8/ NOVEMBER 2022 THE RIDER My Horse, Flash - A Day With My Grandfather


By Ellen Schoeman My grandparents lived in


the time when the quality of a man’s horsemanship was how he, often enough, caught a lady’s at- tention. In 1959, the Alberta coun-


try bar was packed. The ladies flirting and dancing. One of which, maybe getting some fresh air, pretending to inhale a ciga- rette, or laughing outside with one of her sisters, was my grand- mother. Cowboys rode in, tying their horses to rails where they’d dutifully wait for them to return. Seeing a beautiful woman watch- ing, talented riders galloped in, their horses dropping their back- ends to slide along the ground for reining sliding stops. One of those cowboys was


my grandfather. “He thought he was real


cool,” my grandmother had told me.


“You must have thought he


was real cool too since you mar- ried him,” I had said to her. I didn’t have the closeness


with my grandfather like I had with my grandmother. I would sit at the kitchen


table and talk about books with my grandmother while my grandfather fed the horses, fed, calved, and took the beef cows to market, worked the land, fixed the machinery, and still somehow managed to work fulltime as a mechanic. My grandfather was a cow-


boy. He won belt buckles and tro-


phies. And yet, I’d only ever seen him ride a horse once in my life. I was spending the weekend at my grandparents’ farm and the cows had gotten out. I was told to go inside while my grandfather saddled up his old, black Morgan stallion and rode off into the sun- set to round up the cows. The memory is clear in my


mind. The deep colours of the sky. The long, forever-wavy mane of the horse. My grandfa- ther’s back to me. This memory is so clear in


contrast to vague family dinners where my grandfather quietly sat at the other end of the table, lis- tening rather than talking. So, when my mother asked


me to drive my grandfather to chemotherapy one day, I was nervous. I gripped the steering wheel, pulling small talk out of us like broken teeth. Until I started asking him about his life. About his days as a cowboy. About belt buckles. The oil stands. My great grandfather. About his horse Flash. “I worked on a big cattle


operation. You still needed your horse in those days, in that kind of back country. Each ranch hand picked their horse from a herd of two-year-olds. We’d break them. Farm with them. They’d be our partners. I picked a deep red bay colt. There was Arabian in him. And anyone who knows anything about horses, knows Arabians have attitude. I named him Flash. I wasn’t sure I made the right choice, until he hurt himself.


Nearly severed his hoof from his leg in a bit of barbed wire fence. I cauterized it. Spent weeks soak- ing the foot in an Epson salt mix- ture of mine until that fast colt healed completely. We bonded through that time. Any doubts about the horse after that were gone. He trusted me. But that didn’t mean he was easy to break. As an Arabian, he held his head high and when he got excited, he


could whip it up so fast he’d nearly smack you in the face and take you out of the saddle. So, I always rode him with a tie-down. Another ranch hand tried to ride him once without permission. Flash hit him so hard with his head, nearly broke the man’s nose. Needless to say, no one tried to ride my horse again. I was happy for it. No one had any business riding my horse.


“I managed the cattle. You


couldn’t take a truck in that kind of back country, so you had to ride, you had to go horseback. I put plywood on the sides of my truck and would lower the tail- gate and, saddled up, Flash would jump up into the back of the truck like an old farm dog. We’d drive into the fields, and I’d drop the tailgate, signal for Flash to jump down, and we’d ride out to check the cattle, the fences, make sure everything was in order.


“I remember a time when


the cows had to cross the river. It was too strong for the calves, and they started getting swept away. I couldn’t let that happen. So, I sent Flash in. He was a good swimmer, and I roped the calves and hauled them onto the saddle. Problem was, the current was too strong. And there were rocks and boulders. Sharp and deadly. We were hitting them. My legs were getting cut and Flash was getting butchered. We hauled calf after calf to shore and every time I sent Flash back into that water, he did- n’t hesitate. Not once. He rushed right in after those calves until we got every one of them out of the river. By the end, Flash was so bloody, but that damn horse didn’t stop, wouldn’t stop, until every cow, every calf was safely across. I fixed us up when we made camp, but poor Flash. His poor legs. “Once, a transport truck


flipped over on the highway. Transporting cows. Well, now all


these cows were wandering all over the highway. So Flash and I went and rounded up the cows and that horse circled those cows until help arrived. It took hours. By the time they arrived Flash was a white foam mess of sweat. But he refused to stop. Refused to tire. He didn’t lose one cow. We made the paper for that one.” There’s an old photograph


he showed me of my great grand- father. A massive fish swung over his back, its tail dragging along the ground. Rugged and covered in fish, there’s a James Dean, a Steve McQueen, a Gladiator ef- fect to the black and white pho- tograph. When I close my eyes and


think of the photograph, I think about how there just isn’t fish like that nowadays. Fish drag- ging. Larger than a six-foot man. Broad. Muscled from working the farm. There might be a few monsters left here, but not many. Not like that fish. They’re a sa- cred thing now. A blessed thing now. Something you won’t find in your backyard stream or the river separating land from land. A memory. Like my great grandfa- ther. Like the photograph. Black and white. Taken with time. Nearly forgotten. Like the world my grandfa-


ther had lived in. Like the old back country. Like his horse. Flash.


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