Posted on October 2, 2009 - by Hubba

The Summer of ‘89, Cont.

Ok it’s close enough now I can tell the rest of the story.

The cows had been up at Cascade Springs in the Black Hills since mid July.  Except for maybe Dad going to check on them we had pretty much forgotten about them.  But Dad had made a plan to gather them into a set of corrals up there, sort the calves off and send them to Edgemont to sell, and haul the cows home.  We called all the neighbors and got ready.

We all assembled at our place on a balmy October afternoon.  All except Dad that is, who went to get his truck.  He had an ancient cabover semi with a wooden straight trailer that he had the brakes overhauled for the trip to the Hills.

So there we were, about seventeen of us, waiting in the yard.  At the tender age of ten, I was wearing a set of Crockett spurs that I had found in the barn a few months before.  My horse Dan had proven impervious to the children’s spurs I had gotten the Christmas before, so I had dug up Dad’s old Crocketts from the barn.  He had been a little shocked, and reluctant to let me use them, but he had relented, partly because Dan got more done at their insistence.

So there I was, a miniature Festus, waiting for the big adventure.  All of us kids, me, Nick and Al, Brian Wilson, and Ben and Will Page, were terribly excited, as were most of the adults.  Someone had given me half a bag of Levi Garrett chewing tobacco, so I was all set to go.

Finally Dad got back.  We loaded seventeen horses up the chute into the straight trailer, with some coaxing, and took off.  The semi, which led the convoy, had a top speed of about 65 miles an hour, so it was a long trip.  Dad and one of my brothers were in the semi, a few other people were in a pickup and horse trailer, and I somehow got squeezed into a pickup with six or seven big guys which brought up the rear.

The thing I remember most about the trip was that one of the guys, whose name I remember well, was gleefully overcome with a severe and smelly bout of flatulence, which he loosed repeatedly on the overstuffed cab of the pickup.

We stopped at a Taco John’s somewhere to eat, leaving the windows open on the pickup to air it out.  Sometime after dark, we got to the Cascade Springs Bed and Breakfast.  I don’t remember helping with the horses, but maybe I did.  All us kids were ushered into a basement room with our sleeping bags and told to go to sleep.

We should have.  We had had a long enough day.  But we were much too excited, and besides there were fifteen gallons of apples downstairs.  Somebody started eating apples and then threw a core, which hit somebody else.  Before long we had a full on apple core fight in the dark, until Dad came down and threatened to whip us all.

The next  morning when we woke up way too early, there were apples and apple cores all over; on the wall, on the floor, in our hair, our sleeping bags, everywhere.  Dad said we would be in trouble later.  After a breakfast of heavy whole wheat pancakes, we went out to catch our horses.  A half hour later, we were mounted and ready to go.

To be continued some more…