AU T UM N W I T H A H O R SE NA M ED JACK I didn’t know Jack in the spring or summer of his life. I married into his family when Jack, the horse, was 15 years old. He was a handsome, well-made unregistered horse, standing about 15.1 hands, brown with a blaze and socks. Jack was a heck of a roping horse and had done well in Working Hunter classes. His IQ may have been the highest of any horse, (and a lot of humans) I ever met. My husband, Buster, and I took Jack to the ranch in Junction. He wasn’t really fond of the hard work of climbing up and down the sides of the canyons, but he loved living down in the river bottom with the rest of our horses. My stepdaughters rode him when they visited, but he developed a limp during round-up one year. We just couldn’t find anything wrong. He would seem to be fine, but as soon as he was saddled, he would limp on his right front foot so bad we were afraid he was going to fall. Whoever was 40
Pat’s Horse Tales
on him had to get off. This went on the entire summer, and we still couldn’t find a cause. One day, all the horses came up to water near the house. They came flying up in a cloud of dust, and Jack didn’t know anyone was looking, so there was no limp. I walked out the front door and yelled, “Jack, you old fraud.” The minute he heard my voice, he started limping so badly it was all he could do to get to the water trough. About that time, one of the mares pinned her ears, bared her teeth at him and turned to kick. Jack spun out of her way and ran off a few steps with no limp. He saw me watching and immediately started limping again, only he limped off on the wrong foot. We still couldn’t ride him, because he refused to give up the act. Finally, after several months of not riding him, he forgot the limp, but he still had plenty more tricks in store for the humans in his life.
