AUTUMN WITH A HORSE NAMED 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 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.

I decided I wanted to learn to ride a jumping horse, so I put the jumping saddle on Jack and off we went to the river bottom to jump a few logs. Well, the old devil would gallop very nicely up to a log, take a couple of short strides and pop straight up and over.... making a six-foot jump out of what should have been a little three-foot hop. Of course, that would leave me way behind the saddle, sitting on his butt. I’m sure I heard him give me a horse laugh. A little bit of that and I decided to stick with my western saddles and let Jack go back to his idyllic life of retirement. One day, I had caught my horse, King Joe Doc, and put him in one of the stock pens. A horseshoe on the end of a piece of chain acted as the latch for the gate. It could not be reached by a horse on the inside of the pen. After a bit, I looked out and saw that Doc was out. I went out and put him in the pen again and made darn sure he couldn’t reach the latch. In about 10 minutes, he was out again. There were no other horses anywhere around and once more I put him up. The third time it happened, I caught Doc one more time, but this time I slammed the door to the house as if I had gone in but hid around the corner. Sure enough, in a few minutes, here came Jack in a dead run. He flipped the latch off with his nose and took off to hide again. That horse could open any gate, no matter how fool proof you thought the latch was. One afternoon we came back to the ranch to find our two stallions together, fighting like tigers. After we broke up the fight, we found Jack in one of the stud pens with the gate shut. He had opened both gates, let the stallions out and then gone in and closed the gate behind himself to watch the fight. When horses were found in different stalls than they had been left in with all the doors open, you always knew Jack had been there. If you wanted to keep Jack from opening doors or gates, you needed to use a large Master lock and be sure to take the key with you. Once, we took several horses down to Sabine Pass on the Gulf of Mexico to swim them in the ocean. They all loved it except Jack. He acted like he had lived 20+ years without ever swimming in the ocean and wasn’t going to start then. No amount of coaxing would get him in the water, so one of us took him back and tied him to the trailer. Jack was as good at untying himself or slipping a halter off as he was at opening gates. Very shortly, I looked up and there hung his empty halter. That day he wasn’t enjoying anything we were doing, so off he ran. We chased him through people’s carports, down the road, up the road, and up and down the beach until he got tired of playing with us and went back to the trailer to stand by his empty halter. When Jack was 21, my little daughter was 6 years old and she started showing him. They were billed as the oldest horse with the youngest rider. In one Youth Gelding halter class, the judge kept looking at Jack because he did have great confirmation, but his age was beginning to show. The

judge would walk up to him and put his hand in the sink in front of his withers and step back and rub his chin. He was having a tough time trying to decide where to place him. He finally placed him third in a very large class. After the show, we were talking to the judge, who was a friend, and laughed about his dilemma with Jack. When we told him he was 21, he said he felt vindicated, because he had no idea the horse was that old. Jack could do anything. He was a super Western Pleasure horse, barrel racer, or 4-H game runner of any sort. He would read the rule book the night before, so all they had to do was just sit there and he would handle the rest. One problem arose though, when we realized that Jack’s rule book was not the most current edition. His book said there would be five poles in the pole bending, but the rules changed to six. His first time out after the change, he counted five poles and rolled around that fifth pole, completely ignoring his rider to finish the event with a very good time. I’m sure he just thought they were trying to mess with him by adding a sixth pole. That generation of kids spent a lot of time convincing him that the rules had changed. There was an old fellow, Henry, who worked for us and lived at the stable. Since there was no point in trying to confine Jack to his stall, his door was usually open and he just wandered around the stables at will. One day, I felt a lump in his jaw between his cheek and gums. I reached up in his mouth and found a very shriveled dehydrated pickle. I asked ole Henry where Jack had gotten a pickle. Henry told me that he bought them for Jack all the time. Jack would walk up his steps, look through the screen door, then bang on it with his nose, begging for a pickle. Jack was also very fond of hamburgers and would take you to the ground if you tried to eat one around him, so we always just got him one of his own. He preferred his burgers “all the way.” As soon as we got to a show, his little mistress would take Jack to get a hamburger. You know, just to tune him up. At one show, she was busy doing something and asked, “Mom, will you take Jack to get his hamburger?” I hopped on Jack and loped up to the concession stand. That day the moms and dads were grilling burgers for the kids and I ordered one for both of us. Jack was so eager for his that I wasn’t able to get very far from the concession stand before I had to give it to him. As I was standing there holding his burger for him to eat, a woman said, with a great deal of disgust, “All the starving people in the world and you are feeding that horse a hamburger!” I answered, “Lady, he paid for his burger the same as everybody else.” Jack and I stood right there while he finished his burger. My daughter and I left Houston and moved to Cheyenne, Wyoming. Jack had to stay behind. I was told that he lived to be 31 or 32, long past his autumn. He was the biggest horse character I ever knew and there are enough Jack stories to fill a book.