Mahlon Couch rides his Missouri foxtrotter horse, Feather, on his ranch in east Bend recently. He's been riding horses since he was a child in Tumalo.

At an age when most cowboys have retired to the tack room, Mahlon Couch is still clippety clopping down the trail.

Just last week, Couch, 84, and his wife, Ruth, rode their horses around the circumference of Black Butte west of Sisters for the sheer joy of it. On other occasions, the indomitable cowpoke takes a more serious approach to his riding, driving cattle and horses for rancher friends to the east of Bend.

If Couch wasn’t born to the saddle, he was weaned on it.

Born in 1922 in Tumalo, Couch started working on his parent’s 120-acre ranch at a tender age.

”They expected a lot of a kid (in those days), more than they could cope with sometimes,” Couch told an interviewer for an oral history commemorating Bend’s centennial.

He remembers driving cattle from Tumalo up to a ranch near Black Butte.

With his skills as a horseman budding, Couch left home after the eighth grade to work on a cattle ranch.

The passage of time has mellowed the hard edges.

”There was a little controversy between me and my dad, but not much,” Couch says. ”But, I was my own boss since I was 15.”

Couch, relaxing on a leather sofa in his east Bend living room Wednesday, is surrounded by things that speak to him of his cowboy heritage: Western art, old photographs, there’s even a horse emblazoned in relief on that sofa. Outside, the Couches’ three horses – Feather, Boots and Deedee – switch their tails in the afternoon heat, waiting for the next go-round.

And Couch remembers out loud a time when cars were a prohibitive luxury, the range was open and wide, and the stockyards in Bend were where Bi-Mart now stands.

He was 15 when he hired out to move horses for a rancher in Central Oregon. Then, at 18, Couch went to work for the ZX Ranch, a sizable outfit near Paisley.

As a horse wrangler, Couch drove the remuda (the cowboys’ extra horses) behind the chuckwagon. They’d move up to 7,000 head of cattle at a time between Paisley, where they wintered, and Sycan Marsh, then south to the railroad at Bly at the end of summer for shipment into California.

”You’d rope your horse,” Couch recalls. ”You’d never walk up to your horse and catch him … Running horses is a pretty hazardous occupation. That was a lot of fun for a young kid. And we got paid for it, too.”

When World War II broke out, Couch served overseas in the Army and ”came back alive.”

He was married in 1946 and got into the logging business in Central Oregon.

”I guess I was predestined to do what I done,” he says. ”I got out of the Army and was just looking for a job.”

Couch worked for several mills in and around Bend, then started Mahlon Couch Logging Co. He worked in the woods, felling trees until he was 52.

”There used to be almost 300 towns in Oregon with a sawmill,” he says. ”Now I don’t think there’s many.”

His voice trails off until he gathers another thread and renewed momentum.

”It’s a tough blow,” he says, not missing an opportunity to take a poke at the environmental movement that helped spell the end of the hard-charging days of the Northwest timber industry.

”You see an old tree out there, it has a sparse crown and short needles,” he says. ”Trees grow up and die just like people.”

Couch believes those trees should be harvested.

Upon retirement from the logging business in the mid-1970s, Couch earned his real estate license and became a mortgage broker.

”That put me in a position that I could trail ride with my horse,” he says.

And ride he does, every chance he gets. Ruth, his wife of almost a year, is an ex-trick rider and avid equestrienne. They spend hours each week in the saddle, exploring new country and revisiting old haunts.

”He’s a cowboy and I’m a cowgirl,” Ruth says of their relationship. ”He’s a wonderful person, solid. He’s a Christian man. As far as I’m concerned, I don’t see a fault in him. I wish everyone was as happy as we are.”

Sue Frewing, whose friendship with Couch dates back to his time as president of the Des-chutes County Historical Society in the early 1980s, describes him as a ”warm wealth of information.”

”He’s what we imagine as being a real cowboy gentleman,” says Frewing.

Couch has outlived two wives. He raised one son, Jim, who was seriously injured in a logging accident when he was 19. And he’s seen Central Oregon go from old school to resort chic in what’s seemed like the blink of an eye.

”Sometimes I think, I don’t know if I belong here or not,” he says. ”Everybody’s under pressure now. Everybody’s got to be there at a certain time and go like heck to get to the next place … (but) I guess the good has outweighed the bad. I don’t miss what I never had.”