Crazy Cowboy

  My brother lived in B.C., but every so often he and his family came to Calgary for a visit.  On one occasion he decided to go for a ride with me out at Twin Bridges.  I gave him my horse Duke to ride and off we went. Unfortunately he had been imbibing in a few drinks and it was getting dark.  He did not know the lay of the land and what he mistook for a road, was in fact two well rutted tracks the horses and stock used to go out to pasture.  At on point he went to gallop across these ruts and of course the horse went down.  The horse ran away while he moaned and groaned.




 My brother had hurt his knee quite badly and could hardly walk so I put him up on the horse I was riding and walked him back down the lane.  I could only hope Duke would not step on his reins and cut his mouth.  Once back to his truck my Brother was not yet done and thought we should drive out there and find my horse.  Again, I found you could not reason with someone that was under the influence but the by the time we got to the end of the lane and shone the lights on where we had been, I did manage to convince him that there was no road and to drive down into the valley would be suicidal and he would not get far upright for sure.  His wife backed me up and we also had their little girl with us.  We could not see Duke and I didn't sleep well that night knowing he was out there all tacked up.  Luckily in the morning I went hurriedly down to the corrals and there he was not much worse for the wear at all.

  Although I had bonded with Trouble I never had with Duke. He was not an easy horse to ride at all and was a horse that did a lot of dancing and prancing.  In my lack of knowledge when I bought him, I thought that was neat but it is not.  A few miles on a "jigging" horse is most tiresome and although since then I have managed to train some of that out of horses, at the time I did not know what to do about it.  In the fall at sale time I took him in and he only brought me $130.
  The late night ride my brother took did not endear him to Mary at all and one day I would hear the oft-repeated words "Well you may think the sun rises and shines out of his _ _ s, but it does not!"  Still he was my big brother and I thought a lot of him.