8. Together

The story is a heart-wrenching one for sure.

In the movie, the now not-so-young cowboy tells about his hardscrabble childhood in Idaho, where from a very early age he and his older brother were made to practice rope tricks for hours on end and perform at rodeos across the west, all while enduring the near-lethal violence of their father’s rages.

When I say an “early age,” I mean early: the cowboy was doing rope tricks at the age of three, turned pro at the age of six, and made his first television appearance, on the game show What’s My Line?, at age seven.

And when I say “violence”—well, that’s just too hard to talk about here.

The boys’ mother fell sick and died and the beatings got even worse, until one day the law stepped in and removed both children to a foster home on a ranch near the Madison River in Montana.

There was safety, order, love, and honest work on that ranch, and the two youngsters finally got a chance to thrive.

The older brother grew up and left the ranch and put that cowboy stuff in the rear-view mirror.

The younger one stuck to it.

Not long after he graduated from high school, the young cowboy went to that arena in Bozeman and saw what he saw there.

The encounter, coming on the heels of his childhood trials, set him on a course to handling horses in a way that avoided pain, fear, and coercion.

And if that’s all there was to the story, I probably could have finished my bowl of ice cream reclined on the couch without any life-changing perturbation.

But, in a short, slow-motion sequence at the start of the movie, I saw that cowboy ride through one of the most demanding maneuvers you can do on a horse with an ease and grace that seemed to defy the laws of physics.

They were gliding sideways across a green meadow in this precise and powerful sort of crab-walking motion, the horse’s legs scissoring wide across the diagonal with each step, both of them looking as though they’d gladly do that dance together for the rest of their lives.

I put my spoon down and sat up straight.

What exactly was I witnessing?

I grabbed the clicker and pressed the back-up button.

There was a horse, a big, handsome bay with three white socks, a star on its forehead, and a snip on its nose.

And there was a person sitting on top of the horse, an ordinary-looking fellow in a cowboy hat and chaps, with no distinctive markings to speak of.

And I knew that person must be directing that horse’s movements somehow, but I couldn’t for the life of me tell how.

I pressed the back-up button again.

The human had a calm, quiet presence and moved not a muscle as he rode, with a float in the rein and nary a crease on his brow nor a hair astir upon his head.

The horse, too, looked relaxed and easeful, no more bothered by his gymnastic exertions than if he’d decided to take a sideways stroll to the watering hole, albeit with some considerable aplomb.

Honestly, if I didn’t know better, I’d have said the whole deal was the horse’s idea, and that cowboy was just along for the ride.

Now it wasn’t what they were doing that impressed me; it was how they were doing it.

I’d seen those kinds of fancy lateral moves before, when I was a horse-crazy kid.

There’s a whole repertoire of balletic steps and postures practiced in the equestrian art form known as dressage.

But whenever I saw them done, there always seemed to be some kind of trouble.

The people rode stiffly with a grim expression, like they’d just lost a bet.

The horses performed stiffly too, with tails wringing and foaming mouths and nostrils flaring red and the whites showing around their eyes.

It was a forced, tense, robotic business that made me vow never to try that stuff at home.

This cowboy’s thing with his horse was another business altogether.

It was like some kind of spell had been cast on the both of them.

I could not tell where the horse’s body stopped and the cowboy’s body began.

More to the point: I couldn’t tell where the horse’s mind stopped and the cowboy’s mind began.

And that’s not even what made me cry!

What made me cry was another scene early on in the movie where the man was simply leading his horse across a flat, grassy field.

Only, as with the aforementioned “riding,” there wasn’t any actual “leading” that I could discern.

It was a sunny day and the grass was green, the sky a still, crystalline blue.

The cowboy fellow was tall and lean and a little hunched over with a gap between his legs like a keyhole.

The horse wore a halter on its head with a rope attached, as per usual.

But the horse wasn’t testing the line, even with all that tempting grass underfoot.

The slack never came out of the rope. The cowboy never tightened his grip.

That horse was just totally dialed in to the man, tagging along like a foal following its momma, matching steps, slowing, stopping, and even backing up whenever the cowboy did.

It was like some private, invisible force field united the two of them.

Wherever they went, they went together.

Even today, when my own horses follow me around just like that, I still get goosebumps remembering that scene in the movie.

I cried because it was the dream: the wish I’d had all those years ago but could not articulate, the feeling I’d longed for but never quite believed in, the promise held in the tender bond between me and my pony that I’d not known how to make good on.

And I cried too because, when I saw that scene, I knew this fact with certainty: 

I didn’t understand horses.

Not one bit.

You can watch the slow-motion sequence that rocked my world in the trailer for the movie Buck, beginning at 0:22. It only lasts three seconds, but believe me, that’s enough. The horse’s name is Rebel.