The author and his wife are full time residents of Puerto Peñasco and don’t ever plan to leave.
In the previous three issues I have tried to give a recollection of my life as a horse owner in the horse breeding, raising, selling, and racing, all with the purpose of making a fortune. In reality I should have had a Gypsy read my palm and tell me to get out of the business and I would have been better off financially and more healthy for it.
I have been beat up, stomped on, have had all kinds of foreign particles that don’t taste very well in all parts of my body. Lost money, had a whole pasture full of horses in all different sizes eating up all the profit, if there was any to start with.
I have introduced you to Old Whats’ Her Name, my last wife that I don’t dare call by name so in these articles she is referred to as OWHN. You have read about her cousin Jan and her other half Brian, and how I had to extricate them from squatting in my basement.
Brian loved to go out into the pasture and play with the assorted animals, sometimes to his disadvantage because they were all bigger than him and some didn’t want to play.
Brian owed a lot of back support and he couldn’t hold a job so they were always broke, but not so broke that they couldn’t find a way to get some beer and drive five miles to my house and get there at dinnertime. But all in all he was a lot of help around the farm or ranch whatever you would call my place.
OWHN had made a decision to by some beef cattle to raise from a couple months old until they were a year or so and sell them to our friends , have them butchered and wrapped and with the profit we would buy some more and get one free for us. They eat more hay than the horses and where were the friends when I had to go get some?
We had two bought, fed, and ready to go to the meat place with commitments from two families to buy what ever we didn’t want. Will pay us when they are cut up and wrapped.
I came home from work and there was one of them a big white steer on his back, four feet sticking up in the air in the corral DEAD. Why couldn’t he have waited a couple more days? I tried to get a neighbor to come over with a tractor to lift him up into my pickup but no dice.
I called up the local towing company and the conversation went something like this:
Spar’s Towing can I help you? Yes I need a tow trunk to come out to ——. Make and model please. White cow. What? White Cow. Do you think AAA will cover this?
I’m not falling for this, I get these kind of calls all the time. No I’m serious, I have a dead steer in my corral and I need to get him loaded in my truck and I get him disposed of or he is going to start stinking. I finally convinced her and we got the job done. AAA wouldn’t pay for it though.
I called the prospective buyers and gave them the news. One said can we get half of yours and the other said oh well. I had about a thousand dollars in that steer by now and I needed to recoup my investment. After all this is a money-making business, right?
It got to be wintertime in Montana and the snow was extra deep at our hacienda and Brian had a job, finally, at a Bobcat dealership. I called and ask him to help me get rid of some of the snow, which was about three feet deep. He brought a bobcat out and started to plow. We had to take the snow out into the pasture and make a big pile of it. By this time we were back in the moneymaking business and had two steers, one had some pretty good sized horns and he didn’t like that bobcat. Every time Brian went into the pasture he would attack it. Pawing the ground and shaking his head and trying to butt it.
We had to quit as I was afraid he would get a horn stuck in it and we would have another Hold On Don’t Let Go situation.
Brian ended up stealing some money from me and I had to barr him from our place. We went to a horse sale with two of our yearling horses and got two hundred fifty for one and four hundred for the other.
I came home loaded the truck with all the horse stuff and took it to an auction. I called several horse people we knew and got them to buy all our horses. After all it’s a money making opportunity, Right?
Thank you all for reading my stories .I got it off my chest so now I can go have two Coronas. Hasta Mañana, enjoy your stay in Puerto Peñasco where you need to Hold On and Don’t Let Go.