“Hng-oof!”
Body relaxed, a half-smile on his face, he hit the ground on his back, driving
the air from his lungs and the Stetson back into the air. He tried to suck a
breath back into nearly collapsed lungs without success. He pursed his lips and
sipped at the air while a high-pitched laugh echoed in his ears. Funny -- there
hadn’t been any girls ar… his eyes fetched up at the coal-black horse, head
thrown back, trotting in a circle and whinnying -- at him.
Concentrating
on sipping air (getting thrown by a horse ridden in by another hand was
embarrassing enough -- sucking air and heaving like a drunk wasn’t going to
improve matters) Gordon rolled onto his stomach and pushed himself to his
knees.
“Here
y’go, cowboy!” The Stetson was dropped on his head with a chuckle by one of the
ranch hands who’d been standing around or prepping for the day as he mounted
the black.
Gordon
pulled his left leg under himself and sipped another slow breath. Standing was
harder than he expected, but he got there, resettling the Stetson as he rose to
cover the difficulty. He looked at the black, then at the men gathered around
him. “Billy?” He indicated one of the young men. “Why’d he do that?” He paused
for a half-breath. “You put sumthin’ under the saddle?”
“Nah…
he just tries to dump every rider who climbs on his back. Doesn’t try very hard
though. All you have to do is stand up in the stirrups.” There was a round of
laughter.
Gordon
stared off across the meager grass and clots of spiny vegetation. Farther than
he could see lay mountains to the west, he knew… and to the east two days ride
lay lowlands and salt marshes. Two days through the marshes brought the eastern
ocean into view.
“Here be monsters,” he thought, turning his eyes again to the
black.
Saying
no more, he strode toward the horse, hiding the unsteadiness that wanted to
creep into his gait. Thirty men had tried for this job, and some had been
friends with some of the men he was now working with, and these men weren’t
happy about his being here instead. Still, it galled him to have been thrown
just because he was too distracted to pay attention to a strange horse as he
mounted it. He should’ve been much more aware. After all, Billy had brought him
the horse, saddled and bridled with his own tack, before anybody else had even
begun saddling up.
The
black stood rock-still as he approached and gathered the reins. Taking the
right rein in his left hand, he reached under the horse’s neck and flipped the
thin leather strap up and over it, catching it in his right hand and then
swapping both lines into his left. Keeping the reins in his left hand, he
stepped from the horse’s head toward and past its shoulder, grasped the
saddle-horn with his left hand, flexed his knees and jumped. As he jumped, he
began a turn toward the horse’s body and slid the toe of his left boot into the
stirrup, shoving it down and slinging his right leg over the pommel
simultaneously.
When
his weight evened on the stirrups he took the trailing ends of the reins in his
right hand and, leaning forward toward the black’s head he slashed at its rear,
dropping fully into the saddle and digging his heels into the animal’s ribs as
he did so. “Run, you sunuvvabitch… run until I tell you to stop,” he muttered
into the horse’s mane, as the horse leapt forward. Before the animal could
gather itself he dug his heels, and the blunted stirrups thereon, in again, neck-reining the horse hard right to
the dirt track that ran north to the ranch house and buildings, another two-day
ride away. They thundered down the road for a half-mile before Gordon reined
the black left and then right in almost a full circle, swinging south as they
reached the road. The watching men saw horse and rider framed by a backlit
cloud of dust, pounding toward them at a racing pace.
Gordon
sat back and hauled on the reins as they came up to the men, stopping the black
in less than ten feet. He swung down and stepped off as the horse stopped.
Approaching Billy he glowered at him without speaking for several seconds,
then, “Setting me up to get thrown almost made that horse believe he could do
it again… to anybody. I don’t like to run a horse like that, but you left me no
options. Don’t ever pull a stunt like that again. You may have noticed… I’m a
poor sport when it comes to practical jokes.”
He went back and began to rub
down the horse. Someone stripped the saddle and dropped a fresh blanket over
it. When
he was done, he resaddled the black and looked around. There were fifteen men
in the work party, plus the cook and cook’s helper and the hay-wagon driver.
The cook and helper rode a chuck-wagon. All fourteen other cowboys were
standing or leaning against something, and every one of them had a horse fully
saddled and ready to ride.
“You
ready, Gordon?” The foreman’s voice held no tone or emotion. “We’re ready if
you are.”
Gordon
stepped into the stirrup and swung into the saddle. “Yup, let’s go find ‘em.”
The group set out at a trot.
As
they neared the first clot of spiny shrubs the locals called False Mesquite,
limbs began to writhe and lengthen. Each limb was actually a vine, doubled and
redoubled to resemble a limb or branch of a small tree. They were well covered
in barbed spines ranging in length from half an inch to two inches, and needle
sharp. But sensors in the roots told the plant the prey was too large and too
many to attack without severe loss, so the vines moved slowly, not fully
extended and coursing through the rough vegetation that covered the high
desert. Still, they moved constantly while the horses and chuck-wagon filed
past, seeking the smaller animals such a parade might startle into flight
toward them.
In
the distance an oddly elongated animal flowed with an unusual gait parallel to
their own path. “’Cat’ on the hunt,” said one of the men, pointing.
“Well,
we’re not on the hunt for it.” The foreman’s voice left no room for argument.
“You guys let it be. It’s not looking for you and it’s not looking for cattle.”
Nobody else spoke.
An
hour’s slow ride in the heat later, they came upon the first small group of
cattle. There were about two-dozen cows and steers, with three unbranded calves.
The six-legged vegetarians were genetically modified to increase their size and
reduce their tendency to want to hammer humans into the sides of large
structures. They retained their ability to thrive on the woody grasses and
thorny bushes of their home planet, but were converted by their genetic mods to
be edible meat for humans and other earth creatures. The hexapedal “Cats” of
the exoplanet on which Terra had launched its first non-solar colony could
still eat them, but were incapable of attacking the modified animals, now
nearly three times the size of their ancestors.
"We're
not in Kansas any more, Toto," he muttered to the black. "I wonder if
there is a Kansas any more." He pondered the sixty thousand
years the original colony had slept on their flight to a planet from which they
could never again even see the star of the planet of their birth, as he swung
in to help capture the first of the calves for branding.
Copyright R C Larlham 2010, All rights to author
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