Last week, I posted my response to an LA Times editorial about wild horses. In it, I made mention of cowboying up. A theme of my piece was what that means. I received a fair amount of email about the piece, and some people wanted to talk about cowboys who love their horses. Some of them surely do. One of them saved my life at the bottom of the Grand Canyon, and now the time has come to tell his story.

I met him in college, shortly after I saw my first tumbleweed, a big one, blowing across the highway in New Mexico. Tex - yes, that's what he called himself - was living in the Grand Canyon. I had thumbed a ride to the canyon from Albuquerque, along with a friend named Peter. We met Tex while hiking down the trail to our reserved camp site. He was big and beefy, over six feet, or at least that's how I remember him. He knew a lot about the outdoors. And he told great stories - like the one about being wanted for unpaid alimony, which was why he was hiding out in a national park. Once, he had made a living wrestling Brahma bulls in rodeos, but with the law after him, well, a guy just had to get out of Dodge.

Down at the bottom of the canyon, Peter and I decided to camp in a no-camping area - more remote and no people - so we wandered off the trail and found a spot, in a grove of cottonwoods, somewhere along a bank of the Colorado River. We said adios to Tex, who told us he'd be camping nearby, and set up our tent. Two nights later, we sat on a riverbank and gazed at the stars. The canyon was all lit up and the sky was a ceiling of glitter. But then came the galloping of hooves, and voices shouting - "Hey, where's the dancing girls? There she is!" - and three men on mules blocked our escape as one closed in, twirling a lasso and then dropping it around my shoulders. I screamed and tried to break free of the rope. Suddenly Tex appeared, leaping out of the brush, grabbing the bridle of the mule that carried my attacker, and flipping man and animal to the ground. I broke away and Peter followed, racing across starlit paths, finally spotting a trail, and running back toward where we came in.

At the ranger station, I blurted out a strange tale - "Drunk men on mules tried to lasso me! They're beating up our friend!" After convincing the ranger that we weren't lying, we saddled up three horses at the station, and headed back to our campsite, somewhat difficult to find as Peter and I didn't really know where we were camping. But when we heard the sound of men laughing and saw smoke from a campfire, we figured we were in range. Once there, we found a curious sight: they were all sitting around the fire, sharing a bottle of Wild Turkey. "Hey, guess what?" Tex said. "We're all from the same town in Texas!" A few days later, I learned that the three men were guides who led the tourist mule-packs up and down the park trails. I filed a complaint against them and the last I heard, over 20 years ago, it was being processed.

As for Tex, he came to visit me in Albuquerque a few times, and he told me some things about his life. He couldn't make enough money on the rodeo circuit, he said, to keep his wife happy. He liked living in national parks, especially the Grand Canyon, because you could stay down there for a long time and the world would leave you alone. But one thing was really bothering him - more than anybody or anything he missed his horse. He had lost him in his divorce, he said, and there'd never be another one like him. There's nothing as heartbreaking as seeing a tough guy on the verge of tears, a wet veil crossing his eyes like a desert cloud, his body twitching with a distant rumble. The storm passed quickly and then one day, he left, just like Shane in the movies - except he was on foot and embarrassed to say good-bye.

I've thought about Tex over the years, especially nowadays with so much of our heritage vanishing. I don't think he'll be featured in the Ken Burns documentary on national parks. But on the off chance that he's reading this, I'd like to say that I hope he got his horse back. And thanks for the assist, cowboy.

* This piece first appeared in American Cowboy