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shooter, and a kindred lover of the land.
    At 8:05 a.m., I picked up the phone.
    “Hey, how are you Al? Haven’t heard from you in quite a stretch. What’s going on?” His upbeat voice held a smile. We caught up on our comings and goings.
    I veered into business. “Les, I’ve got an idea that involves the BLM . You’ve heard me think out of the box before, but I’m so far out of the box I can hardly see it.”
    “Nothing like starting out the day with a little excitement, man. Lay it on me.”
    I felt like I was taking a running start and leaping over the Grand Canyon. “I’m thinking about starting a wild horse sanctuary,” I said in a surreal airborne moment.
    Silence, then what sounded like a coffee mug clunking against wood. “You’re right, that’s one I never heard before,” Les said. “But it’s a hell of an issue for us.”
    Thump. I had hit dirt. Whether it was pay dirt or burial dirt, I had no clue.
    Les listened to my broad-brush narrative of how a privately operated, federally subsidized wild horse sanctuary could benefit government coffers, overgrazed land, and a couple thousand unadoptable mustangs, a narrative I would soon be able to recite in my sleep.
    “So have I lost it or not?” I asked.
    “Well, I’m not ready to call it harebrained, but it definitely is unconventional. I do have one question for you, though,” Les said. “When those horses charge off to the next county, how are you going to get them turned back and bring ’em home?”
    I had been thinking about this prickly issue since the sun roused me out of a sound sleep. Wild horses balk at following directions from a two-legged alien creature wearing a funny hat. You can train a mustang individually, but it would take years to put two thousand through private lessons. I didn’t care what the government might pay, no way was I going to spend my days chasing horses around a ranch.
    I said, “I’m not a hundred percent certain, but I may have a solution. It’s based on a training program we used on Lazy B to gentle the wild cattle.”
    “ Gentle wild cattle?” said Les. “Did I hear that right?”
    Gentling the cattle had been one of the improvements I made on the ranch after my dad became less active in managing it. Unlike most ranchers, he had preferred to ranch on foot, so he kept horse riding to a minimum. During spring and fall roundups, the cowboys would drive a herd of cattle into the corral and he would have them off their horses faster than lightning hits the ground. They’d run their legs off opening and closing gates and getting the cattle settled. Of course the cowboys bitched. They wanted to be in the corrals on horseback. But I walked in different boots than my dad. I’d been raised around cowboys like Jim Brister, who practically lived on a horse, and like Jim, I loved working horseback. When I took over the ranch, roundups had more running than a tri-state track meet. Because our cattle weren’t accustomed to seeing a man mounted on a horse, they had become increasingly ornery and wild, and they spooked when you rode up to them in the pasture. With pastures as big as eighty square miles, the herd had a fine time playing hide-and-seek with us.
    My real wake-up call came one spring during roundup. The cowboys and I spent two hard days gathering heifers out of the Cottonwood pasture, where they had spent the past year maturing to adulthood. We finally got them in the corrals at headquarters, a temporary holding spot. The next day I instructed a handful of cowboys to drive half the herd up into the Black Hills, where they would join a larger herd. I should have appointed one of the hands to take up the lead and set the pace, but I didn’t. The cowboys all hung out at the back of the bunch. They told me later that when the group started the two-thousand-foot climb up the rocky canyon, the heifers charged so fast that the cowboys couldn’t catch them to slow them down. Three cows ran themselves to death and