MONTMARTRE, SASK.— ”You’re not dressed warm enough,” he says as I duck into the barn on a stormy -30 C morning.
Barry Quam would know all about staying warm on days like this.
He has been doing chores in the dead of winter for more than 70 years. At age 78, he still refuses to let the frigid temperatures stop the harnessing of his team and the delivery of bales by chore horse to his cattle and horses.
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”I smiled so much this winter my face hurt because of this team,” says Quam, explaining that his latest well-trained hitch of 20-year-old half sisters Rosie and Rita (raised by Nipawin’s Ross Ganton) have made his life easier since he bought them a year ago.
It wasn’t always this way though.
In the early days, the rodeo stock contractor and his wife, Sherry, spent many long days, months and sometimes even years training unsuccessful bucking stock to take a harness and be transformed into chore horses.
“Some of those bucking horses got to be real nice, but it would take them a long time to trust us,” said Barry, adding that most bucking horses are raised free, never even having been haltered.
The process would start with putting them in a chute because they couldn’t be caught any other way. Next came the haltering and moving them in and out of the barn for feedings and watering to accustom them to lead ropes, noises and handling routines. Round-pen work preceded hooking up a horse, which was done one at a time with a seasoned chore horse. After hours of driving in an arena with various loads from harrows to stone boats, it was time to venture outside.
“My advice is don’t do it,” laughs Barry when asked what tips he would give those wanting to start their own team.
“Nobody would want to do it these days, trust me,” he adds, acknowledging that the whole process could take a year or two to accomplish.
Today his daughter, Rusty Rae Woodward, is helping with chores. The barrel-racing champion is happy to give her dad a hand while she is home for a winter break from her training and racing duties in Texas.
“I have lots of good memories of our teams, but some of them you just have to laugh at because there were some wild wrecks,” says the 45-year-old barrel racer.
She doesn’t remember a time when chores were not done by horse on her family’s farm because there has never been one.
“Some of my earliest memories are riding on the toboggan with my brother Cain behind the team, and it was so rough because we’d go flying over all the frozen manure,” says Woodward.
She remembers a few heart-pounding incidents when horses were spooked and ended up racing through gates and over snowbanks.
“When you were told to get off, you got off because there was some stuff going down,” says Woodward, adding that over the many decades of chores on the Quam farm, no one has ever been injured.
She says jokingly that she sometimes worries about her dad and mom still doing all of the winter chores by horse at their ages, teasing them that she’s going to install a GoPro camera on her dad’s cowboy hat so she can watch to make sure they are safe.
At age 77, Sherry Quam still does chores with her husband. She says there have been some unpredictable teams in the past, most of which were raised off the farm and had previous experiences that made them unexpectedly skittish. Both Sherry and Barry have not-so-fond memories of a particular black team that was always on edge.
“When you buy teams, you just don’t know what has happened to them, and that one team took Sherry on a runaway one day that took the (electric) watering bowl right out of the ground,” says Barry, adding that the two horses were promptly loaded up and sold the very same day.
While Barry can’t imagine a time when he won’t do chores by horse, Sherry says she’s been making plans to retire the chore team for many years now.
“This last time I said, ‘no more teams,’ but he loves his teams, so that’s just the way it is,” she says with a shrug.
“I don’t listen so good,” Barry chimes in.
Mechanization has helped the time-honored tradition a little, A customized metal sleigh with a battery-operated lift now allows round bales to be transported and unrolled by one person. However, Barry says his chore team will always be the most dependable piece of equipment on the farm.
“Tractors don’t start as good as horses in the winter.”
