The photographer backed away from the stall and mentioned the conversation to his colleagues who agreeably left Mr. Garcia and his horse alone. The TV reporters arrived with their cameramen and talked to the young people involved in the search efforts under Mike Hartley’s supervision.
Cutter lay with his head in Esteban’s lap for a few more minutes before he decided he was hungry and stood up to eat. Esteban scratched his withers on his way out of the stall and went looking for the photographer he’d spoken to. “I’m available now. My horse is having his dinner at the moment. What can I tell you?”
The print and TV reporters stood around Esteban Garcia and Mike Hartley outside the barn for better lighting and asked their questions. Mike explained he had trained the horse for Mr. Garcia years before and attended cutting competitions across the country with Cutter. They both had a loving relationship with the horse and were appalled when someone stole him. Mr. Garcia explained how he found out about the situation only after John and Rhonda Powell made their escape. He was in Spain because of his mother-in-law’s illness. Mike brought the reporters up to date with the details of the search for Cutter and their successful conclusion late that afternoon. He said their veterinarian was due shortly to check the horse over for any health issues, but he appeared to be in good shape. Mr. Garcia went into Cutter’s stall and haltered him and walked him out so the reporters could take a look at him and any photographs they wanted, then put him back to finish his dinner. Satisfied, the reporters all left the property and dinner on the patio began.
That evening, the families and friends all celebrated! Everyone, including Esteban Garcia, was in high spirits. The kids who rode in the search party enjoyed the water fight in the barn. It washed off some of the mud and desert dust and cooled them down. Brody and Maryann took part because it was fun. They all sat around the patio in damp jeans and tee-shirts, but it felt good.
The festivities were short-lived because those who’d spent their day searching the desert for Cutter were tired. Esteban ate his meal and nearly fell asleep over it. He’d not had enough sleep since he left Spain with Stevie. Mike and Ginny suggested he stay the night again and Ginny walked him to her guest room. Stevie and Brody talked over dinner and decided Stevie would get the top bunk tonight, but they wanted to play a few games first. When the other families left for home, John and Rhonda left for the Hacienda Rancho. Carolyn Howard decided to stay one more night with Rose Wilcox. She and Becky could take Prince Ali home the next morning after everyone had a good night’s sleep. The group slowly left until Mike and Ginny were the only ones left on the patio.
Mike looked at his wife and told her, “I’m tired myself. I wasn’t out riding in that heat or that gully washer today, but I was on the radio constantly with those who were. I can’t believe how great the young people reacted to this and how they pitched in to help. Even Susie, your problem child, was out there busting her chops to find a horse she’d never seen before. Actually, out of that group, Brody is the only one who ever had. Maryann and her drone idea was a streak of genius! And Brody took it and ran with the idea. I’m so proud of those kids! If you don’t mind, I think I will talk to Esteban tomorrow about Desert Rose. It’s time for Brody to have his very own horse. What do you think?”
“I think it was time for him to have his very own horse a long time ago,” Ginny said. “It wouldn’t take us much time to get Rosie ready for competition. Then Brody can join his friends.”
“You think he wants to do that?” Mike asked.
“You should have seen him at the Youth National Championship show. He was hanging around the rail watching everyone else compete and busting his fanny to help them get ready. I think he wanted to join them but didn’t want to say anything. He’s as good a rider as any of the kids Chris and I took to that show. With a horse like Rosie, he’ll be in the winner’s circle with them instead of just watching them from the sidelines. I’d love to see that happen for him.”
CHAPTER | THIRTY-THREE
Several hours later, Ginny got up from bed and went to the kitchen for a glass of water. She noticed Brody’s bedroom door was open as she passed it and she expected to meet him in the kitchen fixing himself something to eat. Boys his age just couldn’t be filled up. They were always hungry. When she turned the kitchen light on, she was surprised Brody wasn’t digging around in the refrigerator. He wasn’t in the kitchen at all. She got her glass of water and checked the living room and the den and didn’t see him. She poked her head out the back door and saw the light on in the barn.
Ginny went back to her bedroom and pulled on her bathrobe and slippers. She walked down to the barn quietly so she did not disturb other horses. When she stepped in the barn, Clyde was laying on the mats in front of Rosie’s stall and wagged his tail at her, banging the mat with it in the process. That alerted Brody. “What is it boy?” he asked Clyde stepping out of Rosie’s stall.
“Just me,” Ginny said, “I was wondering who was in the barn at 1:00 in the morning.”
“I didn’t mean to wake anyone. I just wanted to spend some time with Rosie before she goes home tomorrow. I heard John and Rhonda telling Mr. Garcia they’ll come back and bring their trailer to haul the horses home.”
Ginny didn’t want to give away her conversation with Mike. “John and Rhonda won’t be here until late morning or early afternoon. You have plenty of time with Rosie. Why don’t you get some sleep? I’d bet you are pretty tired right now.”
“Okay, I’ll be back inside in a minute. I’ll shut off the lights,” Brody told her. His heart sank. He expected Mr. Garcia to take his horses back to his ranch, but he’d hoped they would be there another day or two. He just confirmed his Rosie would be gone sometime in the morning. He was heartbroken all over again. He didn’t want to say anything to anyone about it. He wandered back to bed and lay on his bed trying to come up with ways to keep Rosie. He only had a few dollars in his pocket, a piggy bank more full of copper pennies than silver, and his personal savings account had $606.00 in it. He’d been saving for a car when he was old enough to drive. In his mind, black and white images began to filter into his consciousness. His first images were Rosie as a newborn. She was a chestnut baby with a fine thick coat because of the temperatures at that early time of year. She had the face of an Arabian horse with a jibah, the bulge of her forehead above her eyes, large dark eyes set wide on her face, and a fine muzzle. Her neck was long and curved. Her loin was long and level, and she had legs for days. Her legs had beige hair from the knee down to the white markings. Her tiny hooves were white because the dark hair didn’t meet the coronet band at her hooves. She was refined and elegant, but she was as sassy as the devil. She was independent, even then. She went to her mother when she was hungry, but drifted off to do her own exploration of her environment when she was satisfied. She loved to explore every rock, every rail in her turn out, everything that drifted into her environment. She studied the desert ravens who landed on the rails of the turnout. She watched the sparrows who settled in the trees around it. She watched the mice who attempted to live off spilled grain tossed into feeders. She was curious about everything. And she learned who was a friend and who might be a foe very quickly.
One individual caught her attention right off. It was Brody. He came to visit her every day after school and first thing in the mornings on the weekends. He had the most wonderful scratches for her withers. He brushed her coat while it was shedding out for the summer time. He had magic fingers that knew just where she itched.
Brody saw it all. He watched her in the arena for the first time when she finally got to stretch her legs and run. He saw her crash into the rails while she figured out how far back she needed to put on her brakes. He saw when her mother rejected her for banging her head on her milk bag. She walked away dejected. He was there to comfort her. He offered her his two fingers to suck on. At first, she had milk teeth that had no bite. But as she grew, he had to teach her to suck, not bite. He taught her how to lead by haltering her
and letting her follow her mother back to their stall. They got used to each other and their schedules. She knew when he came home from school and was waiting for him, nickering for attention.
He was the one who discovered her in the turnout with the calf that got loose and called his uncle over to watch her. That’s when Uncle Mike learned she was a natural born cow horse. He watched Uncle Mike begin her training with the groundwork he always did with young horses. He saw her learn how to stop on command, how to lead, and how to turn. He watched with great interest when Uncle Mike bitted her up for the first time and began teaching her how to ground drive with the long lines. Uncle Mike taught her how to stop, how to turn left or right and how fast he wanted her to go by walking beside or behind her with the long lines through a training surcingle. He used a soft, padded baby bit on her as they worked. He watched and absorbed the lesson himself so he could teach it to another youngster someday. He was just more interested because it was Rosie getting the lesson.
Brody was standing at the rail the first time Uncle Mike got on her back. She never flinched. She moved out the way he directed her as if she’d been doing it for years. They only walked and did a bit of jogging the first time. It wasn’t until Uncle Mike was confident in her that he asked her for the lope. She was comfortable with it, and so was he. He remembered how proud he was of her as he watched Uncle Mike put her through her paces. He tried to figure out how he was going to ride her himself.
That came up a few weeks later. Mike had a habit of taking his young training horses off the property for short trail rides when they were far enough along in their training to do so. Sometimes he rode them himself and sometimes Brody or one of his assistant trainers did that in a group of two or three horses. Brody offered. Mike let him ride the first time Rosie left the arena for a ride on the trails. It was the most wonderful ride. Rosie was curious and somewhat cautious of strange things she saw on the trail, but not overly so. She was steady and careful, and she trusted Brody. He could hardly wait to ride her again. It gave him an opportunity to be with her and ride her. Afterward, he got to spend extra time with her when he groomed her.
Rosie became his “go to girl” when it came to trail riding. Uncle Mike asked him about that. “She’s so calm I don’t have to think about it. That way I can enjoy the ride without worrying about a horse going off over a piece of paper blowing across the trail in front of us.” Mike knew that was true and his client’s horse was getting the experience she needed, so he thought no more about it.
When Rosie was a little older, Mike finally tried her on a handful of his calves to see how she reacted. Chet and Skip were mounted in the arena as turn-back riders when Mike took Rosie in. She stopped in the center of the arena and just looked at the cows, watching their every move. Mike asked her to walk among the cows. She picked her target and moved the calf away from the others. That calf’s single-minded goal was to get back in the herd with his buddies. Rosie went to work. Brody watched from the rail. Rosie nearly sat down on her butt and hocks to keep her front end moving to block that calf. She was as quick as lightning, and she was effective. Mike had to hang onto the saddle horn to stay seated. She got low enough his boot heels dragged the dirt several times. She moved quicker than the cow when he took off in another direction. She held that calf longer than the required time for competition. Mike had to take her out of the arena to get her to relax and leave it go.
Rosie was a sweaty mess, but the activity exhilarated her. She loved it! She wanted to do it again and jigged all the way to the barn. Uncle Mike smiled broadly as he dismounted and put her in the cross ties. “I think we have another Cutter on our hands. I need to teach her when to stop though. This mare will work the pounds off those calves if I let her.”
Brody laughed. “Guess we’d better feed her up too. She really works it out there! I’ve never seen another horse so much like Cutter. She could be your next champion.”
Within a few weeks, she entered the arena with the cows calmly and walked through the herd, made her selection and kept that calf away from his buddies for the right amount of time and relaxed when Uncle Mike picked the reins back up and walked her away.
Mike’s only problem with Rosie was her size and her looks. Cutter was a 1,200-pound animal people usually saw in the cutting arena. Rosie was a delicate 900-pound horse that looked more like an Arabian than a Quarter Horse. She was pretty and her tail flagged when she was getting down on her cow. She didn’t look the part at all. She was all cowgirl in behavior but looked more like a princess. He wasn’t quite sure what to do with her.
When Uncle Mike was busy with another horse, Brody started working Rosie in the reining patterns. He didn’t put her in the sliding stop but worked the riding in circles at different speeds. He added the change of direction with flying lead changes in the middle of the arena to work in the opposite direction. Her first few times were clumsy at the transitions in speed and direction changes, but he kept at it with her until her circles were perfectly round and her change of direction was effortless.
Brody used the tractor to groom one of the secondary arenas one morning and asked Uncle Mike to watch. With no hoofprints in the arena, the patterns would be more clear to Uncle Mike. Brody rode Rosie in and put her through the reining pattern used at the big shows except for the sliding stops. He had Uncle Mike look at the hoofprints so he could see clearly how round her circles were and how smooth her transitions were even on the ground.
“I think Esteban will be very pleased. This little mare is such a good cutting horse, and I think she’s going to make a great reining horse as well. Let’s get her fitted with protective sport boots and teach her how to slide!”
Brody could have popped the buttons off his shirt right then but kept his feelings to himself. He’d been very careful not to show any more affection for Rosie than he did to the other horses he got to work with under Uncle Mike’s tutelage. He reserved that for times in the barn when he was alone with Rosie. She still squealed her baby squeals on occasion with him. When she was nervous or upset, he let her suck on his fingers for a few minutes to calm down. He loved her to distraction, and she loved and trusted him. That was why he was so devastated when he came home from school and found her gone. He was not prepared for that and didn’t have time to say goodbye to her. He sucked it up and pretended it did not affect him. The only time he didn’t was late at night in the quiet of his bedroom, and he was careful about that too.
Tomorrow was going to be another long day. He tried to shut down his mind as the memories kept coming. He didn’t drift into sleep until the rosy glow of morning began creeping over the desert from the east.
CHAPTER | THIRTY-FOUR
Stevie woke up to the smell of freshly brewed coffee and blueberry pancakes. He scuttled off the top bunk and headed for the kitchen. He usually had a cup of coffee with his parents so he asked Ginny if he could have one. He glanced over and noticed his dad was already sitting at the kitchen table having a cup of his own. Ginny nodded as she flipped two more pancakes on the grill and removed two others to the oven to keep warm. “Did you sleep well Stevie?” she asked him.
Stevie yawned and stretched his arms wide, “Yes, Mrs. Hartley. I did. I think I’ve about caught up now.”
“Is Brody up yet?” she asked him.
“Brody wasn’t in the bedroom when I got up. I assumed he was out here having breakfast with you,” Stevie said.
Ginny smiled to herself and nodded. “He’s probably out in the barn again then.”
“Does he go to work with Mike this early?” Stevie asked her.
“Not usually,” Ginny said. “He’s probably down in the barn with Rosie. I found him down there at 1:00 this morning.”
“Is there something wrong with my horse?” Esteban asked concerned.
“No, she’s doing fine. She needs to gain back a few pounds, but Doc Martin said she’d be right as rain in a week.”
“Is there something I should know then?” Esteban asked her.
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br /> “Mike should be back up here for breakfast in a few minutes. We can talk about it then. How many pancakes would you like? How many would you like, Stevie?”
“I’d like three of them to start, Mrs. Hartley. They smell wonderful,” Stevie said as he took another sip of his coffee and stared across the table at his father with a question mark on his face.
Mike walked in the back door and pulled his work boots off. He walked into the kitchen in stocking feet. “That smells wonderful. Can a cowboy get a plate of those?” he said to his wife.
“Sure, when you get your hands washed up,” she told him laughing. “I’m going to fix some for Esteban. Yours are next.”
“Okay, Mike’s here, so what’s the deal with Rosie and Brody?” Esteban asked again.
Mike poured himself a cup of coffee and walked to the kitchen table. “It’s something we didn’t know anything about until we picked the horses up at your ranch a few days ago. Rosie about knocked me on my butt and pulled the lead rope out of my hand to get to Brody when she first saw him. We were shocked. She sounded like a baby horse. She went a little crazy. I’ve never seen anything like it before. Brody couldn’t keep his hands off her either.”
“It seems they had a very close relationship we knew nothing about,” Ginny explained. “We had no idea how Brody feels about Rosie, or how Rosie feels about Brody either for that matter until she came back here. It was a surprise to us. We would have talked to you about Rosie before you took her home if we had known.”
Esteban sat thinking. “This is something I would like to see for myself. We’ll talk about it again later.” He picked up his fork and dived into Ginny’s blueberry pancakes, savoring every bite. Stevie and Mike dove into theirs as well, soaking up all the syrup with the last bite of pancake. Ginny finished up the batch and had time to enjoy a couple of them herself after she put a few in foil in the warming oven for Brody if he ever got back to the house.
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