The Wreck

“Or the day I decided to guide rather than pack!” 

By Jamie Ross 

They never showed this in those old Western films, I thought, as I watched the tail end of my pack string erupt into chaos. 

It started with Chainsaw, the stout palomino bringing up the rear. Maybe his pack had shifted into an uncomfortable position. Maybe he had stepped on a hornet's nest stirred up by the horses ahead. Or maybe he had simply decided he'd had enough. 

Whatever the reason, he launched into a full-blown tantrum—snorting, farting, bucking, and generally behaving like a horse auditioning for a rodeo. 

From my saddle horse, I watched with surprising calm. There wasn't much I could do except call out in my most reassuring cowboy voice. 

"Easy now! Easy, boys!" 

Chainsaw settled for a moment. I allowed myself the dangerous thought that the crisis had passed. Experienced horsemen, I imagined, probably dealt with this sort of thing every Tuesday. 

Then, of course, it got worse. 

Chainsaw's bucking tugged on the lead rope to the next horse, Magic, who assumed, logically I suppose, that there must be a very good reason to panic. Pack horses, it turns out, treat panic as a team sport. Within seconds it had travelled up the line faster than horse camp gossip. The line stretched tight, then slack, then tight again like someone snapping an enormous rubber band. Every horse was reacting to the one behind him while simultaneously giving the horse ahead something new to worry about. 

Rocky bolted sideways. Barney tried to overtake Chadney. Chadney simply leaped because everyone else was leaping. Freddy decided this offered him a perfect opportunity to bite Tango in the butt. Tango concluded the nearest pine tree should become part of the dance, while Smitty, the old veteran, simply sighed before reluctantly joining the madness. 

Then came the great unraveling as my carefully constructed loads began to fail. 

Diamond hitches loosened and panniers slipped. A lash cinch snapped. A feed sack burst open like confetti. My bedroll hung on a branch like a ghostly apparition, convincing several horses that fleeing was still an excellent plan. A propane bottle set off downhill with alarming enthusiasm. A week's worth of horse feed became an all-you-can-eat buffet. Coffee pots, camp lanterns, duffel bags, and mysterious items I'd forgotten packing all took turns introducing themselves to the wilderness. 

I hadn't, until that moment, paid much attention to the forest around me. Suddenly whiskey jacks exploded from the nearby trees in a blur of wings. Squirrels chittered angrily and vanished into their burrows. A raven landed beside a split bag of alfalfa cubes as though asserting salvage rights. Even a passing mule deer paused long enough to give me what looked suspiciously like a pitying glance. All the while, my saddle horse, Stoney, watched with profound disappointment, as if he knew his supper had just been delayed. 

I spurred Stoney forward, convinced I could stop the leaders before they joined the wreck. I quickly discovered that overruling four tons of horseflesh that had reached a unanimous decision was remarkably difficult. 

One piece of advice from the foreman Levi Robinson kept echoing in my head. "Don't let go," he said, before handing me the lead rope to the pack string, tipping his hat and watching me disappear down the trail. This was my first packing assignment, and I was headed off from the 10-Mile pack shed for the three-hour ride to Halfway Lodge. I'd imagined myself riding into a John Wayne movie. 

Until now. 

I didn't "let go," I am proud to say, but the lead rope I still held on to led to a twisted, knotted tangle of ropes, gear and stock. 

I slowly dismounted and surveyed the scene like an accident investigator. 

Silence. 

The trail looked less like a pack train had passed than a garage sale hit by a tornado. Two panniers upside down, oat bags split and scattered, one propane bottle sat fifty metres away, an axe somehow standing upright, one horse wearing somebody else's lead rope. Nothing was where it originally belonged—including me. 

"Well..." I found myself addressing my saddle horse. I looked up at the sun, already setting in the western sky. "Guess we'll repack." 

"You know," I said to Stoney, "I'm beginning to think guiding dudes wasn't the hardest job on this ranch." 

Stoney lowered his head, blew a long sigh through his nostrils, and looked at the wreckage. 

After everything we'd been through that afternoon, I figured he had earned the last word. 

The old Westerns always ended with the cowboy riding into the sunset. They never showed him spending the next three hours untangling lead ropes, rebuilding diamond hitches, collecting runaway propane bottles, and opening every pack box on the mountain looking for the bottle of hootch he'd promised the camp cook. 

Some things are simply too heroic for Hollywood.