Thursday, March 20, 2008

Mustang Pickup..... the rest of the story!

Mar 9
Carla and I spent the night in Motel 6, woke up at 3:30, thinking it's 4:30 with the time change and all, wondering what happened to our wake up call. So we get a good early start to Doris 175 mi. south of Redmond.... good thing we did.
I was kinda half thinkin' the trip to Doris would be a waste, wondering just how we'd ease those stangs a foot into a panel corral and not knowing how big of a trap they were in. We get to Doris, have breakfast at "Mama's Cafe" with the Simmons, then check out our situation.
We figure out the best way to set up the panels, make a wing with a bunch of old cedar posts that we set in snow drifts, and drape a bunch of borrowed tarps over the posts extending out from the panels to the wire fence and along the fence on both sides of the hay trap. We also tied twine along each side of the fence to maybe discourage the mustangs from trying the wire or at least enable them to see it better. Together we all asked that the Lord would see this done and we'd be on the road.
We get around the horses with someone on the outside of the wire fence on one side. We just kinda slowly walk them up toward the panel end, stopping every few steps to let them think about it all. The further we ask them to move, the more worried they get. They start wanting to work from side to side and are looking out over the not so sturdy fences. At one point one of them leaned into the wire fence, thought seriously about going thru it and almost caught a leg on the bottom wire, but the hard snow kept the wire in place. We then had to ease up and let the horses run back behind us.
The mustangs were content to be on the one end of the trap, they hadn't even ventured up to the hay during the night. These two horses weren't very high headed or wild eyed. They had been in the BLM Facilities for quite awhile, so we could get fairly close to them, just couldn't ask them to do anything without them looking for a way out.
I was thinking to myself...." probably would be a lot easier if I had a saddle horse and we just let them out where there weren't any fences and just rope 'em. Could have them halter broke and in the trailer quicker." But what we did was to be smarter than the hairy hoofed creatures and not go against what they wanted. They liked the one particular end and corner, so we brought some hay and buckets of water down there, which they went right for. We packed all the panels down to where they were and tied the panels up on the fence corner and all along it, raising them up to about 7 ft. so we didin't have to worry about the horses trying them. We slowly built a pen around our broncs, then gradually made is smaller. We backed our trailer down to them ( since the Simmons trailer no longer had a door! ) and eventually made a little alleyway.
I used my wild rag as a flag, and everytime their heads were toward the trailer back off the pressure. The gelding seriously thought about stepping in a few times, but is was a perty high first step. These two needed a little more encouragement, so Shelley found a traveling blanket behind the seat of the pickup. It was a little louder, and just the ticket!
The horses jumped in the trailer, we shut the door, cleaned up our mess, stacked the panels and hit the road. We met the Simmons in Redmond, unloaded Shelley's braumby, thanked them for breakfast at "Mama's" and headed north to Hooper.
We unloaded my makeover filly.... "Tina Turner" at 11:30 PM

A special thanks goes out to Roy and Joanne Sharp for the loan of the nice trailer!

2 comments:

Andrea -Mustang Saga said...

Wow, what nightmare! I'm glad it turned out so well though.

I'm real curious to find out why you named her Tina Turner. And I can't wait to see how her training's going!

Tracey said...

Whew! What a relief.

Has your girl got Tina Turner hair? Or legs?