Horses in Love, continued
...
I walked south to her corral and sat on
the top pipe rail. The gray mare plodded up and offered to make
friends.
"Sold Bill's Straightaway,"
cried the auctioneer. The sorrel was headed for the cattle semis.
And Ft. Worth. And French or Belgian dinner plates.
As best as I could tell, she was sound.
However, she was penned with a yearling and a two year-old-colt,
also Shire types. They both hobbled about on swollen knees and
crooked legs. Were they hers? Did she carry a genetic defect?
Had malnutrition harmed them? Perhaps the foal that lay big in
her belly also was a cripple.
The auctioneer begin his babbling. His
voice, amplified by a PA system, carried into the holding pens.
As usual, he would begin with the sheep, auctioning up to a dozen
at a time. Behind the sheep waited goats, queued in a series
of pens just off the arena entrance chute. In about 20 minutes
it would be the horses' turn.
Wranglers began saddling the horses they
would ride, at $5 a head, into the ring. Horses sold under saddle
often went to dealers who would resell them as riding horses.
The rest were usually destined for pens at the southwest corner.
That afternoon stockyard workers would cowboy these horses up
a chute for a semi trailer ride to a stock yard for fattening,
or directly to Ft. Worth.
Now goats frolicked into the chute for
the auction ring. The iron gate clanged shut behind them. I heard
laughter -- probably the usual goat antics. Riders lined up their
horses behind the last of the goats.
No one had brought a halter to the striped
mustangs. No one had haltered any of the draft horses, either.
Darn, I had always wanted to buy a draft horse. Darn, my two
favorite prospects looked as if they would take extra time and
care -- the gray mare to get her through delivery of her foal,
maybe another crippled offspring. The mustang had eye problems.
I couldn't afford to work with both.
A wiry Hispanic with mustache and crumpled
felt cowboy hat rode the first of the horses into the gloom of
the iron box that was the last stop in the progression into the
sale ring. The gate clanged shut behind them. To the south, another
wrangler opened the gate to the pen with the draft horses, waved
his hands and clucked his tongue. They trotted down the central
pathway directly under the catwalk to take their place in line
for sale. I hurried inside the cavernous metal shed which houses
the auction.
My eyes adjusted to the gloom. Cutting
through the gabbling of the auctioneer I heard the chatter of
a sparrow. It flitted about the iron beams of the ceiling high
above. I took a seat as close as possible to the sale ring. It
was a sawdust-floored, half-oval enclosure only some 25 feet
long. On the long flat side across the back of the oval, in a
booth with a counter about six feet above the ring, sat the auctioneer.
To his left sat Charlie Meyer, and farther left a cowgirl with
big hair. With each sale, she fed a document into a pneumatic
tube that whooshed it to the front desk.
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