05/11/2022
Today is a celebration of a good, long life for the lovely Cayuse Mighty Tantalizing (Curly to her friends). By Mighty Storm Song (USA) out of the Royal Corporal mare Cayuse Royal Titania, Curly was part of the then excitingly new Storm Song's third foal crop in Australia.
After a show career that saw her racking up points in halter, dressage, hunter under saddle, western pleasure, working cowhorse, reining and trail — at a time when classes saw dozens of competitors — she came back to Cayuse Appaloosas as a broodmare.
Her foals by Wolkenstein II (Germany), Cayuse Fewsion, Skip's Supreme (USA) and Cayuse A Grand Illusion went on to successful show (and breeding) careers of their own, and at age 18, after leading a herd in Australia for years, she jumped a ship to New Zealand, in foal to Cayuse A Grand Illusion.
She immediately organised the farm here the way she thought it should be run and later that year, produced the most phenomenal filly and introduced us to protective motherhood — Curly style. Nobody was harmed as her first 2 foals here needed help to get the basics working, though there were one or two slightly tense moments.
She was a big part of searching for and finding the Emmett Technique — a soft tissue release therapy that solved both her occasional colicky moments after eating, and post-foaling problems with 3 foals that meant their systems struggled to expel post-foaling essentials.
With that sorted, we were a unit and her final two foals by Skip's Supreme were completely stress free. Two of her daughters are still here, and she was a phenomenal babysitter for her good friend Cayuse Scratch Me First, who left us last January.
She reached age 28½ before anyone who met her thought she was any older than about 18, and was seen beating youngsters at a flat gallop just a week ago, so it's got to be said that 30 years and 2 months is not a bad innings.
