Living the cowboy dream

When it comes to the countryside I am, to quote Woody Allen, at two with nature.

I prefer BlackBerrys to blackberries and rugged isn't a word often used to describe my physique.

Forget the right to bear arms; I balk at the right to bare arms. And yet while I may be the unlikeliest cowboy in the West, I have always loved Westerns.

As a young boy I would throw a blanket round my shoulders while chewing the end of a biro and kid myself I looked like Clint Eastwood. I grew up and lost the blanket and biro but never stopped wanting to be a cowboy.

"So you've never ridden a horse, huh," says Elaine Schweng as she leads me to the corral of her ranch. It's my first day at Lonesome Spur, a 400-acre working homestead in Montana nestled between the snowy peaks of the Beartooth and Pryor mountains.

The big sky is crowded with clouds and the sound of crows cawing scratches the stillness. I am wearing suede chaps and a Stetson. "Horses are like people," says Elaine. "They have their own personalities and you have to match the rider to the right horse."

There are 10 of us staying at the ranch and most are experienced riders. I have never been near a horse and the last cowboy I met had just quoted a price to fix my air-conditioning unit. "Say hello to Honey Bear," says Elaine. He is a pale horse, a palomino gelding with warm wet eyes and a coat the colour of sand. All riding virgins start on Honey Bear, who has the sweetest of temperaments. I stand alongside him and feel a shiver of awe and terror at his sinewy might.

"It's important to bond with your horse," says Elaine. "Why don't you talk to Honey Bear and get to know each other."

She leaves me and the horse together in the yard. I pat him gently on his head, make a half-hearted attempt at stroking his mane and look into his eyes. This feels like a first date: I want to make a good impression but don't know what to say.

Elaine helps me slide my foot into the stirrup and I slowly haul myself up swinging my other leg across and slipping my foot into the other stirrup. I am on.

"Can I just say I am really, really petrified," I tell Elaine. "But the horse hasn't even started moving yet," she says. I sense she is becoming frustrated with my lack of cowboy spirit - not so much the horse whisperer as the horse whinger.

Elaine teaches me how, by giving Honey Bear a gentle kick, I can make him walk, and how to make him stop by tugging at the reins. Slowly the cold terror subsides as Honey Bear patiently obeys my instructions.

Montana is among the least populous states in America: there are under a million people in a state nearly 965km across. During the next few days Honey Bear and I ride through grasslands bristling with sagebrush and coated with the bright yellow of wild mustard. We cross gushing brooks, pass grain silos and white-barked quaking aspens and it feels like I am the star of a real-life Western: my own private Montana.

Among my fellow riders are Jane, a television make-up artist from Derbyshire, England, who is visiting the ranch for the 10th time, and Peter, a German who runs a BMW factory in Leipzig and is here for the first time. Peter is accompanying his wife, a vet, and his daughter. "Take my advice," he says gravely, with the look of a man who has learnt life's lessons the hard way. "Don't fall in love with a woman who loves horses. I learnt this too late."

Everyone who visits the ranch is given a cowboy name by Lonnie. "How about Fearless," I suggest. There's a hint of a smile behind his huge moustache. "How about Phyllis," he says.

That evening as a campfire burns at the ranch I watch the sun set, a blush of pink behind the snow-peaked mountains, droplets of blood-red clouds floating in a sea blue sky.

The days begin with breakfast at eight sharp prepared by Pam, who lives on the ranch with her husband and 14 parrots. Elaine likes to encourage a family atmosphere at Lonesome Spur: some guests stay in cabins that have framed photographs of John Wayne on the walls; others have rooms in the basement of Elaine and Lonnie's own house. There are three meals each day at fixed times and everyone eats together - it gives the guests a chance to get to know one another.

Jo is a mounted police officer who works in the City of London; she is here with her sister Jen and their friend Lara. They are all keen riders.

Lara admits her love of horses helps explain why she broke up with her last boyfriend. I say it couldn't have been a stable relationship. Paul is a gardener from the small English town of Maidenhead who's come because he's always wanted to be a cowboy, and having turned 50, wants to fulfil his fantasy while he still has time.

On arriving at the ranch I had been struck by a silence that I found almost suffocating, like a black blanket. During the week as the din of city life - the screams of police sirens and the babbling of television - fade from my mind, the silence peels away to reveal the sound of wind rushing through the cedar trees, the song of larks and starlings, the chirrup of crickets.

When the weather is fine the ranchers go riding; for most of them the chance to ride horses amid spectacular scenery is their reason for coming to Montana. This winter the ranch will for the first time be offering ski and ride holidays. The sun has burnt away the last wisps of cloud and the big Montana sky crowns the land like a blue eggshell. We ride out to the grasslands, through fields prickling with cactus.

Time and space both take on fresh meaning when you ride on horseback in a valley surrounded by ancient mountains.

They say if you don't like the weather in Montana, stick around for a day. The next day the sun has disappeared and giant smoky clouds fill the sky, threatening rain. On days like this we could be helping irrigate the fields, feeding the 50 horses Lonnie owns or mending fences, but today we were driving to Cody, the town founded by 'Buffalo' Bill Cody. It's a reminder of how potent this region is with the history of the West: Buffalo Bill, the Johnson County wars, General Custer, the Battle of Little Bighorn, it all took place around here.

My ideas of the West were formed by the memory of Clint Eastwood riding in and restoring order to a town overrun by bandits.

It has taken a trip to Montana for me to realise that my cowboy fantasy was just that, a fantasy, and that I preferred my West to be inauthentic - the quick-drawing reloading movie version rather than the real thing.

To me the cowboy life was about the outlaw spirit. It wasn't the horses that interested me; it was the violence.

"It's a myth that the West was violent," said Mike Hunsaker. It's late in the evening and Mike, a local historian who visits the ranch once a week to cook Dutch-oven style and talk to guests, is busy exploding some of my most cherished fantasies.

"There was only one gun fight ever recorded," he says. "The real enemy was the weather: the snow storm of 1886, pestilence, locusts and the wind. Not only were cowboys not violent," he continues "most of them were not even white. They were Hispanic, Native American, black and of mixed descent. I'd say around 98 per cent of Montana cowboys were not white." "That's incredible," I say.

Suddenly the idea of me being a cowboy no longer seems like a joke; it turns out that cowboys didn't look like John Wayne - they looked more like me.

The founding principle of the Western life - the freedom of open space, the individual freedom to ride your horse, carry your gun and tend your land. Today's cowboys don't have the same freedoms as in the past and yet for all that the cowboy life lives on in the stories told by Mike.

On my final morning in Montana I hang up my Stetson, slide out of my chaps and say goodbye to my new friends, two-legged and four-legged. In my week of riding, rodeos, herding and hiking, I have glimpsed how the West was really run. I may not have got to play Clint Eastwood, but I have learned the truth about cowboy life: the good, the bad and the ugly..