| Without a cowboy waving wildly from atop a bucking bronco, Wyoming wouldn't have a license tag motif and the late curly Fletcher's song " The Strawberry Roan" wouldn't tug the way it does at the heartstrings of wannabe cowboys.
" Down in the hoss corral, standin' alone, Was an old red caballo, a strawberry roan. . .yew-necked and old, with a long lower jaw, I kin see with one eye he's a regular outlaw."
Yessiree, pard, that horse yonder is a bronco, and broncs are for bustin' in the time-honored way that pits the bronco buster's wits, muscle and will against it until one or the other of them calls it quits.
But not all horse handlers are traditionalists. Instead of bustin' the bronc (and maybe the pelvis in the bargain), some prefer just to bend it a little.
Bronco-bender Frank R. Bell trains horses that way, and as I watched him work with a 3-year-old mare at the Rocky Mountain Training Center last week, the results I saw were a lot easier on the horse than on tradition.
The mare had been trailer trained and a few days earlier Bell had ridden her for the first time, but to a less-than-lover of horses like me she didn't look like anybody's sweetheart yet.
Saddled but without halter or bridle, she stood alert and aloof as Frank sidled up and stroked her nose. She didn't demur, and he stroked her muzzle, then her eyes, and, as he leaned lightly against her neck, he tousled her ears. " This is play," he said, " but with a purpose. She likes having her ears stroked, so if I do that regularly she'll be less likely to fidget when I slip the halter over them."
Then the halter was slipped over her ears without a fidget, and as Frank buckled it beneath her jaw he scratched her there, crooning softly as he did.
" She can't scratch in the hollow of her jaw, so she's happy to have me do it," he explained. And so it seemed.
Dangling the halter rope, he gently urged her head up, then down, then sideways. " I use a little pressure, and the instant she cooperates, I ease it off."
After leading her a couple of times around the corral he dropped the rope and she followed him, starting and stopping when he did. " We're cooperating," he said, and bending her neck with his arm, began backing her, carefully noting which of her feet she crossed as she did.
" It's like ballroom dancing," I said as they waltzed to and fro.
" Exactly," said Frank. " We're learning to sense our partner's movements as they happen." Around and around they danced, and when they stopped he hugged her neck, bent her head around to the right and showed her a stirrup. She nibbled at it. Then, still crooning, he swung onto her back, plucked up the halter rope, holding it as if it were made of knitting yarn, and when he wiggled it they moved away in unison, sensing each other's movements.
If Little Joe the Wrangler had been sitting the rail beside me at that moment he would have fainted, landed on his Stetson, and when I offered smelling salts, would have growled: " Nah. That stuff's for sissies."
Instead, I asked Frank how long he's been training horses and if he thought up this easy-going business all by himself. " Seven years and no," he said. " I started learning it from Tom Dorrance, who spent 60 years at it. Then I learned a bunch more from Ray Hunt, Buck Brannaman, and the Lakota Sioux. Now I'm on my own, still learning, trying to perfect it."
He grinned when I asked him how the bronco busters and spur manufacturers view this gentle revolution.
" We've been called touchy-feely and worse," he said. " Dennis Reis, a California trainer, claims it works best if you get a macho-ectomy first."
While we talked the mare nuzzled. Frank nuzzled back and stuck his fingers in her mouth.
" If she's used to my fingers, she's less touchy about accepting the bit," he said. Then he stuck a finger in her nose. " She likes being tickled where she can't tickle herself."
Perhaps, I thought, it's best that Little Joe the Wrangler went to his reward long ago, for if he were to ask me how Frank broke that mare, what could I say except: " He stuck his finger in her nose. Swear to God, Joe. I saw it with my own eyes."
Jack Kisling's observations on life run every Tuesday, Thursday and Sunday
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