The Cowboy Way
Sheila Heuer and Cowboy the Magic HorseStory by: Claudia Mosby
Photos: Betsy Erickson
If she hadn’t taken a friend’s dare, Sheila Heuer probably wouldn’t be alive today. She certainly wouldn’t have met a magical horse named Cowboy, an intuitive friend who helped save her life.
Heuer had been injured in an equestrian accident and ended a 30-year hiatus from riding when she accepted her friend’s challenge to get back on a horse. Her fortuitous meeting with Cowboy at the Cottonwood Creek Equestrian Center came after the first horse she’d been riding was diagnosed with cancer and retired. She rode Cowboy for about four months before noticing a change in his behavior. “He would wrap his head around me or nudge me,” she says. “I thought I was cinching him wrong.”
This went on for several weeks, until one day Heuer felt a pop in her back as she and Cowboy came to a quick stop. “He ignored the personal space,” she says,”and he put his head on my back. I’d never had a horse that was so cuddly. I sensed something was wrong.” Eight weeks, four doctors and multiple tests later, Heuer was diagnosed with kidney cancer.
“When someone looks at you and tells you that you have cancer, everything stops,” she says. “You just can’t believe it’s happening.” She admits one of her first questions was whether she’d be able to ride again. To her relief, the surgeon told her she would never take away something that would keep Heuer alive.
After recovering from surgery, she recalls, “I went straight from the hospital to see Cowboy. I had all these bandages and he stood real close to me and put his head on my chest.” She says it took another two months before he broke into a gallop with her astride. “He decided by how I smelled what he wanted to do that day,” she adds.
Through an unexpected encounter, she discovered Cowboy’s potential to touch other lives. While waiting in an oncology center for a post-surgical scan, she met a fellow patient, a 3-year-old girl, who inspired her to immortalize Cowboy in print. In Heuer’s imagination, her horse healer was transformed into the protagonist of a children’s book.
“I wrote ‘COWBOY the magic horse,’” she says, “and then I wrote 11 more in a 12-part series that follows Cowboy on his adventures through trail rides, camping and his birthday.” Like the young patient who inspired her, Heuer says, “I wanted a young child to be able to look at the book and know the story without having to read the words.” Although she searched for an illustrator as far away as the East Coast, she found her ideal partner closer to home, the result of an introduction through a mutual friend. “When I talked to Jacki, she understood exactly what I wanted to do,” says Heuer.
Jacki Goedert, who illustrated the first book and is currently preparing sample illustrations for the next four books in the series, says all of her renderings are done in full watercolor. “Cowboy’s markings are distinctive,” says Goedert. “It was so much fun to paint him. It took about three months to do the 22 paintings for the first book.”
Although Heuer self-published the first book and printed it through Red Tail Publishing in Anderson, she plans to submit it and the next several in the series to a New York publisher early this year. “People have written to us from all over the U.S.,” she says. “It’s been very healing.” A copy of the book even made it to the White House.
Recently, the Western Miracles Foundation, an organization dedicated to granting wishes to terminally ill children interested in the western way of life, agreed to donate one book to the Shriners Hospital for Children for every book purchased through its Diamond W Western Wear affiliate in Chico. Heuer is attempting to get the book into hospitals nationally.
“Cancer stopped me in my tracks for awhile, but I feel like I’ve been given a second chance,” she says. “I need to make a difference with that second chance.”•
www.cowboythemagichorse.com
