Tales from the Trail - C S Wilson - Bog

Merriam-Webster.com defines a wrangler as: "a ranch hand who takes care of saddle horses". In the tourist livery industry, not only does the wrangler take care of saddle horses, but he/she leads out trail rides, mostly working for the love of horses and tips. Whether they worked for a day, a season, or a decade, every wrangler has stories from their time spent on horseback, leading out trail rides. There's nothing we like better than to sit around and swap 'war stories'. This book is a collection of short stories from leading out rides in the Rocky Mountains. "I told the guests I knew how much they appreciated the beauty surrounding them and I knew they and their horses were getting tired, but we really, really needed to step up the pace. By that time, the storm had broken over Long's and had zeroed in on us; though the sun was still shining brightly, the horses caught their first whiff of the coming storm and sped up on their own. I desperately tried to keep an eye on both storms bearing down on us, and in short order, it was much easier to do. With a theatrical crash, the two storms collided. Now the trick became keeping the horses from bolting. Eerily, the sun was still shining brightly, but the forest around us had gone dead silent. The birds and little critters had disappeared. We were in a controlled trot, pivoted backwards in our saddles, watching the two storms battle it out. Halfway to the trees, we began to see lightning arcing between the two storms and hear the rumbling thunder as one storm grumbled at the other."