Reality in Fiction - Horses

As I mentioned in a blog post awhile back, readers are often curious about how much from my life shows up in my novels. Probably the book I most enjoyed writing is Big Horn Storm. I grew up in rural Wyoming and life in those early years revolved around horses. We rodeoed, rode nearly every night in the summer, and my dad’s idea of a family vacation was a pack trip into the wilderness. I’m sure I didn’t appreciate it at the time, but looking back, we had some great adventures. Fast forward to 2012 when I published Big Horn Storm. There are a number of crazy horseback escape scenes that I couldn’t have written without those childhood experiences and the time spent in the Big Horn Mountains. One in particular involved helping neighbors move cattle to their grazing lease. They were farmers, not ranchers, so my dad and I were nearly the only experienced horseback riders in the group. We were nearing the end of a long trek, but had to push the herd up one last steep dirt road in order to leave them at the watering hole. Halfway up the slope the tired cows decided it would be easier to veer off the road and slide down the loose-soil slope back to the bottom than to press on. My dad was on a green-broke colt who was also getting tired so he told me to go after the errant cattle. I thought he was crazy, but edged my strong palomino gelding to the edge and gave him a gentle tap to gauge his response. Being the dedicated cow horse he was, he leapt. I beat the cows to the bottom, rounded them up, and pushed them back to the road, but still have a few flashbacks. I’m sure it wasn’t as terrifying as I remember, but if you’re curious as to how my youthful mind interpreted the short event, check out chapter nine of Big Horn Storm.