Careful What You Dally

There’s a Charlie Russell painting, “Roping A Rustler”, in which three cowboys are roping a grizzly bear. Riding in close enough to make a throw at a bear is impressive. But I wonder what they did once it was dallied to the saddle horn?

Last week, I got a call over the radio from two of our hunting guides. Their client had killed a bull elk on a steep mountain. “You got the packstring handy?” they asked. I didn’t, because the herd was out to pasture. “Can you think of a way to get this elk off the mountain?” The Charlie Russell painting gave me an idea. I had a lone jingle horse in the corrals that I could use to rope and drag the elk off the mountain, like a calf towed to the branding fire. The horse, a Belgian-Quarter Horse gelding named Lefty, was a skilled packer and a roping horse who could handle the job.

From a distance, I could see the hunters’ bright orange vests high-up a steep ravine where the elk had been downed. The ground was covered in snow, and the ravine was thick with sagebrush, which made the going difficult on horseback. I took down my lariat, threw a loop around the elk’s front feet, and dallied off. For our first attempt, we traversed the elk down the hill in a series of switchbacks. I stepped Lefty forward with enough force to pull the 800-pound bull, and we towed it 50-feet before the elk got caught in sagebrush, jerking us to a halt. With a sea of sagebrush in front of us, it would take days to get down.

There was only one other option: ride straight down at speed enough to plow through any obstacle. I re-cinched, readying me and the horse for the worst, and we took off. The bull slid on the snowpack, toboggan-ing down behind us like an avalanche. Lefty and I reigned through a slalom course of sagebrush. Approaching the bottom, I wondered how the heck to make it stop. I aimed Lefty towards a large sagebrush, hoping to use it as a speed bump. The elk hit it and ramped into the air like a ski jump. I reined Lefty clear of the projectile, undallied and watched the bull land and slide to a stop. We hauled it in a four-wheeler from there.

There’s a difference between having a dead bull elk and a live grizzly bear on the other end of your lariat rope. But I glimpsed the lesson learned by those Charlie Russell cowboys: know what you’re getting into before you dally-off.
— Ryan T. Bell