These days leading up to Christmas are crazy. I feel like a kid on a merry go round that’s going too fast for comfort…or maybe like the frantic engineer on a train that is on unfamiliar track downhill and the brakes have failed…or more exactly, what I really feel is that all-too-familiar adrenaline that kept me in the saddle all those times my horse Rudy ran away with me.
Rudy was gentle. Not a mean bone in his body. But somewhere in the middle of his training, my sister asked if she could “try him” to see how fast he could run. I never should have let her ride him, she had a way of scaring a horse to go faster, usually by getting the horse to the fastest speed he was willing to go, and then hunching her shoulders and making weird sounds until the horse was scared for his life and ran faster. Looking back, I’m not sure why she saw the need for this, but we were crazy teenage kids boasting about whose horse was the fastest. So she rode Rudy, and he learned to run away.
I found out about this new learned behavior the hard way. It was a day of cattle work, and we had all saddled up and rode out to the south cornfield to gather up the herd. I remember all of us trotting our horses abreast, and Dad looking over at me riding Rudy and chuckling because Rudy was literally trotting sideways, chomping at the bit, and rearing to go faster. His anxiety escalated until he just couldn’t stand it, and he just broke out in a dead run for no reason at all, leaving the other horses far behind and racing clear to the south fence. I was pulling on him as hard as I could, but his ears were straight back in a panic mode, and he was not stopping. We ran clear around that entire cornfield, racing to the south edge, turning west at the fence, circling clear around to the north and finally the east, and he finally stopped in the far southeast corner. It took us maybe ten minutes at a dead run to cover that much ground, and I don’t think you could have driven it that fast in a pickup. Nothing I could do would slow him, so I mainly focused on hanging on, but I was pulling back the whole time. Rudy never even looked for the other horses, he was just running away.
Well, I continued to ride Rudy, and these situations would crop up every so often. Once in awhile it was because of something scary that set him off (a rope dragging once, me reaching back to fix my saddle blanket another time, a cedar tree whipping us as we rode by another time) but more often than that, it was simply Rudy getting too hyper and wanting to go faster than I was letting him, until he was so phsyched up he wouldn’t listen anymore, and we were off on another wild run. He continued to be a good riding horse, and loved to work cattle, but once he reached panic mode, you really had to just hang on and ride it out.
We had a group of college kids come visit the ranch one summer, and they all wanted to ride. In finding everyone a horse and saddling it, we put the biggest, strongest guy on Rudy. I rode another colt, too green to be ridden by guests, and the whole group went for a leisurely ride down our dirt road about a mile or so, then turned back home. The entire way, I rode next to Rudy, chatting with his rider and warning him not to let Rudy trot or get “hyped up”. Well, we were doing fine until one of the other guys came whooping up on Spider at a gallop, doing his best impersonation of John Wayne to show off for the girls in the group. I was still saying, “Pull back, hold on, don’t let him run!” as Rudy disappeared over the hill ahead of us. He lit out in a full run, jumped two cattle guards (instead of going through the open gates beside them we had just come through), and streaked straight up to the yard fence, made a quick left which unseated his rider, and flew on up into our grove of trees clear to the far fence where I found him half an hour later, sweating and quivering. The poor college kid had gone off at the yard fence, crashing through it, and rolled on up into the yard. His shoulder was dislocated, and as I hear it he still has some back and shoulder pain from that day. Rudy rose in fame as an outlaw horse as the rumors and stories got bigger the more they were told back at the college.
Dad put his foot down after that episode, stating that no one but he or myself could ride Rudy. Dad took over riding him quite a bit at that time, and really enjoyed the fact that Rudy wasn’t lazy. He would gladly lift into a ground-eating trot with simply a release of the reins, no heel contact was necessary. If you were working cattle, you’d have to hold back most of the time, because Rudy wanted to be right on the tail of the cow, and would guess the cow’s next movements long before I could and leap to block her path. Rudy loved to work.
My sister Kellie thought that the college boy should have just jumped off, that it could have saved him from injury if he hadn’t stayed with the horse that long. Only a few days after the runaway, I was heading out to work cattle with Kellie. I always let Rudy take the lead when riding out in a group, because he would fight for it constantly if you didn’t let him be first, and it usually kept him from getting hyper and running away. If another horse passed him, it was all over—he had to be first! Well, this particular day, Kellie came galloping up behind me on her horse Johannes. I later asked her why in the world she would do that, and she replied that she just wanted to see if Rudy would still run away. Well, of course he did, and this time we were headed for a thick grove of trees and a fence corner, and I couldn’t think of a way to stop him, so I jumped off. Well, I tried to jump clear, but somehow I ended up under him, and my sister said I turned about three cartwheels before coming to a stop. I hadn’t been stepped on at all, but the sheer speed of his run made me flip that many times. We found Rudy in the grove of trees under some low-hanging cedars, and I couldn’t decide if I had been wise or foolish to jump before he went into the tree grove.
Another time I took Rudy up alone into some high hills during deer season. I had my rifle in a scabbard on my saddle, and was looking for a nice buck. Several of the others had gotten their deer the day before, but this was a Sunday morning and I wanted to go out and hunt by myself before church. I got up to the north side of the Hill Pasture, and saw some deer across the fence but too far away to shoot. I rode around a little more, before deciding that I’d better get home or be late for church. I headed Rudy down off a hill, and let him lope but it escalated into a run that I couldn’t pull him out of. We came off of a mountain-sized sand bluff at full speed, and I swear it was like that slope in The Man From Snowy River! I stayed with him until we came to the bottom of the hill where there was a gate he thought we should go through to get home, and when he came from a run to a stop I fell off in front of his shoulder and sat there shaking for awhile. Then I led Rudy through the gate, climbed back in the saddle, and we walked the rest of the way home.
My oldest brother Kollin often scoffed at my stories. He said that I just wasn’t pulling hard enough. I told him that if Rudy panicked, there was nothing I could do but hang on until he was done running. I was afraid of pulling him in a circle, because I knew that could throw a horse, and when he was at his fastest speeds it felt so shaky and his feet barely touched the ground, I was honestly afraid of pulling sideways on him for fear of tripping him and getting spilled off and breaking both our necks. So I always just hung on. But one day my brother Kollin rode him to move bulls, and sheepishly told us at supper time that Rudy had run away with him, too. He said Rudy had run through a field of standing corn higher than his head and almost ran into the pivot irrigation system!
A lot of people would have written a horse like that off and labeled him as dangerous. But we had fallen in love with him in spite of his sin, and his value as a cowhorse outweighed his vice of running away. My dad rode Rudy for many years while I went away to college, and they got along just fine. He would only let Rudy trot, never canter, and if Rudy started prancing sideways or acting hyper, Dad would speak to him gruffly, “Now, settle down Rudy….Come on, quit it!” And Rudy would seem to even out and relax a little. He liked to play with the bit when nervous, too, and it didn’t seem to matter what headgear we put on him—hackamore, curb, snaffle, whatever—no bit would stop him when he got that panicked. When I rode him, I learned to not start fights with him, always let him ride out at the front of the pack. If he started prancing, either talk him out of it or tell the other riders to back off and everyone slow down until he was calm again. With some caution, we all got along just fine.
Rudy is going to be 23 years old this spring. He lives on my parents’ ranch in Idaho, fat and sassy and growing old. I ride him whenever I visit, and he always looks at me with his noble eyes lighted with polite interest. He gets ridden a few times by guests who come to visit the ranch, but never faster than a slow trot. Last summer I chased a calf on him, and he really kicked it into high gear….I think he would still run away with me if I let him. I love that horse.
