The story of Nitro: how one South Dakotan colt ended up in my blossoming herd.
I can start the story where it starts, which would mean around 25 years ago with a myopically obsessed horse girl, or it could start about a year ago.
For brevity’s sake, we’ll go with the latter.
It has been nearly a year since I bought my 15.3 hand high Quarter Horse gelding Tracker (aka OSR Hickory Sam if you ask the American Quarter Horse Association). Boy do I LOVE that horse who I affectionately call Tall Boy.
Tracker is a towering guy as solid as they come. His bones are thick and heavy like cement– it would take a LOT to get an injury on him. His mind is just as solid: he walks out alone for miles and miles into the wilderness, looking for elk to follow and new trails to be discovered.
Tracker is so solid that even IF something ‘spooks’ him, he just plants his feet and watches whatever it is that scares him. This stands in great contrast to most horses, whose genetically adapted (and perfectly reasonable) response to the fear stimulus is to RUN LIKE HELL. You know about the “fight or flight” response? Yeah, horses are 99% leaning towards the flight end of things.
Tracker is even so solid that I can put strangers on his back with great confidence that he won’t run away, buck, or any sort of bad business.
He is as solid as they come.
BUT.
In my deepest of souls I have a never-quenched need for speed.
And Tall Boy Tracker is just too gangly, methodical and massive to have the rapid twitch that barrel racing horses do.
I’ve gotten Tracker into a full gallop in a 300′ long arena. Yeah he definitely can get going fast, but slowing down is a lumbering and frankly terrifying process on him. It feels like trying to slow down off a tractor you somehow got up to 120mph but now the freeways exit is coming up on you and you need to turn. Very clunky; very much an experience of closing one’s eyes, crossing one’s fingers, and hoping like hell one survives.
So ANYWAYS, I started putting it out there that I was looking for a horse that was bred for speed.
My friend put me in contact with a farrier who had just had a cute little buttermilk buckskin filly up in Antonito, CO. I got real excited about her and thought, jeez, maybe I can raise a little filly or colt up, just like I’ve always wanted!
I asked for pictures of her sire (aka horse dad) and was not very impressed. On the same day that I received the disappointing photo of the filly’s sire, a different friend called me and said, “Hey– I know its really last minute but there’s an auction in Texas tomorrow. I’ve got a friend who is driving down there from Albuquerque and she’ll be bringing her trailer if you ended up getting something, she could bring it back for you.”
Inspired and excited, I started shuffling through the photos of the horses set to… go to auction…. the very next day.
I picked a top 3:
1) leggy leggy sorrel colt bred clearly for speed
2) gorgeous jet-black buffed out colt bred to be good at anything and everything
3) dun colt with some speed on his papers
So Thursday rolls around and I get 2 strangers’ phone numbers from my friend. One of those strangers will bid on the horses for me, and the other stranger has the trailer– she’ll check out the horses I ask her to, but she’s really busy so it won’t be very thorough.
She already looked at my #1 pick and says in her raspy, long-term smoker voice, “you don’t want that colt, his legs is all crooked”.
Colt 2? Yeah, I have expensive taste: he’ll be going for over $5,000 — maybe even somewhere around $8k.
Colt 3? “He is curvy, not bad looking. “
So that was about as much information as I was working with when I told the stranger to put a bid on him for me. They were doing the auction on a live feed on Facebook and I gave her verbal on the top dollar I’d be willing to pay.
Did I mention Thursday was a work day and I had patients booked in every 20- minute slot?
I came out of one appointment to a text on my phone from the stranger with the trailer: “you got you a nice colt“
Did I really just do that?!
Oh, shit!
Well yes, yes I did.
And THAT, ladies and gentlemen is the story of how Nitro, aka Never Runnin Scared, came to be part of the herd.
Backcountry Cowgirl 