April 12, 2019. My Brother-in-law died. The brother of my wife, Darrell Cunningham died by suicide.

Some people don’t understand how a person could do that, but I know Darrell was only on this earth for as long as he could stand being here. For a while, he really got into old fashioned black powder guns. Lots to tinker with. He even built some old replica buffalo guns. My wife bought one for me for Christmas in 2014. A .54 caliber flintlock. I love that gun, and I consider myself pretty handy, but if ever I had any issues with it, Darrell was a short call away. I found out years later that the reason he got into black powder guns was that the RCMP took his guns away, I found out years after that, that they took them away, because his dad called him in due to suicidal ideations. He made the right call. Darrell never knew who made that call.

In Canada, you can own black powder guns without a license, so for someone who loved to hunt, it seemed like a logical step. Black powder guns led into a series of old-timey interests, such as archery, and tomahawk throwing competitions, and knife making, and wearing buckskin pants. All of this led to horses. Horses made Darrell happy, and Darrell was either smart, and talented enough, or brave, and dumb enough to work well with horses. He started wrangling for a local guide. He loved every minute of it… That is until the mental illness took over, and steered that ship over to burn some bridges.

He then went to another ranch, Gienger Creek Ranch. He picked up two wild horses and was working on training them. He had one for himself, Lyric, and one for his daughter, (Who lived with us, due to his mental illness,) Bandit. He had a saddle on Lyric for the first time on a Wednesday, and on Friday, he was dead.

He had a lot of plans with the amazing family who own and operate Gienger Creek Ranch. In the weeks after the funeral… hell, the months after the funeral, that ranch was the only place I wanted to be. My wife and kids also loved it there. They had four kids, that matched pretty close in age to our four kids, and they also ran a petting zoo. Our kids’ life turned into a petting zoo. How could you not want that? I was healing there. Those animals know when you’re hurting, and know-how to help. Also, my wife, and I now had two horses, Lyric, and Bandit. This is how I accidentally became a wrangler.