More About Gus

By:  Carl D. Morris

Chapter Two

Well, Gus was young. I figured it would be a good time to work on making him a good saddle horse. A couple of my nephew's friends happened to be at my brothers house.. A conversation started about how Gus had done a good job of bucking me off a few days previous. These young cowboys worked up at a dude ranch. I don't know if it was up the South Fork.. or up the North Fork. They said that they'd like to load Gus up and take him with them.. and work the kinks out of him for me up at the ranch they worked on. I gave them permission to do just that.
The rest of the story I learned in bits and pieces..... one detail at a time... until I had a pretty good understanding of what took place. The rest of this came fully to light long after the "cowboys", a couple of weeks after they took him, brought him back and just turned him loose it the pasture without saying a word.

As I understand it now, one of the incentives for these boys to take Gus and "ride him out" for me was to provide them a way of impressing people up at the ranch... especially the girls.. I suppose there's nothing like a raunchy horse to put on a show of your horsemanship.

Soon after they got Gus up to the ranch, some work needed to be done with some cows. They figured it might be a good way to plunge Gus right into his training. Besides, Gus was showing them that he was very docile... obviously too docile to be much of a bucker. One of the cowboys put on his chaps and spurs and got ready to put Gus through his paces and teach him a thing or two. They rode out to where the cows were, the cows took off running, but Gus was only giving a half-hearted effort to catch them. All he was producing was a slow gallop. So.... wanting more action, while they were slowly galloping, the cowboy started whirling his rope over Gus's head, gave out a yell, and really gouged him with his spurs. Like I said, Gus was galloping... but... well... the people watching all this said that they'd never seen a cowboy fly in the air so high... and hit the ground so hard... as this cowboy did.. It was said that it took a while for him to get up.

(to be continued...)

Spook and Gus