Through a series of coincidences, in which I don’t believe, I met a vagabond, saddle tramp, cowboy, named Zeke…
Zeke has cowboy’d his whole adult life.. Working on ranches from Australia, to Hawaii. California to Texas, up into Oklahoma, and everywhere in between.
Living in remote cow camps, often alone, with no electricity or phone has made him a bit of a hermit… or else his natural hermit inclination is what made the life of a lone cowboy sing to him like a siren’s song….
After injuries too numerous to count, but all of which singly would have put a different type into retirement long ago, he has now been forbidden to ride a horse. As one who has probably spent more time on a horse than on his own two feet, this is a new twist in his giddyup…
This new twist in his career is part of how our paths happened to cross.. He is a saddle maker and leather carver… I make quilts that LOOK like tooled saddle leather… Kinda cool huh?
So I drive him crazy, well I have that effect on a lot of people, but with him it’s by asking questions…I find him fascinating… and hysterically funny.. I have decided I might have to start wearing some sort of diaper when we have, what he’s begun to call, “story time”.. Instead of milk and cookies he gives me beer and chips... and I am inspired in both my art and my recent growth and development program…
I hope there will be more Zeke-isms to share with you in the future, (he promised me one about how a snake broke his nose.. he says involves crying and screamin’ like a girl).
I complained that no one laughs when I tell his armadillo story. He says “it’s because when you tell it they don’t believe you, but when I tell it they think this fella is just crazy enough to have done that”…..
One story he told struck me so timely (and funny) I had to stop him mid sentence in Walmart (we run into each other in weirdly random places) and write it down…I thought you would like it…
“Why are you mad, you won!”
Cowboy Zeke, being the hermit that he is, has developed a habit of talking to his animals like they are people.. He tells the horse he’s riding that there’s going to be a jackrabbit in the sage bush up ahead and not to freak out… Then lectures the horse for freaking out after the rabbit breaks from the bush as predicted…
The other cowboys give him a hard time saying “that horse can’t understand you, what you talkin to him for”… This doesn’t faze Zeke in the least…
When he loads his horse in the trailer he says “get in the truck” as the horse gets in… After awhile his brother, and the other cowboys on his brother’s ranch started doing the same thing…
The horses learned very quickly what those words meant… The boys could be across the yard and say to their horse “get in the truck” and the horse would go over and hop in the trailer…
It got to be sort of fun to see just how far away from the truck and trailer a guy could be and get his horse to load…A sort of friendly competition developed…
One day while moving cattle the guys were almost 2 miles away from the truck when they came to a gate… One of the cowboys hopped off his horse to open it… his horse waited patiently off to the side as the crew passed. As Zeke rode by he told the waiting horse “get in the truck” and to everyone’s surprise the horse trotted off toward where they’d left the trailer…Leaving his cowboy spittin, and stompin mad…
Somebody called for another truck to come get the angry cowboy, and the rest of the crew went off to finish the work…
As Zeke rode by the cowboy he said “What are you mad for? You won! Your horse loaded from the furthest away!”
I told Zeke if I was that cowboy I’d have dragged him off his horse and left him standing there.. he said no he was on a big Percheron (draft horse) cross and the guy couldn’t get to him…
As I thought about it I realized that the cowboy not only won the distance thing.. he got a nice opportunity to take a break in the shade…
Depending on how he chose to look at it it wasn’t a bad thing at all… He got a reprieve from work AND the reputation of having a pretty dang smart horse…
That’s how it is with “happy” in all of life… it’s all how you look at it…I’m making a concerted effort to be aware of how I look at my life… I now know that’s it’s not just a trivial pastime… it’s important.. How I choose to look at the “now” I’m in is creating my very next “now”…
Angels on your body.
Prairie Girl
This is a cool post. I'm like you and would love to sit and listen to Zeke-isms all day. There's just something about stories from "old-timers" (don't tell Zeke I called him that) that set the imagination to running. Thanks for the story!
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