Horse Lover (4 page)

Finally Les said, “Call me a Missourian, because you’ll have to show me that one.”

His reaction came as no surprise. Cowboys, neighbors, friends, and colleagues all hailed from Missouri when I told the gentling cattle story. One neighbor south of Lazy B had the wildest bunch of cattle that time and time again ran away. After each incident, this frustrated guy would pound in a piece of fence here, another piece there in an attempt to contain the animals until pretty soon he had the most nonsensical fencing ever created. I went to him and explained the program, how it was foolproof, and how he could do it. “That’s a bunch of shit,” he said.

Telling Les about the herd behavior modification program increased my confidence that wild horses would respond to it. Cocky me. For all I knew, Dayton and I were standing on the drawbridge of an air castle that was about to dump us in the swampy moat. Maybe Les thought so too, but he didn’t let on. He told me who to call in the
BLM
’s Wild Horse Division. They would be the ones with information about the current state of affairs and the ones who could authorize a sanctuary. At least that’s what he thought.

“I’ll give them a call and let them know that you’re mostly a reasonable man.” He chuckled and hung up with a promise to let me know when travels brought him near Lazy B. I promised to introduce him to our gentled cattle.

The conversation with Les set off a chain reaction of activity. I felt like a spider flinging out filaments that would somehow get woven into a web. I half expected my partners to resist the far-out idea of creating a wild horse sanctuary, but they readily stamped their approval on it. Phone calls to the
BLM
were being returned, conversations lengthening, and support growing. Dayton Hyde made friends in the South Dakota state tourism office. They liked his idea of putting two or three hundred wild horses on his small ranch and opening it up to tourists. The
BLM
chimed in with a desire to partner with the state. Over many meetings and cups of coffee, we hammered out a document that gave birth to the Institute of Range and American Mustang, a nonprofit organization designed to ensure the longevity of a sanctuary, protect the horses, and preserve the land.

Then there was the Bureau of Indian Affairs. Of the thirty-five thousand acres that made up the old Arnold Ranch, nine thousand were leased, half from the Rosebud Sioux Indian Tribe and half from the Bureau of Indian Affairs, which meant we needed permission from each group to graze wild horses on their land. I decided to first pay a visit to the person I knew best, Stan Whipple, the range conservationist employed by the Rosebud Sioux Tribe who was responsible for relations with our ranch. He loved our plan, circulated it to the right people, and within a week the tribe had granted us approval. Stan followed up with a fair warning. “Don’t be surprised if you get static from the
BIA
. They never agree with anything we do.” I decided it best to drive the short part of an hour up to the Bureau of Indian Affairs office in Mission, South Dakota, and meet with our contact, a Mr. Roger Running Horse. Since we would be working with the
BIA
long-term, a personal relationship couldn’t hurt. John Pitkin accompanied me.

A slender man with an engaging smile, Mr. Running Horse greeted us warmly. “I heard talk of the old Arnold Ranch becoming a wild horse sanctuary. Quite exciting,” he said. His openness fanned our enthusiasm and we eagerly rolled out our plans.

“I need to have all this in writing so I can present it to my supervisor over in the Pine Ridge office,” said Mr. Running Horse. “It may take a week or two to get approval, but we’ll get it done.”

John and I left Roger Running Horse’s office assuming we had a new ally in our pocket and pleased to have avoided any negativity.

I was lucky if I spent three or four nights in the same bed. Between the blowing and going, I waited for the ranch purchase to close. The banking machinery chugged along in reverse, giving rumors an opportunity to spread like a swarm of no-see-ums. John reported that beer talk at the local bar was pondering the crazy Arizonan buying up ranches left and right in the Sand Hills and aiming to turn the old Arnold Ranch into some sort of sanctuary for three or four thousand mustangs. I could just hear it.

“Sweet Jesus, those horses will be spread over three counties.”

“I can see it now. They’ll come blastin’ through the backyard and Mama will start screaming her roses got trampled.”

“Crazy fellow. What’s he thinking? Hasn’t even weathered a winter yet.”

“Yep, when a dang nor’wester blows through, he’ll be chasing those damn mustangs up and down the river and hollering for help. He’s settin’ himself up for big trouble.”

I didn’t pay too much attention to what people said behind me or to me unless they got in my face, like the field rep for an insurance company who caught up with me one afternoon on the Rex Ranch. At the time, insurance companies were pushing ranch mortgages and three had offered to furnish one for the Rex Ranch. One of the companies had hired this fellow now standing in front of me, an ex-rancher who I knew had gone broke. He claimed his company heard I was putting a wild horse sanctuary on the Rex Ranch.

“If you go ahead with it,” he said, loud enough for anyone within ten feet to hear, “you’ll be denied a mortgage with us and probably every other company out there as well.”

It was all I could do not to say, buddy, you don’t know shit from wild honey. Instead, I reminded him in the same forthright tone that he and his cohorts were in the banking business and I was in the ranching business and maybe we should each stick to what we knew best. The subject never surfaced again.

Overall, I couldn’t complain about how things were spinning together. Yet through the hubbub, a little voice managed to assert itself. Go see the wild horses, it urged. Learn from the experts who handle them. Ask all the important questions. Would the handlers think training and gentling over a thousand horses a possible feat? How did they sort the horses? What kind of branding methods did they use? Did the horses move easily between corrals? Did the herds have renegades or protectors, and how did those horses behave? What criteria made a horse adoptable? How much did they eat?

The best place to be a student was the National Wild Horse and Burro Center at Palomino Valley, twenty-five miles outside Reno, Nevada. Before I left, I called my son, Alan Jr., who had been a sounding board from day one of this journey, and asked him if he would fly up to South Dakota to spend a week on the ranch with John. I wanted his take on the ranch as wild horse sanctuary. Al had logged enough years on horseback to be considered a full-fledged cowboy, even though he had opted not to join the family ranching business. He could stay in the doublewide and not be influenced by my presence. He readily agreed. So in mid-August Alan Jr. left the dry heat of Tucson, bound for the humid air of South Dakota, and I rumbled out Lazy B’s ranch road, turned left, and pointed the pickup toward the Silver State.

4.

Palomino Valley

I smelled the horses before I saw them. Their pungent, wild scent filled the cab. When I pulled into Palomino Valley, I understood why. Horses, horses, and more horses stood and rested in a maze of corrals that stretched behind a main office.

At the far end of the parking lot a long semitrailer, the kind used to haul livestock, was backing up against the loading chute attached to a corral fence. I stepped out of the pickup and heard the truck’s low purr. Because of the angle of the sun, the scene played out in silhouettes. A driver came around and clanged open the truck’s back gate, then pounded a club against the trailer’s metal side. A horse’s nose poked out. The driver yelled and banged some more. A shadowed mustang emerged and ran down the chute into the corral. A string of horses followed. The beat of hooves on metal drowned out the motor. Within minutes, forty horses or so huddled in a far corner of the corral. The driver slammed the truck gate shut.

Well, no big deal there, I thought, walking toward the office. I’d be able to handle that. I had unloaded cattle from trucks hundreds of times.

“How ya do, Mr. Day?” A tall, sun-weathered man in a plaid shirt and bolo tie stood up and leaned over a desk piled with neat stacks of paperwork to shake my hand. He motioned for me to take a seat. “Glad you could join us. We don’t get too many people expressing such interest in wild horses,” he said, leaning back in his chair.

For the next thirty minutes, we chatted about the process of sorting horses and details of the adoption program.

“Now, let me ask you this,” I said, eager to get to the most important question. “If you had a ranch in South Dakota covered in a thick, healthy grass, would you want to turn wild mustangs out on it? Or would you run a hundred miles the other way to keep from doing it?”

The manager folded his arms and stared out the window. “If it were me,” he said, “I might think double hard about how much time I’d want to spend chasing horses. You could end up learning every inch of that property trying to round up horses that don’t want to be handled.”

I briefly described the cattle training started on Lazy B. “Think it might work with a bunch of mustangs?”

The question earned me a curious look. “Can’t say I know much about training cattle. But I do know wild horses don’t want to do anyone’s bidding—yours, mine, or the best blue-ribbon cowboy west of the Mississippi. You might bait them with hay and get them to follow you, but the minute you turn those animals out on the range, they revert to their wild ways. Guaranteed.”

The conversation turned to horse care and maintenance. A bottle with a handwritten label perched on a shelf caught my attention.

“Tell me about that euthanizing solution up there,” I said. The manager looked over at the cluttered shelf. “Is that something I would need to keep on hand?”

“We have that by prescription only,” he said. “We do our best to avoid using it. If a horse kicks or jumps and knocks the syringe out of your hand, you don’t want to get stabbed. It works its magic without discretion. My suggestion is to use a good old Colt .45. That’s our preference when a horse is sick or injured and needs to be put down. It’s much safer.” I used that same method on the rare occasions when I had to euthanize a ranch horse.

“So do you ever try to train horses in the corrals?” I asked.

The manager pointed out the window. “Those two fellows can answer your questions about horse handling. They pretty much do it all day.”

“Well then, I’ll go have a chat with them.”

“Hope it all works out for you,” said the manager, extending a hand.

Outside, hot air pumped against me. I pushed my hat down and followed a corral fence constructed of solid metal tubing and extending a good seven feet high. Too high for a horse to jump, too solid to be knocked over. The handlers stood near a corrugated tin shack, sweat streaked on their shirts. One was smoking and the other drinking a Coke.

“Hey there,” I said, and introduced myself. The fellow with the Coke, named Red, probably after the color of his hair, had worked at Palomino Valley for about two years. Roy, the other cowboy, had been there almost as long, having come over from a ranch in Wyoming.

“So what in the world brings an Arizona cattle rancher up here?” Red said.

I gave the lowdown on the sanctuary. “Problem is I’ve never handled wild horses. Thought I might learn a thing or two from you boys.” A look of pride flashed across their faces.

Roy said, “Well, one thing’s for sure. They won’t let you get bored. You’ll be too busy riding in circles.”

“Yeah, these suckers, they’ll run five miles without drawing a deep breath,” said Red. He took the last swig of soda and aimed at a garbage can five feet away. The can swished in with a clank. “They’ll run around you, away from you, in every crazy direction.”

“After you work with them for a while, do they start to respect you? Maybe trust you a little bit?” I asked.

Red snorted. “Hell no. You sure ain’t been around a bunch of wild horses. You expect the ornery cusses to do one thing, and they get in their dang head to do the opposite.”

“Remember Jimmy?” said Roy, slapping Red on the arm. “He went to shutting a gate in front of a renegade red roan mare. That bitch hit the gate at a full run and wham, Jimmy caught it right in his face. Shit, he was ironed out. Lost part of his front teeth on that little charge. Took most of his desire to be a cowboy right out of him.”

Red snorted. “Yeh, Jimmy. He’s probably still bartending in Reno.” The boys got a good laugh out of that one.

Red eyed me. “Just so you know, your ranch is gonna be like what you see here. The pretty horses, they get adopted right off the bat. We end up with the ugly, wild ones that no one wants, and they are damn difficult to care for. You say you’re thinking about taking care of several thousand of these scrounges. Well, I say, mister, are you crazy or just misguided?”

I gulped down the reality check. Crazy, yes. Misguided, I sure hoped not.

By the time we started walking to the corrals, I knew that the boys believed if the South Dakota ranch didn’t have tall, iron fences, say seven feet tall, the horses would be scattered from hell to high water across the neighbors’ pastures. Horses could be baited with hay, but no way in the world could they be trained. These cowboys stood on a different dance floor than the one I was hoping to two-step on, but it didn’t surprise me all that much. Yet, since they spent each day working with wild horses and had expertise I lacked, I felt compelled to consider their opinions. Red pointed out the small corral holding the new arrivals, the ones I had seen being unloaded earlier, and suggested I go take a look.

I walked through several empty corrals, opening and closing gates until I reached the small one. Most of the horses had their heads down, munching on the hay strewn across the ground, and took little notice of me. They had congregated into family groups of seven or nine. Red said they had ridden two hundred miles in the semitrailer before being unloaded on these foreign grounds. I leaned my arms against the corral tubing, stood still, and observed. It must have seemed like a seven-course meal served at a desert oasis compared to the overgrazed, drought-ridden range they had come from. They didn’t have a chance to wash up and put on their best duds. To tell the truth, they looked ratty, with long hair and dull, lusterless coats.

A brown mare with a swooping neck and black mane with a forelock that hung halfway down her nose stood near me, her light-brown foal next to her. She wasn’t terribly big, maybe fourteen hands high. Dried streaks of sweat covered the outline of her ribs and her underbelly. The foal, probably about a month old, walked around his mama and came broadside to me. With legs poking out like skinny sticks from his torso, he already showed the results of overgrazing and feed shortage. He nuzzled his mother for a drink of milk but, finding none, walked away and picked at some of the loose hay on the ground.

Many of the other horses looked like they too had had a workout. How many miles did they have to run from the hated helicopter to be marked with such defined sweat streaks? A terrifying run, followed by jail. At least they were fed well in jail.

“Fun will start tomorrow,” said Red, coming up behind me. “The vet pulls in around ten. We’ll run the bunch up the chute and get them vaccinated and branded. You’re welcome to watch.”

I was eager to see the interaction between man and animal and get a glimmer of whether or not I could work with mustangs. Even though everyone had told me in one way or another that I wouldn’t be able to do it, something deep inside of me said that I could. Yes, these horses seemed different from those I had known. They looked different, too, and they had lived such a different life than the ranch horses I grew up with and had worked with all my life. I would have to accept that I wouldn’t have the same relationships with wild horses that I had with my ranch horse friends like Chico and Aunt Jemima, Blackberry and Saber. And certainly not like Little Joe. Now there was a horse that grew up acting more like a dog than a horse.

I still remember the first day I met Little Joe. Jim Brister was riding in the back of the pickup, instead of on his horse or in the cab next to Leroy McCarty, the ranch foreman who was driving the pickup in from the east pasture. At first I thought maybe Jim had hurt himself, because even by age ten, I knew he felt his best on a horse, not in a four-wheeled vehicle. Leroy pulled the truck up next to the barn. I abandoned chasing an imaginary bandit around headquarters buildings and ran over to greet them.

A head popped up next to Jim and a foal plopped its nose awkwardly over the truck bed’s side. “Who’s this?” I said, petting the baby’s fine, soft hairs. A tuft of gray mane stood up between his ears. The foal blinked at me.

“We found him in the pasture circling around his mama, dead on the ground,” Jim said. He jumped out of the truck and swung down the back gate. “She must have just died ’cuz the coyotes didn’t get to her yet.” He reached in and pulled the colt by his legs, then lifted him and set him on the ground.

The baby’s loss pricked my heart, especially since the other broodmares would be reluctant to adopt him. He stood there, skinny legs splayed, looking out of sorts. I put my arm around his neck and gave him a hug.

Jim said, “Go get a bottle of warm milk from your mother. You can feed him down in the corral.” I ran to the barn to get the bottle with the nipple that we used to feed orphans. My mom always left warm milk on the kitchen counter. I dipped the bottle below the layer of cream and filled it.

For the next three months, I fed Little Joe a bottle at least once a day, sometimes twice if I wasn’t in school. Gradually, he came into his coloring. He was a blue roan, handsome even at a young age, with a peppered light gray on his flanks and darker hairs around hips and neck. His nose, mane, and eyes were black. I don’t remember who started calling him Joe, but it didn’t take long before he was known around the ranch as Little Joe. And was he known.

When I went down to the corral, he would be there waiting for me, bobbing his head and flipping his tail. He would watch me unlatch and swing open the gate, then he’d skip out, come to a stop, and look at me to see what the plan of action was. We’d wander around the ranch, his nose resting on my shoulder when content or nudging me along when I dawdled.

If I walked into the bunkhouse, Little Joe tried to follow. Bug, our cook, would yell, “Get that damn horse out of here,” and the two of us would hightail it out before we found out if the frying pan Bug held was headed for one of us or the stove. Out in the yard, I’d push my shoulder against Little Joe’s. “Don’t take it personally. He’s that way with a lot of people.”

I was so accustomed to having Little Joe out of the corral that I wouldn’t think to put him back in there. When I ran inside the house, Little Joe would wait for me in the yard. “Take your damn horse and put him in the corral,” my dad would holler if he saw Little Joe grazing around the front walk. I’d come out and put a hand on Little Joe’s neck and lead him back to the corral. He never looked happy when I shut the gate. “I’ll come get you later,” I’d say. He would push his nose over the corral tubing for a last rub. Sometimes I climbed on Little Joe and let him take me for a ride wherever he wanted to go, but I knew that he shouldn’t have much weight on him until he was older. Almost every day, I fed him extra grain and watched him grow. And he watched me grow. It seemed like we consistently stood at eye level with each other.

The summer of my thirteenth year I was eager to have my own cow horse that I could ride out on the range. I had outgrown Chico, though I still loved him and always would. By then Little Joe, having been fed quite well, had become big and strong and was ready to break. Since he was my horse, it was my responsibility to do that. When I went to break him, I assumed he would partner with me like he always did.

It proved quite the challenge, however, to break him into our new relationship. He wanted a partnership where he had at least 50 percent of the say. He didn’t mind a saddle, but he did mind being given directions. If I wanted him to turn, he continued straight ahead. When I snapped the reins for him to gallop, he kicked at me with a back foot or turned his head and nipped at my knee. “You’re spoiled,” I said to him one day in the corral in a moment of frustration. He wasn’t bucking, but he wasn’t doing much of anything I asked him. The dry June heat and our individual wills to win made us both cranky.

After a month or so, Little Joe wearied of fighting every day. You’re the boss, he acknowledged, giving in to the pressure of the reins or my knees. I’ll follow your orders. “That’s a boy,” I said, my arms around his neck. I looked into his eyes and saw friendship. “Now let’s go round up some cows.”

When the sun rose on a day the open range called, Little Joe and I would be one of the first to saddle up. He had a shorter gait than the other horses and a rough trot, so it was tiring riding him all day, but at thirteen that didn’t bother me in the least. I had my own horse and we were a working team. Besides, if I leaned forward and pitched him the slack, he could hit a dead run faster than almost any of the other ranch horses, though I didn’t yet have the skills to teach him how to stop smoothly. Instead of putting his back legs forward and lowering his hips, he would bounce to a stop on stiff front legs. Plus, he was kind of a sneaky guy. When we rode near a fence or tree or shrub, he would veer into them with the subtlest of movements and scrape my leg against them. More than a few times, I had to pull out prickly pear and cholla needles that pierced my chaps and jeans. One day, I had enough. The next time Little Joe tried to pull his shenanigans, I whacked him a good one on the neck. After that, he behaved. It was all part of our give-and-take relationship.