09/25/2026
Wade Tolliver saddled the gray horse at 11 at night with lightning coming across the flats west of Casper, Wyoming, because the dog hadn't come home.
Tuck is a 13-year-old heeler who's worked cattle with Wade since Tuck was a pup. The thunder that evening had sent Tuck bolting out the barn door, and that was three hours before.
Wade is 78. He's run cattle on that ground for 50 years and knows what a storm does to an old dog out in the open. The legs keep going until they quit, and then the dog lies down wherever that happens to be.
A pickup was no good out there. There are washes you can't see at night until you're in them.
He rode out with a headlamp and a rain slicker over the saddle, and every few minutes he'd call, stop the horse and listen. The rain came in sideways for the first hour.
A little after 1 in the morning, the horse stopped on its own at the edge of a dry creek bed about 3 miles north of the house and wouldn't go on.
Tuck was down in the wash under a cutbank, soaked through and shaking, with a front paw cut open on the rocks.
Wade got down, lifted the dog up across the front of the saddle and climbed back on behind. He rode home at a walk with one hand on the reins and the other flat on Tuck's back the whole way.
They got in a little before 3. His wife had the kitchen light on and a towel warming on the stove.
The paw took six stitches. Tuck stays in the house now when the sky goes dark in the west, on a rug by the kitchen door.
