“”You kid!” he said, packing a fingerful of Copenhagen snuff under his lip. “Take this old hoss and head east ‘bout sixty miles toward that mountain over there. You’re in luck. The old man wants yuh to learn hayin’.“
I eyed the horse dubiously. “What kind of killer did you come up with this time?”
Homer grinned. “His name’s Sleepy. Hell, yuh c’n handle him good. Ah’ll ear ‘im down in the corral,then open the gate fer yuh. Better pee afore yuh go, ’cause he won’t let yuh back on. By the time he’s made the sixty mile ride to headquarters he’ll be plum gentle.”
“How will I know the place?”
“Cain’t miss it. Other side of thet long ridge, you’ll come to a river. Jes follow it on to the head.”
I tied my bedroll on behind my saddle, but the big gray blew his nose and busted his tie rope
every time I laid a hand on him, trying to kick my ear off.
“Maybe he wants me to walk with him instead of riding,” I said hopefully.
Homer blindfolded the horse to get me mounted and turned him out of the corral. “Keep him
busy travelin’, kid,” he shouted. “That way he won’t get no time to think!”
Away I went riding a horse I couldn’t manage to a ranch I’d never seen,
owned by an uncle I scarcely knew, to a destiny I could not have dreamed of.
I got along fairly well until about noon. I was getting pretty desperate to get
off when the horse reads my mind and put me off in two jumps. I had a
feeling he’d just started, so I sat down on a pitch stump,hopin
he’d get his mind on another track.
I should have picked another stump. Yellow with pitch, it
so impregnated my Levis with resin that, once I hit the saddle
again, hard as he bucked there was no way he could get me
off short of throwing me clear out of my underwear. It so
demoralized the horse that by the time I hit the river and
turned south I could have rolled a cigarette in one hand
with him doing his worst.
Dismounting at the ranch, however, was a different matter.
Every time I tried to get off there was a ripping sound like
adhesive tape being torn from the rib cage of an athlete.
Sleepy panicked, smashed down a pole gate, and
stampeded through the willows to the house spring,
It took the combined efforts of two smirking cowboys
and a gallon of coal oil to dissolve me out of the saddle.
That night I spent my first night in the big stone house
at Yamsi that would someday be my home....”
– Dayton O. Hyde, Don Coyote.
Book available at www.daytonohyde.com
Yamsi was Dayton O Hyde’s home through the sixties. He and his wife Gerda raised a family of five children. When one of them, Marsha, died in a tragic horseback accident, things were never the same as often happens with the death of children. Gradually he drifted off to begin his career as a writer and as the organizer of Operation Stronghold, which became an
internationally successful landowner sponsored wildlife conservation organization.
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