The Buck stops here

The last time I hung out with Buck Brannaman was in April 2005, when I rode Lyle in one of his clinics. 

Since then, Buck's been the subject of a pretty popular movie and the whole world has discovered him; 

it's not every horse trainer that goes mainstream.

Buck was giving a clinic in Santa Fe over the weekend and I went up to watch. 

I'm happy to report that all the newfound fame hasn't seemed to change him a bit.

He may be driving a fancier rig, and his p.a. system doesn't squeal and spook Lyle your horse
when you ride past the speaker anymore, but he's still the same Buck. 

He's teaching the same stuff, telling some of the same bad jokes, and still making what he does with horses

look so damned easy, I could just scream because it's anything but.

As good as he was with horses back in 2005, he keeps improving, finding new ways to explain and share his knowledge 

so that his students can catch on a little faster and with a deeper understanding of how to train a horse to "follow a feel."

Buck got a little melancholy talking about his mentor, Ray Hunt, who passed on in 2009. 

He shared a lot of stories about his early days with Ray and how much practice it took for him 

to learn and master the things that he teaches today.

Watching Buck ride is nothing short of inspirational – you can't help but want to run right home 

and practice all the stuff you've learned. Lucy has no idea what she's in for.

Here Buck is giving his students their homework assignment –

it's one of the same assignments he gave to me and Lyle back in the old days.

We may not have mastered anything else at that clinic, but we aced this one...eventually.

Next time you see me climbing a fence to make a video, maybe I'll be getting Lucy to move it on over.

Does Ft. Worth ever cross your mind?

I got an e-mail last week about the Ray Hunt Memorial Clinic, A Tribute to the Legacy of a Legend, in Ft. Worth on February 27 and 28, 2010. I've been thinking about going ever since. It's only 756 miles from here. Ouch.



You can click here for more details, but a bunch of Ray's students (including Buck Brannaman, Martin Black, Peter Campbell, Tom Curtain...the list goes on and on) have been invited to demonstrate how they work with a young horse. They were chosen and are being honored for their dedication to the horse and to Ray's legacy. Far from a colt-starting competition, each presenter gets 45 minutes to work with a horse they've never met and will be critiqued by a panel of judges and the audience on the basis of who best employed Ray's methods and teachings. And the winner gets ... are you ready for this? ... Ray's saddle. Yowsah. The opportunity to watch all these guys (and one gal - Lee Smith) at one event is almost more than I can stand. The website does mention the possibility of a DVD being produced, so purchasing that will be my plan B. But plan A, a road trip to Ft. Worth, sounds like way more fun...except for the 756 miles part.

"Feel, timing and balance...and there's one more thing"

Ray Hunt was the truest horseman I ever met. I learned this morning that he has died, and now I'm thinking about how much I learned from him.

Anyone who ever rode with him can rattle off at least a dozen Ray-isms that they think about every time they work with a horse: fix him up and let him find it; reward the slightest try; observe, remember and compare. My favorite is: give what you never gave and you'll get what you never had. It took me a long time to understand that one, but once I finally got it, my relationship with Lyle turned a corner.

The last time I rode with Ray, he told us that riding and training our horses was all about "feel, timing and balance...and there's one other thing in there." He said he hadn't been able to put his finger on what that "other thing" was yet. Now I'm wondering if he got it figured out before he died.

Here's Ray with a flag, getting ready to move Hank's shoulders across so that I would understand how that's supposed to feel. My stomach sinks just looking at this picture, remembering how intimidated I was at the time.



There were ten of us in this colt-starting clinic, and here we all are in one 60-foot round pen, taking our first ride as Ray kept the colts moving and out of trouble. Amazingly, Lyle and I lived to tell about it.





The lessons Ray taught me over the years are still sinking in. Once in a while I'll be out with Hank or Lyle and have one of those big ah-ha moments – oh, that's what he meant! I won't be able to ride with him again, but I still learn from Ray every time I'm near a horse. And the next time I saddle up, I'll whistle, grin and ride.

The Story of Lyle, Part 2

Lyle did his best to snap me out of my grief – he was born with a sense of humor.

I knew I would get another horse at some point to keep him company, but that would take time, so I borrowed a pony, Jimmy, from a neighbor for the interim. Jimmy had permanently googly eyes and was just plain weird; my eagerness to get him out of the picture prompted me to start looking for another horse more quickly than I would have otherwise.

It took about two months to find “Mr. Right.” He was listed on a website; I still have the ad: “Looking for a new partner? This may be the one! Cochise is an 8 year old 15.1 hand bay Paint gelding, ridden and shown Western and English by a young girl, who has moved on to jumping. A breeze to load and clip, he's a healthy easy keeper with a sweet and calm disposition. He's great on the trails and gets along well with other horses.”
I made several trips to Santa Fe to ride him. It didn’t take long to decide he was the one, but the name Cochise had to go, so he was re-baptized Hank (as in Sr.).

Hank and Lyle buddied up instantly. I can’t say the same for Hank and me – he quickly decided I was pond scum. But over the next year, after walking home alone more times than I can count and hours and hours of groundwork, I finally earned a little of his respect. And all the lessons learned with Hank helped me put a start on Lyle’s ground training. I was way out of my league, though, having never trained a yearling, so I found a trainer along the way to train me to train Lyle (thank you, Randall Davis).

Here is Lyle at his first birthday party ... he was turning his nose up at a whiff of white wine ­– how was I to know he preferred red?

Kevin, our vet, proclaimed Lyle physically ready to get started under saddle when he was 2 and half. About that time, I learned Ray Hunt was coming to New Mexico to teach a four-day clinic – colt starting in the morning and horsemanship in the afternoon. Cool! I could take both horses and participate in both sessions. However, Hank decided to make the clinic even more challenging – he got western on me during a trail ride four days before I was supposed to leave. I stayed in the saddle but broke my hand in the process. I had surgery to screw the bones together on Tuesday and left for the clinic on Thursday. Probably not the best decision I’d ever made, but I knew Ray was getting kind of old and I couldn’t pass up this once-in-a-lifetime opportunity.

There were about 10 of us in the colt-starting clinic...9 of them were strapping young cowboys, wearing chaps and looking good...experienced colt starters who wanted to show off under Ray’s watchful eye. I was the one not wearing chaps - the 48-year-old woman in the purple cast and helmet. Could I have stuck out any more?? And Lyle was as out of his element as I was. When all the colts were turned out together in the arena, he would run over to me instead of running with the herd. The cowboys kept calling him “Mama’s Boy.” Well, we showed them. I got Lyle saddled, climbed on him using one hand, and was riding him on the second day. And he didn’t buck once.

Somehow I managed to live through the whole four days, riding Lyle in the morning, riding Hank in the afternoon, and being humiliated and decapitated by Ray Hunt all day long. Ray’s style is about a light year beyond “tough love” – he’s there for the horse only, and I was ok with that. But God help the human with thin skin. And geez oh man, did I learn. Did I mention there were about 100 spectators watching our every move...and it rained almost the whole time...and I was living out of my non-living-quarters horse trailer? In this instance, “what doesn’t kill you makes you stronger” was not a worn-out cliché.

You know how when you’ve anticipated something for so long and it’s over and done and you’re sitting there thinking, “did that really just happen?” Yep, that was what I was thinking the whole way home. I did it – I started my first colt. Wow. And the helmet-wearing old broad with the purple cast earned the respect of the cowboys, too. Cool.

But now what would I do? I knew my hand was more broken than when I had left and it would be awhile before I should ride again, so I found a local trainer to help me for the next few months. Lyle tested her at every opportunity – he was smart and easily bored. We made progress, but his attitude was always more noticeable than his abilities.

Ray Hunt came back to New Mexico for another clinic that summer and, glutton for punishment that I am, I took Lyle for the horsemanship sessions.  We did ok, but Lyle was far from a “finished” horse. When we got home this time, I sent Lyle to Randall Davis for 30 days of remedial lessons and to fix the bad behaviors for which I was solely responsible.

Sure enough, Lyle came home a finished horse...soft and responsive and not nearly as much of a knucklehead as when I had dropped him off. My challenge was to keep him that way. I rode him as much as I could and took advantage of every opportunity to advance my horsemanship.

In April 2005, Lyle and I participated in a 4-day clinic with Buck Brannaman. While not as harsh as Ray, they were definitely cut from the same cloth. At least when Buck chastised me, he did it with a smile on his face. And geez oh man, did I learn. In the month after the clinic, I had my best rides on Lyle ever. Everything had finally clicked for us.

To be continued...