Anderson: Saddling up for a simple pleasure

Thursday morning Bob McCutcheon was bent over the rear hoof of bay gelding, replacing a shoe that had gone loose. It's nothing he hadn't done a thousand times before. But when you're 83 and have ridden horses since you could walk, and have been bucked off a few, the bending comes a little harder and a little more slowly. Still, the shoeing hammer swung rhythmically, and soon the gelding was squarely upright, shod once more.

A beautiful day, cooler than a few others this week, Thursday seemed a good time to throw a leg over a horse, and I arrived at Bob's place bearing my saddle. He'd be around the barn, I knew, and needing to work one horse or another, gelding or mare. I'd ride with him.

Bob and I go back 20 years or so, to the day I brought him a black horse I had recently purchased out of Texas. This was a cutting horse, and Bob, a good hand with both cutting horses and reining horses, had cattle on his place. I arrived on a hot summer day and his barn smelled of used-up blankets. If an ATM had been in a stall, upchucking money, I couldn't have been happier.

You hit it off with people or you don't, and Bob was hard not to like. He limped some, because he had been put together wrong some years earlier after a particularly bad wreck coming off the hills on his place near River Falls, Wis. He had been atop a 3-year-old mare that spooked, and for a while, he stayed deep enough in the saddle to remain upright. But when the horse bucked her way downhill at a gallop, Bob was cartwheeled in a flurry of arms and legs.

"I was laid up a year," he said.

Bob has only three horses in his barn this summer, a far cry from the old days. Time was when he returned north in spring from Texas with a trailer full of stock. His dad had been a horse trader out of Canada who moved to the Twin Cities when Bob and his brother, Bill, the former St. Paul police chief, were just boys. So Bob has long known something about judging horse flesh, and has known also when to raise 'em and when to fold 'em at horse auctions, where rubes often throw good money after bad, while sellers wink.

Thursday morning, Bob and I saddled two horses and rode out of his barn beneath a bright sun. They say the best thing for the inside of a man is the backside of a horse, and the day grew only better. The gelding I rode had a good handle on him, characteristic of Bob's horses, and stepped into his leads easily. Soon I asked him to pick up a lope, and together the gelding and I relaxed into a rush of cool morning air.

If cowboys are a breed apart, Bob is that. His dad taught him how to trade horses. But training them, he picked that up on his own. As a kid, he showed horses, and won, and when he took up training full-time, his lick was young horses bought cheap, and teaching them how to stop, turn around, and move out quietly. Good vaqueros have done this for centuries, and Bob did, too.

For a long while after I met Bob, I went through some horses, trying to find one that would take me to a pay window consistently. Hauling on Fridays to weekend cuttings in Wisconsin, Iowa, Illinois and the Dakotas, and in summers to Montana, I'd sometimes convoy with Bob, who piloted his own rig and show string. At cuttings he was good help, and over dinner, a lot of laughs. He could recall easily cuttings that ended in fist fights, the ups and downs of the ever-fluid horse economy, and the wildcatters turned horsemen turned inmates serving three-to-five at the suggestion of humorless bankers and various federal authorities.

"The prettiest horse in the world is one that drinks water in the shade of a pumping oil well," Bob said Thursday, a reference commonly made in Texas about the benefit of significant income to offset horse expenses.

Maybe so. But it's true also that no horseman with a 2-year-old in the barn ever committed suicide. Young -- and even old -- horses can instill that much hope in people, and riders mainline these enthusiasms unbridled, believing willfully that each mount will be better than the last, and good enough, at day's end, to win a check.

Late Thursday morning, Bob's cow dog, whom he expansively calls Dog, penned a small herd of heifers next to the outdoor arena where we rode.

The cattle jostled into the smaller space, and my horse shifted beneath his saddle, pitching his ears warily toward the indifferent bovines.

I might have ridden better horses than the one I was astride just then. But inside, I wasn't so sure. I never felt better.

Dennis Anderson danderson@startribune.com