I bought the saddle from a man named Pruett who was selling his equipment in pieces, as men do when they are leaving a place and do not intend to return. He asked less for the saddle than I would have expected and seemed almost relieved to be rid of it. I was not in the habit of asking sellers about the feelings of inanimate objects, so I paid what he asked, loaded it into my wagon, and drove home.
The first time I sat in it was the following morning, before dawn, getting ready to ride the east fence line. I adjusted the stirrups by feel, the way you do when a saddle is new to you and you have not yet found its measure. And then I stopped, because I realized I had not needed to adjust them. They were already at the length I would have chosen. This seemed like a coincidence. I rode out and did not think more of it.
What I thought more of, as the weeks passed, was the seat. It is difficult to describe exactly. The saddle was not broken in to my shape — it was broken in to a shape that was very close to mine but not identical. It had been made for a man slightly taller than me, I think, or a man who sat differently on long rides. But the difference was minor enough that after an hour it ceased to matter. The saddle accommodated me in a way I had not expected from a secondhand object. It was as though it had been waiting for someone close enough.
By midsummer I had stopped thinking of it as a used saddle. I thought of it as mine. This is unremarkable. Men form attachments to their equipment. But I noticed that visitors to the place — neighbors, drovers passing through — remarked on the saddle before almost anything else. Not on its appearance, which was plain. On its presence. One man, a drover who had ridden through the region for twenty years, looked at it hanging in the barn and said: that saddle has been somewhere. He meant it as a compliment. I think he was right in a way he did not intend.
The marks on the left fender are the thing I cannot account for. They were there when I bought it, two shallow cuts running parallel, deliberate by their regularity, the kind of mark a craftsman might make for measurement and then leave rather than correct. I asked Pruett about them and he said they had been on the saddle when he acquired it. He did not know their origin. I have since learned that the saddle may have come through Trinidad before it reached Pruett, and before that from a shop near the rail yard in Pueblo. If that is correct, the marks were made at the source. A craftsman marked something and did not explain the mark.
I have looked at the marks every year since. They do not mean anything to me in any language I know. But they are precise, and precision suggests purpose, and I have not been able to convince myself that the purpose was purely decorative. The saddle was built for work. The marks were placed on the part of the saddle that faces outward when hanging. They were placed to be seen.
I am submitting this account because the archive asked for first-hand accounts of notable equipment and I believe this saddle qualifies. I am not prepared to say it is haunted. I am prepared to say it is known, and that being known is a quality that objects can carry, and that this particular object carries it with some distinction.