“Buzzard Head does not sound like merry-go-round horse.” Herman cocked an inquisitive look at me.
“He’s the worst,” was all I could say. “C’mon”—I still was on fire from the miraculous encounter with my hero Rags—“I know the best place to watch him ride, if they’ll let us.”
? ? ?
“YOU ARE SURE this is good eye-dea? Dangerous place, if we fall?” Herman shied away as far as he could from the bronc pawing at the bucking chute beside us, as he crept after me on the narrow plank stairs.
“Then don’t fall,” I gave him the cure over my shoulder. “Shhh. Leave this to me,” I cautioned further, keeping on up the midair steps that led to the shaded platform beneath the announcer’s booth.
When we popped our heads through the opening in the floor of the platform, what awaited us was pretty much as I expected from other rodeos I’d been to. Clustered there where the arena director and anyone else who counted in running the events could keep track of things at close hand were several Indian men in snazzy beaded vests and the darkest sunglasses made, beside big-hatted rodeo circuit officials and a few other white guys in gabardine western suits who had to be the livestock contractors supplying bucking horses and Brahma bulls for big shows like this one. As I scrambled onto the perch with Herman stumbling after, the only personage paying any particular attention to our arrival was a Crow elder, lean as a coyote, with braids like gray quirts down over his shoulders, who gave us a freezing stare.
“We’re friends of Rags and he told us to get a good seat to watch him ride,” I said hastily, as if that took care of the matter. “My uncle here is from, uh, out of the country and this is his first rodeo”—Herman wisely only grinned wide as the moon and did not ask if there were any Apaches around—“and it’d be a real treat for him to see it from up here like this and we’ll stay out of the way, honest, and just—”
“Welcome to Crow Fair, don’t get too close to the horses.” The gray-haired Number One Indian made short work of us and swung back to overseeing the commotion in the chutes beneath our feet where the rigging crew was wrestling saddles onto thrashing broncs.
Establishing ourselves at the far end of a long bench softened by gunnysack cushions filled with cattail reeds—boy, these Crows knew how to do things—Herman put his attention to the printed program that listed saddle bronc riding, calf roping, steer wrestling, barrel racing, bareback riding, and of course, the fancy-dancing exhibition. “Same as circus, many acts,” he expressed in satisfaction as I read over his shoulder. But then, coming to the names of the broncs the riders had drawn, Widowmaker and Funeral Wagon and Dive Bomber and similar ones, he nudged me in concern. “Sounds like war, this buckjumping.”
I had no time to reassure him on that as the saddle bronc riding explosively got underway almost beneath where we sat, with an Indian contestant named Joe Earthboy sailing out of the chute on a nasty high-kicking horse called Dynamite Keg. Earthboy and airborne animal became a swirl of dust and leather and mane and tail as the crowd cheered and the announcer chanted encouragement. A full few seconds before the timer’s whistle, the rider flew up and away from the bronc as if dynamite had gone off under him, all right. “Ow,” Herman sympathized as Earthboy met the dirt, gingerly picked himself up, and limped out of the arena.
Which set the tone for that go-round, contestant after contestant getting piled without coming close to completing the ride. By now it was obvious Crow Fair did not fool around in staging bucking contests. Deserving of their blood-and-guts names, these clearly were the biggest, meanest, most treacherous horses available on the professional circuit, as veteran in their way as the career rodeo cowboys who tried to master them. Watching these hoofed terrors with Herman swaying next to me as if he felt every jolt in the saddle himself, I couldn’t stop my nerves from twanging about Rags Rasmussen’s chances on the monarch of them all, Buzzard Head.