A Horse Called Sunshine
“This
colt is for you,” my father said, his brown eyes shining.
He stood and looked at me, waiting for my reaction.
“Thank you! Oh, thank you!” I said. I gave my father a big hug.
Sunshine was five minutes old when I learned he would be mine. I named him then and there.
To me, Sunshine was the prettiest colt on the ranch. His mother was a sweet-natured strawberry roan. His father was a feisty palomino. Sunshine’s coat was a mixture of both parents: it glowed with a soft, honey-colored light.
“You do understand this colt’s father is hard to manage,” my father reminded me.
“We’ll have to wait and see if your Sunshine turns out sweet like his mother or mean like the palomino.”
We had a lot of horses on our ranch. Some were for the family to ride; others were bred for racing. Still others wound up being sold to the rodeo as bucking mounts. My father and the ranch wrangler, Bill, tried to breed out the bronco strain, but there were always a few colts that grew up refusing to be saddle-broken.
Until the year I turned nine I’d shared riding horses with my two older sisters. With the arrival of Sunshine I had my very own horse.
I worked with Sunshine every day after school. When summer came I spent long stretches of time with him. I trained him to a halter, and we took walks together by the river. I told him again and again that he was a beauty.
At the age of thirteen months Sunshine started to act strangely. I wondered if he might have his father’s “wild hair.”
The expression “wild hair” was one Bill taught me. “Means a horse with a crazy streak,” Bill said. “It describes an animal that cannot be trusted.”
It came to the point where Sunshine was breaking fences and running loose in the pig sheds. Whenever he misbehaved, I begged my father to give him another chance.
“Looks to me like that colt takes after his father,” my father said, staring at me hard.
But I convinced him to let me keep working with Sunshine. I went to Bill for advice.
“Handle him a lot,” Bill said. “Touching tends to gentle an animal. Rub him down after a workout. Get him used to wearing a blanket, and don’t rush him.”
I did as Bill advised, but Sunshine got worse. He nipped the other horses and even tried to take a bite out of me once when I turned my back on him.
One day, when I was close to tears with frustration, I went to Bill. “Sunshine gets meaner every day,” I said.
Bill looked at me for a moment before speaking. I knew that he wanted to make sure of his words. “Look, kid, I know you hate to hear this, but Sunshine is a born bucking horse.”
Not ready to accept this, I made a plan. I got up early one morning, even before Bill, and haltered Sunshine. I put a blanket and saddle on his back and climbed up. I would break him once and for all.
Sunshine tossed his head, arched his back, and crow-hopped so high I flew off the third time he reached for the sky. I landed with a painful thud.
Bill was standing there before I had a chance to get up and dust myself off.
“Fool thing to do,” he said, helping me up. “You might have gotten hurt bad.”
When my father heard that Sunshine had thrown me, he said, “Pretty as he is, that colt has to go. Not all horses grow up to be nice.”
Sunshine was loaded into a trailer, and off he went. Bill was able to say a few consoling words. “Broncs get treated OK, kid,” he said. “They don’t get ridden much, and they love to buck. A good one gets treated real well because it earns a lot of money for a rodeo string.”
My father bred the strawberry roan again, this time to a gentler stallion. Her second baby was a male the image of Sunshine.
“He’s
your colt to raise,” my father told me. “What’s
the name to be this time? Buttercup? Or maybe Lollipop?”
I was used to my father’s teasing. What mattered was my second chance to raise a horse of my own.
“He’s Sunshine the Second,” I said. “It was a good name the first time, and it still is.”
Sunshine Two, as I came to call him, was as gentle as Sunshine One was wild. Every training hint Bill had given me worked. The little horse responded almost instantly to the touch of a hand on his neck or the nudge of a boot heel in his ribs.
Together we entered the junior rodeo barrel-racing event. We didn’t win, but we came in second, and that was good enough for me. The best times we had were summer days riding in the valley where the ranch was, trailing along the river looking for skunk or coyote tracks.
Sunshine Two lived out his life on the place. As an old horse he spent lots of hours in the big pasture by the pond, grazing under the shade of some old cottonwood trees. He’s buried down there, and there’s a cross to mark the site.
