plant all four feet sending me over his head into the next county. Still, I whipped and spurred like crazy until the race was over. The hand beat me by a little bit and Waldo gave me what for, saying I was on the fastest horse and should have won. The cowboy leaped to my defense saying I had literally spurred the spurs off my boots. The same cowboy told me that I was the first woman that had ever gone on roundup with them. They had had journalists, photographers and all sorts of other people, but never a lady. I think I passed the acid test. I did my assigned jobs, rode the miles, cut the cattle and generally held my own without any whining. It was truly an experience of a life time. Before we left the ranch to start the round-up, I realized that, as the only woman with this group of cowboys, I needed to be particularly careful with my language. No swear words of any kind, no matter what. My word, I decided, for all frustrating events would be “fizzle.” A month or so after we returned to Texas, Waldo called and said, “You have absolutely ruined all my cowboys!” “How?” I asked. He said, “I walk around the ranch and these old grizzled cowboys with tobacco stained beards are getting the mess kicked out of them, among other things, yelling, ‘Oh, fizzle!!’ It’s really embarrassing.”
MY DOLLY DIMPLE In the winter of 1967, Buster and I went to Ogalalla, Nebraska to the Haythorn Ranch, where we spent New Year’s Eve with Waldo and Bell Haythorn. Oh, boy, what a winter it was! One of those 40 below zero winters. On New Year’s Day, Waldo took us out to look at horses. He was a wild man in an automobile, and while we were flying across a snow covered pasture, he crashed his El Camino through a snow bank into a shallow gully, tearing the transmission out. We were stranded miles from civilization. As far as you could see to the north …
38
Pat’s Horse Tales
SNOW. As far as you could see to the south … SNOW. The same was true when you looked east or west. And it was really cold snow! We had to get out and start walking … When I tell you it was cold, believe it … It had, maybe, warmed up to 10 or 12 below zero. Waldo said that with any luck, we would intercept the hands coming in from feeding cattle. We walked … and we walked … aannnd we walked. When we found them in the fields, we set bales of hay on fire to warm up … and we walked. I kept thinking, ”If I keep walking, I won’t freeze to death.” We did finally find the hands and get a ride back to headquarters. We did not freeze to death. My advice: don’t go look at horses in waist high snow on New Year’s Day in sub-zero weather in Ogallala, Nebraska. At the end of that trip, Waldo sent one of his stallions home with us. His name was “My Beaver,” by Beaver Creek out of a Peter McCue Jr. mare. Standing 16.0+ hands, he was a gorgeous horse. We bred him to a mare I had bought that fall at a sale, Rio Rita, an own daughter of Chubby (the stallion) and out Elmer Hepler’s great broodmare, Panazarita Daughtery. Rio Rita had produced 13 foals when I bought her, 10 had been by Poco Bueno, with one, Poco Sail, being named World’s Champion Halter Mare in 1959 or ‘60. Rita was 20 years old and I hoped we might get one foal from her, and she had a beautiful filly, but she never got up to nurse her. A huge tumor on one of her ovaries had ruptured during contractions and we could not save her. It was certainly doubtful we could save the filly. At that time, I ran the stable at a well-known Houston County Club, and I took the orphaned filly to the stable to try to get her to nurse a bottle. My vet advised me to teach her to drink from a bucket rather than a bottle because of the time and effort it would take to get enough milk down her. I spent those first few hours begging her to drink … splashing milk on her nose and into her mouth. The vet told me not to relent, that she would finally be hungry enough to drink. I cried and begged and begged her to drink. Well, miracles of miracles, she did finally take a sip … and then another … and finally after a couple of days she really started drinking. I lived four or five miles from the stable and I would get up every four hours to go feed her. I can’t remember how many weeks I did that before I got her to sleep through the night. The little devil was a real survivor. She grew, and soon, I was adding bran mash to her milk. As she got bigge, another problem surfaced. She did not know
