The Pastures of Beyond (23 page)

The band of wild horses came tiptoeing off the far rimrocks, working its silent way to water. An old black lead mare came first, stopping frequently to stare and work the canyons for the scent of danger. Behind her were three dry mares, equally watchful, then a mare and foal, followed by a battlescarred stallion. The foal caught my eye: an Appaloosa, one ear cropped, rump oddly splattered with white as though a magpie had roosted there, the rest of the animal blue like sage smoke over a November campfire.

The little filly stuck to its mother's side like a bad smell, even though there was only room on the trail for one. Dislodged by time, a small rock rattled and clicked down the hillside, then chunked into the sun-dappled water on the canyon floor. The wild horses froze, thinking about that rock. The Appaloosa's mother restrained the foal with her nose, and for moments, the band seemed sculpted in stone.

Suddenly, the willows along the bottom erupted in rifle fire. The stallion humped up, leaped, screamed once, and died. I shouted at the mustangs to run, but only the mare and foal made it up over the narrow trail to safety. I caught one last glimpse of the little Appaloosa as it dragged with one crippled hip after its mother, then they were lost in the sun. I roared a torrent of bad words at the horse hunters and got the hell out of there, never dreaming that I would see that filly again.

The Bureau of Land Management records on the old Appaloosa mare are slender indeed. Appaloosa. Sex, female. Captured, 1987, on Black Rock Desert, northern Nevada. Shipped by truck to the Black Hills Wild Horse Sanctuary, Hot Springs, S.D., from holding facilities at Bloomfield, Nebraska. Released, September 21, 1988.

I didn't see much of the old mare for a while after I opened the gate to freedom. Besides the Black Hills unit, I had two other sanctuaries to manage with 1,800 wild horses, and the old App stayed up high, where she could see Wyoming to the west, as close to Nevada and her old range as she could get.

She finally picked up with a Kiger mustang off the Steens Mountain range in Oregon, and I knew I had a chance to settle her down, since her new friend was addicted to the grain I kept in the back of my pickup truck. Soon the old App would follow the other mare down off the heights to fight

over the pile of oats I left as a peace offering. Once she even nickered to me, but I was careful not to let her see me smile.

There is among wild horses an innate sense of home. Horse bands, unfortunately, tend to be too sedentary for their own good and the health of the range they occupy. When nature dries up the water holes and scorches the grass, wild horses often fail to move on. As the land dies, the horses die with it. Years back, predators such as cougars, wolves, and humans harassed the horses and drove them to new ranges, mixing up the herds so that far less inbreeding occurred.

The grasses on the sanctuary were shaped by thousands of years of prairie fires and buffalo grazing. The bison gnawed the grass to the nub but moved on, migrating to new pastures, giving the plants a chance to grow strong again and go to seed before the next invasion by a herd. The grasses used prairie fires to keep pine trees in their place. The light accumulation of dead grass was soon taken care of by nature, in the shape of cool fires, insects, or grazing.

My days on the sanctuary were soon spent playing wolf or Indian, moving the horse herd on to fresh ranges even though the horses would pace the dividing fences for days after each move, trying to return to where they had grazed before.

The mustangs had never forgotten the trauma of their capture and would get silly anytime a man a-horseback or helicopter appeared in the distance. But they would allow me to drift them afoot, or bump along behind them in my well- used pickup truck. Horses can only concentrate on one thing at a time, and I soon learned that when they were headed in the direction I wanted them to go, it was best not to distract them.

Wild horses live in a matriarchy. Each band has a lead mare who determines where to graze, when to leave for water, and how best to elude the enemy. The stallion stumbles along behind, pretending importance, mainly concerned with keeping his harem together so that no rival stallion can steal a mare. When danger threatens, the stallion trails the band, keeping between his mares and the enemy.

The groups of wild horses on the sanctuaries had been captured in Oregon, Nevada, and Wyoming, and contained a good many old mares that had once enjoyed status in their herds as lead mares. They did not give up their old habits easily.

Whenever I would attempt to drift a gathering of horses on to a different part of their range, every old lead mare would remember her past, and dash through the herd in an attempt to gather a band and lead them to safety. My herd would suddenly fragment into six different bunches, all leading at a long trot for rocky steeps where they knew I couldn't drive my pickup.

The old App, of course, was the worst. She would run through the herd with such conviction and semblance of real terror that the others would assume she had seen some monstrous danger, and away they would race after her, the old mare running flat out and sassy, thundering down trails only she knew about. In time they would do a big circle and end up back where we had started.

The mare and I were two generals, each with opposing battle plans. Time and again she defeated me, leaving me with a day wasted and my pickup truck severely damaged from racing forty miles an hour over a devil's garden of ancient rocks. There came a time when there was no turning her from her headlong flight. Her wispy tail would come up, her eyes would glass over just as soon as I tried to move her band, and off she would race, charging past my vehicle as though it were invisible.

It was grain that was her final undoing. Every time she sprinted off with her band, I fed the remaining horses a taste of sweet chop, containing a mixture of oats, alfalfa, molasses, and corn. It didn't take long to erode her following. The next time she went running off in pretended terror, the other mares stayed behind, and soon she was the first mustang off the mountain to get the grain.

Little by little, the wild horses left their fears behind and accepted my presence. Often as I wandered afoot in the darkness, I could hear them near me; a flinty hoof striking rock perhaps, sounding a blunt bell. Often, far down a ridge, a lonely mare nickered for a friend separated, somehow, by the night's grass-to-grass wanderings, and maybe a black shape nearest me would answer back. From the crest of a hill, a mustang might cough the night dust from aging lungs, and I'd hear the snuffling downslope as animals grew restless with impending dawn and inevitable change. Obscurity of vision for full sight; cold starlight for warm sun; wet grass for dry; night moths for daytime biters. In the dark, the horses were black on black, invisible yet surrounded by a field of warmth and energy that kept me from colliding. A soft wall warning me that I was too close.

In any dawn, the moment comes suddenly when the white horses in the herd first take shape, like scattered blobs of remnant moonlight, luminescent pearls on the hillside that vanish intermittently as dark shapes drift between them and me. Palominos and light buckskins, sorrels and roans, then bays and blacks. The herds themselves take form in the pinkish dawn. I can almost read horse thoughts as grazing buddies come together along the edge of the herd and drift away like human couples leaving a bar at midnight, hoping others won't notice and follow.

The old App rises from where she has been lying down, stretches the stiffness from ancient limbs, and picks her way down through the rocks to where I have put out grain. In a horse herd there is no respect for age. Younger horses have followed my every movement and dash in to fight each other. The old mare goes back to her ridge unfed.

But the old lady figures it out. The next morning and the next she anticipates my route and meets me in a valley screened from the others where she can have her own ration of grain and dine in peace.

Seasons slide into each other, and the wild horses and I grow gracefully old together. The first sparkle of an early frost comes suddenly to this bit of prairie, each twinkling star mirrored on its own blade of grass. Daylight will come a bit later this morning, rubbing its eyes like a bear not quite ready for its winter sleep.

There is not much fun and games in old mustang mares. During the summer they have given all their extra energy to provide milk for demanding foals who have clung to their sides like shadows on a sunny day. In vain the foals have tried to tease the mares into playing games. Now the youngsters begin to socialize. They race each other across the prairie, the rocky, arid ground beating hardness into tiny hooves, leaping gullies, prancing, dancing, pawing over backs in mock matings, acting silly, tails high, fair to bursting with energy like children high on sugar.

Playing hard, they chew on each other's manes, rising together in a juvenile waltz, cavorting like quarreling stallions, biting at forelegs, backing into each other to drum a tattoo of hoofbeats on the other's ribs.

The insects hide from the night frosts. The grasshoppers, which have sucked the grasses dry, seek out hidden crannies against the cold air which pools in hollows along the valley floor. A few bumbling botflies, playing innocent, meander their slow, clumsy way around the horses' bellies to lay eggs on the hair of drowsing mustangs, then are gone until spring.

In November, shortly after midnight, a group of wild horses comes down from the rimrocks, slipping in so quietly I do not hear them come. I look out my window and see the old App, ghoulish in the moonlight, standing watch as the others move through piney moonshadows to drink.

Gone from their coats is the sleekness of summer. Already these lovers of the storm are jacketed for winter. The first snows will pile on them unmelting, until blacks, bays, paints, roans, grullas, and sorrels will vanish, white on white. There is so much shelter here of pine and rock, but give the mustangs a good blizzard, and they seek out the highest hills, standing just below the crest, turning tail to the buffeting winds, each taking its turn at the windy edge of the herd.

Winter always seems to start somewhere else. It comes in from someone else's range, and suddenly, most often in the night, it lays a white blanket over the sanctuary, obscuring the golden carpet of leaves beneath each cottonwood tree and leaving each wild horse to graze in the tracks of the one which walks before.

There are no flies in winter to plague the mustangs, and each horse's tail hangs like a plumb bob, at rest until spring, except to register, perhaps, a swish of anger when another animal ventures too close.

I take the old App a big, round bale of hay and place it for her where others cannot see. For a time she watches from a distant hillside, then curiosity brings her close. Lured by a tantalizing odor of summer, she bites at the bale and jerks out a long beard of grass. In her lifetime, grass has never behaved thus, and she whirls in terror. Unable to open her mouth and release the grass, she thunders away, bucking and striking, until at last the beard falls to the ground. She stops at a distance and gradually works her way back to the fallen clump, sniffing it carefully. Now it is in a more familiar form, and she finishes every wisp.

Soon she is back at the bale, willing to try again. Another wisp of hay, and she whirls off, but the distance is shorter now. Some thirty feet out, she drops the hay, then eats it on the ground. Later that afternoon, I pass that way again, and she is there still, head buried in the bale as though she has been raised on such easy fare. Winters are long and hard. The old App saves her energy and makes no motions not necessary to her survival.

Spring peers around the corner, smiles, then retreats. Like domestic horses, the mustangs are quick to sense meaningful changes in the weather, galloping wild and free down mountainsides, across gullies, splashing noisily through meltwater rivers, hooves making the first thunder of the season across the hollow drum of the plains.

Traveling, a bunch of wild horses generates its own music. There is not only the drumming of hooves but whinnying, of foals for their mothers, mothers for foals, and one friend for another. There are softer sounds too, the cough from a dusty lung, or the contented snuffling horses make when life is good.

This spring, the pasqueflowers turn the rocky hillsides along the Cheyenne River to purple. Most of the wild horses move high to the sandy ridges, where the blackroot grows. Ancient Indians led their winter-weak horses to these same ridges, and in three weeks they were ready for the warpath.

The old App stays behind. Once or twice she ventures to the edge of the spring-swollen river and looks across with longing, as though to follow the others to the high places she has loved ever since she came here. She waits for me every morning, listening for the rattle and squeak of my truck as I head off cross-country through the pines to give her grain. Her nostrils flare as she approaches, and she snorts like the blast of an old musket, unwilling to dispense her friendship lightly. I would feel better if her attraction to me were not bought with grain. She tiptoes forward, then whirls and trots down the hillside. It is an act she, out of pride, must put on every morning.

Her tail is a disgrace. Never long and full, it is now wispy like her mane, but nevertheless clogged with burrs of wild licorice and burdock. Flies cluster on her back, just out of reach of her club. She is so close now I can see every nose wart, every blemish on her hide. The ancient bullet crease across the top of her hip has formed a ridge of hard horn, as though some excess hoof material has oozed up like lava through a fissure in her body. Her stub of an ear makes her look somehow out of balance.

There is meaning to her aloneness. I can read the signs. The old mare hardly touches her grain, and she stands listless, eyes sunken. She won't be here tomorrow. She has already picked her spot to die, beneath a gnarled old juniper overlooking the range she came to love. She will spend her last hours there standing alone. At best, my ministrations of grain have brought her a couple of extra years of the good life. Tomorrow she will be part of the eagles that fly over the canyons.