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Jul. 7, 2009
Ginger says this is good enough to post here...
Ginger says that this is good enough to post here and I need blog fodder, so here you go.
Chapter One
“Saddle up the horses, Sam!” Adam yelled to me from across the paddock. “Dad wants us to bring the cattle up.”
“Who’re you riding today, Adam?” I asked.
Adam walked over to where I was mucking out the barn and stopped. He took off his hat, revealing a head of dark brown, almost black hair, glanced up at the sun and wiped the sweat off his face with his bandana.
“Uh, the gray,” Adam answered.
“The gray?” I asked. “Are you sure, Adam? He’s hardly finished.”
This’ll be a sort of test drive for him. I want to see how good he is with the cows.”
Adam and I had broke the gray gelding a week before. He wasn’t finished, but Adam seemed to think he was ready.
“Alright,” I replied. “I’ll get him.”
I went into the smaller pasture we kept the horses in. There, they had access to fresh grass, and we had easy access to them if we needed to ride them. I took two halters and leads with me. I sauntered over to where the young flea-bitten gray stood eating. Every time I took a step towards him, he would just ease away. Not really running, but not letting me catch him, either. I hid the halter behind my back and held out my hand like I had something in it for him. It worked. He was upwind from me so he couldn’t smell that I didn’t really have anything for him. He came up to me. The moment he got close enough for me to touch him, I threw the rope around his neck. He stood still once he realized he was caught. He let out a sigh as I put the halter on him.
“It’s okay, boy,” I told him. “We’re just going for a little ride.”
Then I realized I should have caught my bay mare first. She ground ties and I could have left her standing there while I caught the gray. But I didn’t, and I wasn’t about to let the gray go. So I held onto him and whistled to my mare. She looked up and me but went back to eating. I sighed and made my way over to her. I stood on the gray’s lead rope, praying that he wouldn’t spook or bolt. The mare stood still and let me put the halter on her. I led them both up into the paddock where Adam was waiting with the tack.
“What took you so long?” Adam asked.
“Your gray doesn’t like being caught,” I said. “I had to play a pretty mean trick on him to catch him.”
“Oh yeah?” Adam asked, tying the horses to the fence.
“Yeah, I pretended I had a treat for him.”
Adam didn’t reply and I started putting the bridle on my mare. After we got both horses all tacked up, Adam said, “You should have taken a lariat with you. Then he would learn that you can catch him no matter what. The trick you played on him just taught him not to come to you, even if you do have a treat for him.”
“I guess,” I said. “Next time, Adam.”
Adam grinned at me and swung up into the saddle. Adam has always been better at mounting than me. He does it gracefully. Me, not so much. I have to bounce up and down a few times before clumsily throwing myself on the saddle, landing on my belly. Then I wriggle around a bit and eventually end up in the sitting position with my feet in the stirrups.
“So why’s Dad want us to bring up the cattle?” I asked when we had ridden a ways from the barn.
“Well, he doesn’t really want us to bring them up… He just wants us to ride out and look at them. He says he thinks a few of the cows might have calved.”
“Why’s he think that?” I asked.
“Something he read somewhere said something about cows calving on a stormy night.”
“I’ve heard of that,” I said. “They do that because predators aren’t out hunting. And with that storm last night it’s probable.”
“The cows weren’t that far along,” Adam said. “I doubt they calved.”
I wasn’t so sure, but Adam is usually right so I kept my mouth shut. We rode the rest of the way in silence. I could just feel Adam taking in everything around him. I glanced over at him. His dark eyes were sweeping from left to right, noticing everything around him. He saw the herd of 50 cows before I did.
“There they are, Sam,” Adam said to me, pulling his horse to a stop. So far, the gray gelding had done fine. But now with the herd around, we could really put him to the test.
“Let’s drive ‘em, Adam!” I said, straightening up in the saddle.
“Where?” he asked.
“I don’t know, but this is your chance to try out that gray.”
“Hm… Yeah, maybe,” Adam replied. “But where’ll we take them?”
“I don’t know,” I said again. “Let’s just take ‘em around the pasture a couple times.”
Adam sighed. “Well, I don’t see why we couldn’t,” he said. “But first, let’s see if any of those cows have calved.”
Adam and I walked around the herd, looking for any new calves. As Adam had suspected, there were none. Then we started driving the cattle up to the barn. The gray was doing wonderfully for his first day on the job. When we got within sight of the barn we turned the cattle north and then west, heading out to where they were originally. I glanced over at Adam. I could tell the gray was enjoying himself. Adam was happy, too, as a matter of fact. And I knew why. Ever since that horse was born Adam loved him. But Dad’s rule was that we didn’t name any horse or cow until we knew they’d be a good one. See, we weren’t allowed to name that gray gelding because we hadn’t tried him out with the cows yet. But I knew now that we were going to keep that gelding, and that Adam was happy about it. Adam was really tough on the outside, but on the inside he was one of the most sentimental guys I knew. He enjoyed naming animals and was always getting after me about naming my bay mare. As far as I could see she didn’t need a name. “The Bay Mare” was good enough for her.
Finally we were back where we started. The cattle were grazing as if nothing had happened, and Adam had a smile on his face. It was more like a half smile. Just the left corner of his mouth was smiling, but there was that twinkle in his eye.
“Did you see how he did?” Adam asked me.
I nodded, smiling. “Yep,” I said. “I saw. So, what’re you going to name him?”
“I don’t know,” Adam said. “I really haven’t given it much thought.” He looked at me and smiled. “I didn’t want to get my hopes up. I’ll have to think on it a while.”
With Adam, you never knew what “a while” meant. It could mean 2 hours or it could mean 2 weeks. You just never knew.
Well, enough about Adam… I didn’t tell you anything about me. I’m 17, a year younger than Adam. I have dark sandy hair and dark blue eyes. I’m not poetic at all, unlike Adam, who writes poems in his spare time. I’m the more rambunctious type. I’m not crazy about horses and I don’t really enjoy naming animals and stuff like that. I prefer climbing trees and spying on people… Stuff like that. Adam wears cowboy boots; I wear hiking boots. Adam wears a cowboy hat; I wear a baseball cap. We’re very different, Adam and I. Yet, in spite of that, we get along amazingly well. I guess it’s just because our ages are so close together and neither of us have any friends. See, we live way out in the country (about 30 minutes from town) and hardly anyone comes to visit us. And if someone does stop by, it’s usually to see Dad, not us. The only boys our age that have ever stopped by came with their dad to buy some firewood that Adam and I had cut. They filled up the whole back of their pickup with firewood, paid Dad, and left. Adam and I had tried talking to the boys, but they didn’t seem to want to talk, so we left them alone.
I’m more outgoing than Adam, but Adam is braver than me. Adam has the guts to fight a bear, but he needs to warm up to people before talking openly with them. Me, I don’t like even snakes, but I can go up to someone and start talking and I find it easy. But Adam… Not so much.
So there you know a little about me and a little about Adam. Now our dad.
I know you might think I’m being mean and disrespectful, but this is the truth and I mean it in the most sincere way. We love our father and I think our father loves us, too. But he doesn’t really show it. In fact, if we weren’t his sons, I think I would have doubted his love for us. He’s always yelling at us. And not because we’re being disrespectful or not finishing a job or anything. He just yells for no reason.
“Get out there and bring up them cows, you lazy good-for-nothings,” he’ll say. Even if Adam and I have just come up to the house soaked with sweat because we just finished building a shed or something, if we so much as sit down and crack open a coke… he always says something along those lines. While we do all the work around the place he’s sitting in a chair on the porch drinking a can of ice cold beer. He’s not a drunk, but he does like a can of beer every once in a while.
I asked Adam once when we were younger (13 and 12) why Dad always yelled at us like that if all we ever did to him was say, “Yes, Dad”, and go do a satisfactory job?
“I don’t know,” Adam replied. “I guess it’s just because he wants someone to yell at.”
I guessed so, too. So, in a nutshell, our dad is a nut. Okay, not really. In a nutshell, our dad yells at us almost 24/7, has us working almost 24/7, and loves us. I have a hard time understanding that last one.
So we left Adam saying he’d think on the name of that gray gelding. Well, Adam thought all that day and all that night and when he woke up he told me he had the perfect name.
“I’ve got it, Sam!” he told me during breakfast.
I looked at him expectantly.
“Floyd!”
I almost choked on my sunny side up egg yolk.
When I quit coughing I said, “Floyd?!”
Do not use with out written permission from the author.
If you read all that, congratulations. Let me know what you think and maybe I'll post chapter two. And just to let you know, it all works out with their dad in the end. :) |
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Posted by Anonymous 
Jul. 9, 2009 - Funny!