My Runaway Horses

       Stonewall and Jackson were actually easygoing, gentle horses.  I bought this team at the Kalona Sale Barn but the guy selling them was an Amish man, that lived only a few miles from my place.  The picture with our dog "Coach" sniffing them was taken on their first day as my horses (you can tell he didn't know them yet.)
        I bought them in the fall and that next spring, when they turned 2, I took them back to my Amish friend, he used them for his spring fieldwork.  When they were ready to come home, my Amish friend and I drove them here.  I hitched them a few days later and took a nice drive down a gravel road, everything went great.

       Just before unhitching them I decided to take them out into some cornstalks, to see how they would react; because I was planning to take my disc out into that cornfield in a few days.  Well, that was a mistake!  A cornstalk poked them or the sound of rustling leaves scared them, I'm not sure, but they took off as fast as they could go.  When we started to get close to a fence, I tried to turn them out into the open field by pulling hard on my left line... it broke.  I fell back into the wagon pulling on the right line and that turned them into the corner of the field and they came to a stop, unharmed.

I was shook up about it, so I took them back to my Amish friend to let him use them a little more.  We ended up having a whole string of runaway stories over the next year.  I'm saving all of that for a collection of short stories about my horses.  I have one of my short stories posted on this blog.  It is a story named, "Back In Time."  You can click on this link below.
http://amishhorses.blogspot.com/p/blog-page.html

       I was so discouraged because I liked Stone and Jack a lot.
I felt like crying out "Why Lord?"  Now, years later, I know that it all turned out for the better.  I had so many great experiences, taking these boys back to my Amish friends place.  Because of my troubles, I got the opportunity to drive a six-horse hitch, on a plow and a disc (Stone and Jack in the hitch)  and many other interesting jobs.
        All of these experiences ended up as material for my book, Under the Heavens, due out later this year.