IX
NEUTRIA
My name is Neutria. It means Beaver, and they gave it me because I tuck my tail. Nobody but Chappo ever called me a pretty horse, but Chappo once said in my hearing that my ugly roan hide covered more beauty than all the girls of Sonora possessed; and Chappo really knew everything worth knowing.
He was not my first master. There was another, to speak of whom is pain--a tall man, with only one eye, and a long, sandy mustache, stained of the tobacco he chewed perpetually. This person owned my mother and we lived in a small pasture among the lesser hills of the San José range. What he did to sustain life was never quite plain to us, because the land he held remained uncultivated and he spent much time by himself in his dirty shack, drinking from a demijohn which he kept hidden under some sacks in a corner. Oftentimes he would come from his drinking and drive us into a corral he had constructed of ocatilla. There he would beat my mother, and chase us about and about. I was very young then and he spared me. She was terribly afraid of him, and whenever he roared at her, even though it was in the sixty-acre field, where he could be evaded, she fell to trembling and would walk falteringly to the halter he held out.
There were nights when he forgot us entirely and left us in a small wooden pen, without anything to eat or drink. Occasionally a calf was dragged up and shoved in with us, and it would bawl for a day and a night for the mother from whose side it had been torn. After a while he would brand the little creature with his own mark of the inverted pitchfork. In this manner he gathered a respectable bunch of cattle, though I know of two cows only which he ever bought.
This is not the place to tell how he broke me to the saddle. He made me obey him, but he did not break my spirit, even though my sides were bloody from his savage anger. Although Sloan branded all else he could get, on me he never put the iron.
“What for you haven’t got the Pitchfork on that li’l’ horse, Sloan?” a cowboy asked him one day at Buzzard’s Feast.
“He don’t need it, this hoss don’t. He’s so doggone ornery nobody’d steal him,” said my master.
Later I heard the other--a roaring, swaggering boy, with a kind eye and soothing hands--tell a friend that the only animal Sloan did not brand was the one which he owned legally.
Whenever the strength was in me, I fought him. He was a powerful man, with a punishing knee-grip and a poise that was almost unshakable, whatever his condition. But oppression begets cunning, and ride as he might, there were times when I could hurl him off. If a horse take thought when he starts his pitch, instead of bucking in blind, raving anger, there is a chance that he will have the victory. I mastered a trick of rocketing straight into the air and whirling about back under the rider, before my feet touched the ground. This is difficult, but imparts a really terrific shock; even Sloan could not withstand it. Of course he would beat and spur me almost to death when he was able to walk again. If that method of fighting him failed, there was another, dangerous to horse and rider alike. I would rear high, with my head thrown back, whereupon Sloan would kick his feet free of the stirrups lest he be caught under me when I toppled. Then, before he could recover, my head would shoot down between my forelegs and once more I would go to pitching. It was very efficacious, this stratagem, and the pleasure of it was much enhanced if the ground was rocky or there were cactus and mesquite into which he could be flung.
In spite of the endless cruelty to which Sloan subjected me, he taught me much. Whatever else he might be, he was a cowman; but he knew and practiced a lot that no honest cowman should know. Sometimes he would reverse the shoes on my feet that the impress on the ground might appear to be a trail leading in the opposite direction to his line of travel. He rode much at night, so that I became expert at picking my way down rock-cluttered declivities in the blackest of the dark. Once when he fled before a body of horsemen which had discovered three calves hogtied in a box cañon, I managed to distance them. Thereupon he alighted and muffled my hoofs with gunny-sacks, that he might follow a stony creek-bed without sound.