Flax The Blue Whale

We were pretty young, I think I must have been about 8, my older brother 10 or 11. We went to gather cows on our summer lease, but it was early spring and we wouldn’t have had our cattle up there on that lease by then, so I don’t remember why we were out horseback long before daylight. We could have been heading out to help a neighbor brand but I couldn't tell you now whose branding it was or why we left the barn before the sun came up. That's just how it worked. Somebody needed help, and you went to help, and they would come and help you when the time came.

Dad rode Flax that morning, like he rode Flax every morning that mattered. Flax was a slim sorrel with a wide white strip down to his nose and a nervous streak a mile wide, the kind of horse who spooked at his own shadow and would lather up when you were just holding his reins standing on the ground, but he was quick and he was smart. Dad loved him the way you love a horse who won’t let anyone else ride him and gotten you out of more trouble than he's gotten you into. Flax was the one he saddled up when the work was serious.

Our ride out for us was on the far side of the river, which far up river from the home ranch was really more of a creek, except when it wasn't. We knew a crossing. We'd used it every summer, walked our horses through water that came up maybe to the stirrups, nothing to think twice about. But it was spring, not summer, and the mountains above us were dumping snowmelt into that creek by the hour, and nobody had thought about whether the crossing we knew was still the crossing that existed.

Dad always led. That was the order of things, Dad first, then whichever of us drew the short straw for next, when we had to single file it, then the rest bringing up the rear, safely behind two people who'd already found out if the ground was going to hold. He walked Flax up to the bank in the dark, and Flax wouldn’t take the first step down into the water.

Not hesitated. Stopped. Planted all four feet like a man refusing to sign something.

Dad clucked to him. Flax took a step sideways instead, tossed his head, danced back from the water like it had said something rude to him. He tried again, a little more insistent this time, heels down, and Flax gave him a half-step forward and two steps back, which is a horse's way of saying he's heard the question and he's still voting no.

This went on for a while. Long enough that my brother and I stopped noticing the cold and started being cold in a bored, waiting sort of way, the way kids get when the adults are having a disagreement that doesn't involve them. Dad was getting louder. Flax was getting more theatrical. The bank got a good bit of hoofprint decoration from all the dancing.

Finally Dad had enough of being told no by a horse. He hauled off with those two-inch split reins, the wide leather kind he always rode with, more straps than rein — and let Flax have it across the flank, once, hard, the kind of crack that carries in cold air.

Flax did not so much cross the river as leave the continent.

He gathered himself up under Dad like a cat working out just how much launch it was going to take, and then he left the bank in one enormous jump, and for one full second I remember thinking that was the most impressive thing I had ever seen a horse do. He cleared what should have been three or four feet of shallow water and landed square in the middle of a hole the spring runoff had scoured out of the riverbed, a hole that turned out to be ten feet deep, a hole that had absolutely not been there the previous year.

Horse and rider went under. All the way under. Gone. The river just closed up over the top of them like they'd never been there at all, like Dad had ridden Flax straight down some sorrel-colored storm drain to another world.

For one horrible, silent second there was nothing but moving water where my father used to be.

Then Flax's ears broke the surface first, laid back flat and furious, followed by the rest of him coming up in a lunge like a whale deciding it had had just about enough of the ocean for one morning. Dad came up a beat later, hat gone, hanging onto the saddle horn, muddy water running back down like Niagara spilling over the bluffs. Between the two of them they floundered and swam and half-walked the rest of the way across, Flax scrambling for footing he couldn't find and finding it anyway, until they both climbed out on the far bank dripping and blowing and thoroughly disgusted with each other.

My brother and I were still sitting our horses on the near bank. We had not moved. We had not spoken. We were laughing so hard we were in real danger of following Dad into the river by accident, just from falling off sideways.

Sitting on a horse that was now essentially a full bucket of river water with legs, did not find any part of it funny. He hollered something back across at us that I won't repeat here, mostly because I don't remember the exact words, just the general shape and temperature of them.

We found another crossing. It took maybe five extra minutes, upstream a ways, wider and shallower and altogether more reasonable, we walked our horses across it dry as good bread. We laughed about it until way after daylight, while Dad sloshed along ahead of us not laughing at all.

When I think about something funny, that scene always comes to mind, even many years later. We thought Flax was part whale when he breached the surface coming up for air, and Dad's face when he made the far bank is still with me today.

Flax might have known something the rest of us didn’t. But I think he just made up his mind that the river was just like getting across one of the irrigation ditches in the hayfield we’d just crossed. Those were little jumps, he just needed a slightly bigger one.

We had crossed there in the years before several times, and none of that mattered, because sometimes little changes don’t show up in any obvious ways, they show up as a cold plunge before the sun comes up.

We rode on to the job for the day. I don't remember much about the work that day. I remember the river.