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D avid Grant calls himself The Pee Dee Cowboy. That's from the Pee Dee Rivers, both the Great Pee Dee and Little Pee Dee, 300-plus miles from the Appalachian Mountains to the saltwater at Winyah Bay. There are vast cypress and tupelo swamps in its lower reaches, with satisfying populations of deer, ducks, wild hogs, and enough alligators to suit most anybody. David Grant grew up in the Pee Dee country of South Carolina, hunting, fishing, and riding horses. Eventually he came to a sport known as "ripping"— riding upwind through brushy clear-cuts and shooting deer from the saddle with a big pistol or a shotgun stuffed with double-ought buck. You can pull the trigger from just about any horse, but that's just the first half of the story. It takes a steady mount to not leave you broken and breathless on your back in the bushes. We call them "gun horses," and they are not easy to find. Grant found them when a buddy from Charleston invited him to ride after hounds and shoot wild pigs from the saddle on a horizons by roger pinckney Saving the MarSh tacky – the beSt little gun horSe ever. Marsh Tacky, a good hunt. Grant formed Carolina Marsh Tacky Outdoors in 2005, a string of 15 to 20 mounts to take clients on hair-raising rides after venison and pork into the Pee Dee wilderness. He has his own cable TV show now, Carolina Horse Tales, where he also engages in jousting, Revolutionary and Civil War re-enactments, popping balloons with a pistol at full gallop, even water skiing behind his horses running in shallow water. M arsh Tackies have existed on these wind-washed islands since before anybody remembers. Fourteen hands and tipping the scale at around 750 pounds— buckskins, bays, milkshake grullas, red roans, even blue roans. Double manes, long tails to beat back the bugs, and hard, flinty hooves. Sure-footed easy-keepers with a sixth sense for getting around in the woods. Legend pegs them as descendants of horses loosed here by Spanish explorers in the 1500s. Experts rolled their eyes— utter nonsense, road apples, horse pucky. Tackies were just scrub horses, like the wild horses of Chincoteague, stunted by centuries of poor diet and casual, indifferent breeding. But meanwhile, Tackies served their purpose; Indian ponies at first, then Revolutionary and Confederate cavalry mounts. After the shooting stopped, Tackies pulled wagons and plows, hauled the mail, carried high-rolling Yankee quail hunters through thicket and briar, and, finally, served in the famed "Pony Patrol," Coast Guardsmen riding these beaches looking for German saboteurs during WWII, toting Tommy guns, not fine 20-gauge doubles. On Daufuskie Island, Constable Hinson White married the island's best bootlegger, rode a Tacky, and carried a long hickory stick so he could bust your head without dismounting. On Edisto, Johns, and James islands, a Tacky got you coming and going, carrying the midwife and the undertaker. But alas, John Deere and Henry Ford eventually put an end to their necessity. Numbers dwindled . . . 400, 300, 200? By the time the coast hereabouts was beset with a plague of over-development in the 1960s, Marsh Tackies, whatever their origin, seemed on a fast track to extinction. 66 • S P O R T I N G C L A S S I C S