The County

Horse Traders and Rawhide Braiders

Hey folks, dropping a line to share a video from Jake at Dusty Vaquero and some of my prose writing about the place.

Take it easy, but take it.

—Forrest

Three riders in a cloud of dust came drifting along Whiskey Creek road like some scene from a Mexican Corrido or a cowboy preacher's parable. They stopped their packstrings at the top of the driveway and sent two emissaries down to the house. My boss, of course, knew them. These travelers clothed in homemade buckskin and lean from seasons lived off the land were doing the same thing he had done when he first came to The County decades earlier: wandering horseback through wilderness and public land, acquiring unwanted horseflesh and turning it, with miles of travel and months of work, into something useful. They had come to horse trade.

This was my first summer in The County, and I was helping build a new barn in exchange for a roof over my head and horses to ride. The horseback vagabonds fell in beside me at the drawknives as we peeled bark from pine and juniper logs, trading labor for horses.
The couple was my age and had been journeying through the Great Basin and Northeast Oregon for years, harvesting and propagating indigenous plants, and living in structures and clothing they'd made themselves. They ate biscuitroot, camas, venison, elk, wild onions, and smallmouth bass. They were fomenting rebellion against colonizer agriculture, invasive plants, and The System generally. They stank, and they were awesome. When I gave them a ride to a grocery store they came out with plastic bags full of PBR and powdered donuts, grinning like children at a carnival.

They left a couple of days later. I remained at the barn with my drawknife and my poles, watching them lead their new Paint horse up the driveway, tie him into their string and break camp. They traveled slowly as the stock grazed the bar ditch, with nowhere to be but elsewhere. They were going North, into the Grande Ronde country, a place even wilder than this ranch where wolves chased horses in winter and bears loped across open fields to wild berry patches. My boss came down to watch them leave and have a chuckle over the Paint he was thrilled to be rid of. "I was pretty sure you were gonna head out with 'em, too" he said. "Wouldn't be the first one of my guys to do it."