High Country Cowgirl

“This is the first real meal that’s been cooked in that kitchen,” Gabe told her.

She waited for him to take the first bite of steak, to give her a stamp of approval for the dinner, before she began to eat her portion of the scrambled eggs.

“Now, that’s good,” he said with a satisfied little smile. Her mother always said that a way to a man’s heart was through his stomach. So far, Bonita believed her mother was right about that. “Where’s your steak?”

“I don’t eat meat.”

“You don’t meet very many vegetarians in Montana.”

“You don’t meet very many vegetarians in my family!” Bonita countered. “My father thinks it’s sacrilegious to not eat meat, and trust me, none of my relatives in Mexico get it.”

Gabe cut a tiny piece of steak for Tater, who had been waiting, ears perked forward, at the cowboy’s feet.

“Is that who taught you to cook like this?”

Bonita nodded while she washed some eggs down with water. She wiped her mouth off with a napkin and then said, “Cooking and food is a big part of our culture. My mom didn’t know how to boil water when she met my dad, but she learned quickly. I’ve been cooking since I was a kid.”

“Well, you’re dang good at it. It’s rare for me to have a home-cooked meal on the road and it’s been two nights in a row for me this time around. So I thank you.”

“It was my pleasure. It’s the least that I could do seeing as I’m technically a stowaway.”

She meant those last words to be a roundabout way of apologizing. Gabe met her eyes, but he didn’t pick up on the cue and run with it. He just gave her a simple nod, as was his way she was discovering, and let the matter drop.

“I’d like to go check on Val after we’ve cleaned up,” she said. “I saw one of the hands take him to the stable and I’d like to see how he’s settling in to his stall.”

Gabe dropped his crumpled-up napkin on his plate. “You cooked, I’ll clean.”

“Are you sure?”

“I got the better end of that deal. Go on and visit with Val.”

Bonita took Gabe up on his offer and headed to the barn. She found Val in his designated stall at the end of the long aisle, eating hay.

“Hi, handsome boy.” She opened his stall gate and held out her hand to him so he could begin to learn her scent.

“There’s some grooming tools hanging on that hook if you want to use them,” suggested one of the stablehands mucking out a stall across the aisle.

“Thank you. I think I will.”

Bonita grabbed a body brush; she was glad to finally have some time to bond with Val. But when she started to brush his neck, Val nipped at her, backed up into the corner of the stall to avoid her and swished his tail, a sign that he was resisting her.

“I know you don’t think so now, Val.” She fought through the nerves she always seemed to feel around her new horse and kept on brushing him, not letting him rule the moment. “But you are going to learn to love me.”

She brushed his body, ignoring his grouchy attitude when she switched sides and asked him to move his feet. Then she combed his mane and his tail and finished by cleaning out each of his hooves. The entire time she worked on him, he tried to bite her, and his body language, from the tail swishing to stomping his hind hooves, was a sign that he had some behavior issues that they were going to have to work on.

“You look super handsome now, Val.” Bonita wrapped her arms around the horse’s neck and gave him a quick hug. “I’ll see you tomorrow. At a ridiculously early hour.”

While she was putting the grooming tools back in the bucket hanging outside the stall, Bonita heard Gabe’s voice nearby. She walked toward the sound of his voice.

He was standing next to what looked to be a full-blooded Thoroughbred in the large, indoor riding arena. He was talking to a couple of people who Bonita assumed to be the owners. She looked around and found that there were empty bleachers nearby. She climbed up to the midpoint in the bleachers and sat down.

“Everything we do with horses is pressure,” Gabe was saying. “We put a halter on them, it’s pressure. We ride them, it’s pressure. What they want is to be left alone and eat. That’s not how it’s going to be for them, but we have to understand what they want if we’re going to change their behavior. What is that you want this horse to be able to do?”

The younger of the two women, the one wearing a pair of riding breeches, said, “I want him to not freak out every time he sees a flag. When I take him to a show, he’s fine, unless there’s a flag. Then all bets are off. He bolts, he tries to buck me off...”

“Well, he might have had someone train him wrong with a flag. We don’t know his history. So his reaction, at least to him, could make perfect sense, even if it’s doesn’t make perfect sense to you. But don’t worry, we can work on it. We need to operate on the principle of pressure. Operating on the principle that horses respond to the application or the release of pressure, we can desensitize this horse to stimuli. In this case, a flag.” Gabe nodded his head toward the other side of the arena. “Why don’t the two of you stand over there so when he reacts, you won’t be in the way, and I’ll show you what you can do with him.”

In Gabe’s free hand, he was holding a training device that looked like a long crop with a flag on the end. He had the flag grasped in his hand, so the Thoroughbred didn’t see it. Calmly, as was the way Gabe seemed to operate in the world, he stepped away from the horse, gave him some length of the lead rope and then showed the horse the flag.

The moment the horse spotted the flag, it started to rear and then buck and tried to run away. Gabe held on to the horse, and instead of taking the flag away, he waved the flag to keep the horse moving.

“If he’s not doing what I want him to do, which is stand still, I keep him moving,” Gabe explained while he worked. “In the horse world, whoever moves the feet is the boss. That’s the way it goes. All this horse is looking for is a leader. That’s what a horse is looking for in all of us.”

When the horse finally stopped moving and stood still, Gabe dropped the flag to the ground. For the next thirty minutes, Gabe worked with the Thoroughbred, repeating the steps over and over again, until the horse let him rub the flag over his body.

“We don’t want to teach him that this tool is another thing to fear, so we want to rub him all over his body with it to let him know that it’s not.”