Then there was the time when the Stranger, Timberline and a mountain lion had a face-off.
It might be easier to understand if you are acquainted – at least on paper – with Timberline. He was a tall, lanky brown and white paint horse with an evil temperament and one blue eye. Maybe evil isn’t the right word. He just flat didn’t like people.
He and the Stranger got along fine because neither one tried to change the other. They tried to kill each other on several occasions, but it wasn’t personal, just all in a day’s work.
The big tobiano was fast – so fast he’d make your eyes water. He was quick to heap abuse on horseshoers, veterinarians and a well-meaning wife whose only crime was trying to feed the cockeyed camel when his rightful owner was late coming back to the barn.
He was also all-day tough. He’d been in terrain from Oklahoma to Wyoming by way of Colorado and back and there was just no way to ride him down. He just got tougher.
The problem was the longer the Stranger rode him, the nuttier he got. From time to time – and he would pick his timing – he would fire a cheap shot, like bucking going downhill when everything was out of balance anyway and it was either jump off or risk going over the edge. Or waiting until the Stranger had stepped off to tag a roped calf and having the horse sail out, headed back to the barn, and leaving the Stranger to walk back alone.
But one thing was always money in the bank. Ol’ Timberline wasn’t going to put himself in a situation where he was going to get hurt. Apparently, he had learned that lesson and no enraged cow was going to hook him.
Once, thinking they had a bull cornered in the brush, the dynamic duo crashed into a clearing only to find their ‘bull’ was a cow moose that had given birth moments ago. Timberline never slowed down and cleared the fallen trees blocking his exit like he was a Grand Prix jumper in the finals at the Olympics, not a shaggy cow pony on a Colorado mountain ranch.
So it was that the two were trailing some bulls that had decided to take a scenic shortcut over some red hills in the Panhandle to a neighbor’s pasture. The soil was settled by a recent passing rain shower, and they were easy to track. It also made the pig trail over the hills soft.
They were coming around the mountain – OK, it was a hill, or I’d be a widow – when a mountain lion met them coming around a curve on the same narrow track.
It took Timberline about 2.2 seconds to decide to abort the mission and bail over the side. In the soft red clay, he planted his front feet and probably without meaning to, lawn darted the Stranger down ahead of him.
So not only was there the steep descent to deal with at high speed, but there was also the chance his not-too-trusty steed was going to be stepping on him all the way down.
Luckily, a friendly cactus stopped his fall, and the horse managed to find another way to the bottom where he promptly took off, leaving the Stranger to hoof it back to the barn alone. By the time he got there, though, he had most of the cactus spines removed and some, if not all, of the bleeding stopped.
Finally, wisdom and a nagging wife won out and the Stranger got rid of Timberline before something worse happened. He was gifted to another pretty good hand that could get along with him fairly well. The first time that cowboy tried to trim his feet, Timberline kicked him in the face and snapped his glasses in two at the nose piece. We stopped answering the telephone after that and to my knowledge the paint horse still lives with the same family. He’s older than dirt now, but you know what they say.
The spiteful ones live the longest.