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Cupcake was a good ol’ horse. Wylie Gustafson used to muse about her in his stage patter when he wasn’t singing about moonlit nights out on the range or long rides to gather up cattle in the spring.

But Cupcake moseyed on down the road when Wylie sold his favorite cutting horse a few years ago to a fellow down in California, where “she is living the California lifestyle.”

Today Wylie is out in the paddock every day, raising and training horses used for cutting competitions, then he’ll hit the road on weekends to perform.

Wylie and his wife Kimberley live near Dusty, Wash., on the centennial farm owned by Kimberley’s parents. The younger couple’s cutting horse operation (www.crossthreequarterhorses.com) addresses a horse-lifestyle craze that has swept the West over the past 20 years. Cutting competitions are based on the traditional ranch skill of separating young cattle from the herd for branding. Wylie calls the modern competitive version an “addiction,” a term that corresponds to Ian Tyson’s famous description of it as a “disease for which there is no cure.”

Aside from the quarter horses they raise and train for cutting, Wylie and Kimberley have 20 cattle and 20 buffalo on their 900-acre Palouse spread. Set amid the rolling hills of eastern Washington, it’s a milder locale than his boyhood home. Born and raised in a stretch of Montana foothills famous for some of the most brutal weather on earth, with blistering heat in summer, killing cold in winter, Wylie helped his veterinarian dad with the family’s small herd of cows and grew up listening to “Rib” Gustafson sing to the family. He studied business in college in California.
“When I was 18 I wanted to get as far away from cattle as I could,” says Wylie. But instead, he picked up a guitar, practiced yodeling and wound up in Nashville.

Although Nashville has a lot of "country" music, traditional Western music (a much different thing) is as scarce as a $3 gallon of gas. Wylie soon returned to the Northwest to marry Kimberley, travel the plains and mountains singing, and settle down in a 1905 Craftsman house built by Kimberley’s grandfather. Tradition is a powerful current in the inland West, and Wylie has buckets of it running through his life today. He’s on horseback almost every afternoon, tending cattle. It recalls the days when, as a boy, he rode his horse Becky with his dad for roundups in the Two Medicine Mountains in Montana.

“My memory is that invariably, we’d have to ride 22 miles in a storm. It’d be wet and cold and miserable, nothing glamorous about it,” Wylie says, just in case some 10-year-old reading this is tempted to run off to Cut Bank, Montana, and live the cowboy life. Did cowboys sing to their cattle, as in “Cattle Call,” the famous Eddy Arnold song that is a mainstay of his stage show? Wylie suspects they did, mostly to stay awake on long nights sitting astride their horses. Has he ever? “Well, sure.”

Unglamorous as the reality may be, there is a magical allure to the inland West and its cattle ranching traditions that Wylie captures in his exquisite song, “The Gather”:

“Magpies are singing in the cottonwood trees
“The river is tickled by a cool northern breeze
“I can float like a feather, when I’m in the leather,
“Riding out on the gather.”

Eric Lucas lives in Seattle.