Carolyn Dufurrena

In spite of the way it looks, I have not dropped off the face of the earth. However, the flow of current events (no pun intended) has reached epic proportions. In August of 2006 I took on the duties of Rural Principal for three remote rural schools in the empty desert of Humboldt County, in addition to teaching. Now I travel several hundred miles a week through ranch country to visit these schools, helping the new teachers get their feet on the ground, occasionally delivering border collie pups to kids in the high desert valleys. One of the teachers I work with also works on a ranch with her husband; she appears at the end of this story, proving once again how intertwined our lives at the edges of civilization truly are. "A Colt With come Heart" was adapted for the anthology Unbridled:the Western Horse in Fiction and Nonfiction in 2005.

Thunderheads drifted through the summer afternoon, their shadows darkening the ridges of the Pine Forest Range. Peggy sat at the kitchen counter, coffee and a cigarette in front of her. Two four-year-old boys, my son and her grandson, played in the shallow ditch just outside the window, building endless mud pies. I watched while Peggy folded laundry. We talked and talked the hours away, as she broke an egg into a bowl of flour, stirring up a batch of rolls for dinner. She set them on the pilot light to rise and put the laundry away. We had another cup of coffee. Merv was only a little late. It wasn’t near time to get worried. Still, her blue eyes scanned the ridge every few minutes.

Merv snaked the big bay colt down over the rocky, brush-choked trail, through the lightning-blackened pines rimming the cirque’s headwall ridge, slopes masked by mountain mahogany and aspen. The trail had led him from the headquarters west, up a rocky canyon, across a high meadow, a little soggy even this late in summer; and up again, out of the sagebrush and into the pines. He had a pretty good scatter on the cattle: fifty head each in the several basins on the eastern side, fifty head over the ridge. It was a good place to get a horse started, and he was happy with this one.
The glacial lake was dark green at midday, and mossy light brocaded the jumble of granite boulders beneath the surface. Merv stepped off in a grassy place near the icy water and cautiously slipped the hobbles around the colt’s hocks. He stood, and stretched. He walked to the shore through the skiff of long pine needles over fine sand.
Swifts skimmed the wavelets, hunting the afternoon hatch. The wind freshened. The grizzled cowboy breathed, lifting the terrible, old, used-to-be-white hat off his forehead.
A couple of fly fishermen eyed him curiously, a figure out of a Western novel riding into the Twentieth century. The fishing population here had changed since the government had declared this a wilderness. Not many locals chose to hike the jeep trail they’d driven in years past, and these men were from someplace else. One of them came over.
“How’s the fishin’?” Merv inquired politely, fishing his own can of Copenhagen out of a blue shirt pocket. They discussed the merits of angling in the middle of the day, dubious at best, and shot the breeze for a while. The fisherman said he’d better work his way around the backside.
He eyed the bay, half asleep in the warm sun as he passed by. “What’s your horses’s name?”
“Roller.”
Merv did not explain to this man how the horse had earned his name. The colt loved his life, loved his work. He loved to chase cows, and worked up a pretty good sweat doing it. When the saddle came off at the end of the day, he would roll and roll in the pasture, as many as six or seven times.
“Nice horse,” the fisherman commented, walked past, and smacked him on the rump.
Merv’s eyes widened as Roller—still hobbled—came out of his doze with a snort. He took one, then two sideways jumps toward the lake. Merv moved as carefully as he could toward the colt’s head, but Roller was panicked, and too quick. Every yank on those hobbles scared him worse. Next thing Merv knew, Roller had bucked himself, saddle, snaffle bit, hobbles and all, into the icy green water.
Glaciers carve a steep profile, and the water is deep close to shore. The terrified horse lunged, struggling for his life. The hobbles kept the colt’s front hocks close together: handcuffs. Waves surged from his shoulders as he heaved against the weight of the soaked saddle and blankets, the split reins tangling around his feet. Easy enough for him to tip over and drown. Merv could only stand helplessly on the shore, watching, “Goddammit, Roller…” he cursed--or perhaps it was closer to prayer.
The colt’s eyes showed white. He snorted and coughed, kicked and kicked at the hobbles. Finally, somehow, he broke free. Still hauling the heavy blankets, the soaking wet saddle, he lunged through the hidden underwater boulders toward shore. Power doubled, he clawed his way back up through the rocks until with one final desperate heave, he stood, dripping and quivering on the grass.
Merv reached out slowly, took the reins, eased off the cinch and slid the sopping saddle to the ground.
For a while he didn’t say anything. Then, “Well, hell, Roller. Might as well have a little siesta while these blankets dry, and then ease on home.” He looked at the trail leading up the headwall ridge, seeing the trip back across the big meadow, across the far side of the mountain toward home, and sighed. Roller shook his massive shoulders like a dog, and sighed too. He dropped his head to the grass. He was hungry.

The sun had left Peggy’s lawn, and the children played horses on the living room rug. Peggy took one deep breath as she saw Merv and the big bay colt emerge from the shadows of the rocky canyon. She poured out her cold coffee and turned the dough out to punch down into rolls for his dinner.
Merv shook his head as he finished telling his wife the story of his day. “That old Roller. I thought I was gonna lose him, by God. By God, colt’s got some heart to him, don’t he.”

Roller was still alive in 2001—he would have been twenty that year. He worked for Merv on high desert ranches for years, branding running mustangs, chasing cows, until Merv retired. Merv’s son Gary had him for awhile, then passed him to granddaughter Lacey. Last she had heard of him, he was traded to team penners from California.

Posted by Carolyn Dufurrena at 4:14 PM | Permalink

Several members of the Eldorado Hotshots were caught in a fire whirlwind like the one described in "Tuesday's Fire" on an incident in the Pine Forest Range west of us last week. Fortunately, they survived. Three were flown into Winnemucca; two continued to a burn unit in Las Vegas for treatment. Firefighters describe melted hard hats and plastic shovel handles from a fire whirlwind that jumped up and laid down across the fireline, enveloping this crew. There was apparently almost no time for the firefighters to react or deploy fire shelters.

There were unconfirmed rumors that some of the crew were actually thrown into a bulldozer by the whirlwind. Other unconfirmed rumors circulate about one guy healing up at the Winners Inn Casino in Winnemucca after being treated and released from the local hospital, where locals bought him a few well-deserved cool beverages. Can't say enough about these kids who risk their lives for us every day during fire season. Buy 'em a drink if you have a chance.

Posted by Carolyn Dufurrena at 3:53 PM | Permalink

We've been luckier than some this year: the Trident Fire burned only 5000 acres of our range this summer.
A few years ago, it was a lot worse: excerpt from Sharing Fencelines

Tuesday morning, August 3, hot and quiet, heavy summer.

It is breathless, sultry at ranch headquarters. Time holds its breath, waiting for something.

At 2:30 pm, lightning strikes near the road to our summer sheep camp and at Deep Creek, high on the ridge.

The fire is a wicked red smile at the base of the half-circle of volcanic hills we call the Horseshoe. The Denio fire truck is there when we arrive. Someone calls the BLM. “We can't tell you not to fight it, the dispatch lady says, “but we have no resources available right now.” There have been thirty-two lightning strikes right around town.

We're on our own.
The fire swirls a small circle in a fickle wind, only a few acres across. It moves east toward the canyon, then north. Denio Dan takes the fire truck, loads up cowboys and shovels, and drives to the other end of the fire; it is still several hundred yards north of the road, and burning parallel to it in basalt boulders and sagebrush. Hard to get to in the little truck. Not big, not yet.

The road’s ungraded shoulders are full of dry weeds, but the firetruck wets them down. It will probably stop the flames. The wind changes again, the fire backing south and west. Smoke rolls dirty, opaque.
We move the vehicles. Sam and I find a pipe wrench and drive to the windmill a quarter mile away downwind. We lift the heavy iron pipe and force it, the metal shrieking, into the rusty connection that will bring water to the two big round troughs. The fire truck only holds 250 gallons of water. It can refill here.

The sheep camp road turns south below the windmill and runs for several miles before turning west at the hot springs and connecting to the highway that divides our valley. Pickups gather below the windmill, their drivers watching. Curious humans, fascinated by fire. A stinkbug crawls across the gravel. I watch him for a minute, then pick him up and toss him into the back of the truck. Cows and calves gather in the corner of the crested wheat field, nervous at the smell of smoke.

The fire eats a fencepost, crosses into the seeding, into the main chute of the valley. Here, convection currents make invisible ferris wheels, cycling hot summer air high up into the atmosphere, bringing cool air down; dust devils dance along the meeting line of the convection cells. On any late summer afternoon, this valley is a wind furnace. Tim has decided to open the gates, just in case. He bumps off west across the field.

We watch, mesmerized: in the wind tunnel of valley air circulation, the fire grows, in a moment, into a flame-cored whirlwind sixty feet tall. It sucks the smaller flames into itself, black smoke towering and turning in a slower column around it. It is a live thing, beautiful, terrible.
Antonio leans on his shovel at the bend in the road, one elbow on the old wooden sign that points the way to Lovely Valley. He is silhouetted by smoke--and then suddenly, by flame. The whirlwind roars, blowing the heat south. The tongue of fire that has run west across the fenceline into the seeding turns, full on us.

The pickups easily outdistance the flames, but the big vehicles, the water truck and the grader, are slower. I drive south with my thirteen-year-old niece, Magen. She has come with her dad, now piloting the water truck. The red whirlwind paces us, cutting southwest across the flat. This is when I get nervous, and I tromp the accelerator of the quirky old truck that doesn't always start, and sometime dies on you. It will be good to be out of the way of this thing, I think.

Jackrabbits dash back and forth in front of us. The dust is bad; we roll the windows up. The sky darkens. We cannot see the sun.

The gravel road turns west across the fire's path to reach the highway. We beat the fire there, but not by much, and turn north. It is then I see the cattle, close to the highway, running before a wall of flame, coming fast. We drive, against the wind. Two small parcels of land where horse people have moved in crouch in the fire's path: doublewides, new barns, corrals, trucks. One man is driving out with his horses loaded, two vans following, full of stuff.

We pass a woman on a three-wheeler with a shovel, looking at us over her shoulder. A man with a little Bobcat loader is making tiny circles around the power poles in the path of the wall of fire. Several carloads of tourists, looking startled. Cows and calves, running down the shoulder of the road, all backed by the red tower of smoke and flame. It reminds me of the Wizard of Oz. We are all displaced; the rules are all different inside a twister.

When it seems like we are behind the fireline, I pull over to the shoulder of the highway. As soon as I stop, Tim's brother Hank is at the door, grabbing the radio.
"Antonio, Antonio," he shouts into the mike.
"Antonio, did you get through?" No answer.
"Antonio, where is Dan?"

Nothing. Black smoke has rolled across the road. Some of the vehicles in the racing caravan must have turned the other way. We can't see them, and the fire has jumped the highway. It has split into four fires, burning in all directions, unstoppable, it seems, until the wind dies.

Continue reading "Tuesday's Fire" »

Posted by Carolyn Dufurrena at 3:22 PM | Permalink

It's nearly as hot here as it is at home, but we have found the pubs and the seashore, if not the salmon. There are very many cattle here, but almost all dairy animals in rock-walled pastures. Our first morning as we waited for the ferry across the Shannon estuary at Killimer, the local herd came by and stopped to snack on the Texaco station pansies. If I can discover how to download images from my camera I'll post some photos soon.

Posted by Carolyn Dufurrena at 6:58 AM | Permalink