included a paint, a buckskin, a red roan, a blood bay, and a sorrel with a flaxen mane and tail.

Gradually Lennie's interest came around to what was being said. 'George says we're gonna have alfalfa for the rabbits.' 'What rabbits?' 'We're gonna have rabbits an' a berry patch.' 'You're nuts.' 'We are too. You ast George.' 'You're nuts.' Crooks was scornful. 'I seen hunderds of men come by on the road an' on the ranches, with their bindles on their back an' that same damn thing in their heads. Hunderds of them. They come, an' they quit an' go on; an' every damn one of 'em's got a little piece of land in his head. An' never a God damn one of 'em ever gets it. Just like heaven. Ever'body wants a little piece of lan'. I read plenty of books out here. Nobody never gets to heaven, and nobody gets no land. It's just in their head. They're all the time talkin' about it, but it's jus' in their head.' He paused and looked toward the open door, for the horses were moving restlessly and the halter chains clinked. A horse whinnied. 'I guess somebody's out there,' Crooks said. 'Maybe Slim. Slim comes in sometimes two, three times a night. Slim's a real skinner. He looks out for his team.' He pulled himself painfully upright and moved toward the door.

Okay. You said you don’t like horses.” “Yup.” He grunts as he turns his back on me and crouches down to line up two boards. “But I like you.” And then he silently gets to work while I stand there watching him. Dumbstruck.

Only deranged people prefer to live somewhere where you can’t see the stars, smell clean air, or jump on a horse and ride for hours without seeing a soul.

Although we were in the best of spirits over the successful conclusion of the drive; although we were glad to be free from herd duty and looked forward eagerly to the journey home, there was still a feeling of regret in our hearts which we could not dispel. In the days of my boyhood I have shed tears when a favorite horse was sold from our little ranch on the San Antonio, and have frequently witnessed Mexican children unable to hide their grief when need of bread had compelled the sale of some favorite horse to a passing drover. But at no time in my life, before or since, have I felt so keenly the parting between man and horse as I did that September evening in Montana. For on the trail an affection springs up between a man and his mount which is almost human. Every privation which he endures his horse endures with him,—carrying him through falling weather, swimming rivers by day and riding in the lead of stampedes by night, always faithful, always willing, and always patiently enduring every hardship, from exhausting hours under saddle to the sufferings of a dry drive. And on this drive, covering nearly three thousand miles, all the ties which can exist between man and beast had not only become cemented, but our remuda as a whole had won the affection of both men and employer for carrying without serious mishap a valuable herd all the way from the Rio Grande to the Blackfoot Agency.

Only when he lands on the horse’s back behind the saddle do I realize just how close we’re going to be on this ride. Very, very close.

I love this horse already. I don’t even care if she runs well or not. This kind of contact is therapeutic,

Never had breakfast for dinner. Never been around horses. Both were problems I wanted to solve.