I once worked on several Western wear accounts, Justin Boots and Panhandle Slim PRCA Rodeo apparel among them. We’d shoot for weeks on Texas ranches with real, working cowboys or in rodeo arenas with rodeo cowboys. They are a tough bunch. I found out I wasn’t.
One morning before the sun came up, we were on a huge ranch north of Fort Worth, Texas, shooting cowboys rounding up longhorns. As we were about to start shooting, the entire herd gets upset stomachs – a kind term for what actually happened. Hundreds of bovinae suddenly unloaded everywhere as if on cue, like their colons were on a synchronized timer. The aroma hung in the air for miles.
While the real cowboys were working on this stinky setback, I stood over next to a fence watching and wondering how they would wash all those longhorns. What I didn’t see was the meanest horse on the ranch sneaking up behind me. He was taller than the other horses and had a Jack Nicholson air about him. Suddenly, he’d peeled his floppy horse lips back and protruded a pearly white set of giant teeth and chomped down on a mouthful of me.
If you have never been hoisted into the air by the skin of your back, you can’t clearly comprehend the pain involved. As he swung me around, two old ranch hands saw the action and moseyed on over. One looked up at me as I flailed in the pungent air and, with a sardonic cowboy drawl, said the obvious, “Looks like he’s got ya there.”
Yeah. I could feel a kidney and part of my liver going down Mean Mr. Ed’s throat before Hoss decided that the best course of action was to cold-cock the animal. He hit the horse on the nose with a roundhouse left hook which, of course, caused the horse to clinch his teeth even harder.
Now instead of operating out of playful mischief, the horse was snarling and angry. He snorted loudly and slung me about 10 feet like a cheap pet store toy and I did the only thing I could think of: I jumped over the fence. And landed in the freshly extruded ocean of longhorn dung. Strange as it sounds, at that particular moment, it was the better of the two options.
I was no worse for the biting and finished the shoot with a bruise between my shoulder blades the size of Steven Tyler’s mouth. The old cowboys all gathered around me at sunset and said, “You’re one of us now. Welcome to the ‘Got bit by the meanest horse in Texas’ Club.”
