Wild About Horses Read online

  Nancy was grounded by an innocent-looking little buck that followed a leap over an equally innocent-looking ditch. She went right over the Arab’s neck, somersaulted neatly and landed on her bottom with a thud. She had the look of someone awoken in a strange place with no idea of how she got there.

  Our guide, Skip Ashley, quickly got off his horse and grabbed Nancy’s: a matter of safety, he explained around the campfire that night, for if the horse had spooked, Nancy would have been vulnerable as she sat dazed in the sand. It looked to us at first glance that Skip, who had to endure our gibes, had instinctively declared his priority: horse first, Nancy second. Her only injury, it seemed, was a sizable splinter where bottom so abruptly met sagebrush. Nancy is a spare, muscled woman, a marathoner, and she shook off the injury the way she shook off Skip’s suggestion that she change horses the next day. She got back in the saddle and we all rode off.

  Only later, on the plane home, did she hear an odd scraping sound from her rib cage and feel a fist of pain when she moved a certain way. A ballpoint pen makes that sound when you click it. Nancy tried not to move that certain way, tried to duck the fists, and was shocked when the X-rays showed three broken ribs. “I am either one tough bird,” she told me later, “or I so desperately valued a week of riding in Wyoming that I buried the pain.”

  Those were the few events that made the week what you might call uneventful. But when I later wrote the other riders to elicit their responses to the experience of riding and camping in the Wyoming outback, I got back the most extraordinary missives, longer and more detailed than most moderns have the time or inclination to compose. By then we had all had a few weeks to let the ride sink in, and clearly, it had made a deep and lasting impression — a bit like the prairie itself, which still bears the imprint in places of pioneers’ covered wagons.

  That whole week will remain fixed forever in my brain. The memory of it is a film I keep rewinding, starting now in the middle, now at the beginning, now at the end. When I tell people about running with the wild horses, some get it instantly. Others nod, but obviously, they do not speak the language of horses, or at least of horse lovers; do not grasp what it has meant to me to cross the Red Desert Basin in Skip’s wake. To sit with my back against a rock high on a crest and feel nothing but gratitude. To ride bareback in my underwear — me squealing like a boy — as my horse swims across a pond, then circling back to do it again and again. To rejoice in the sight of mustangs grazing in silhouette on a far rise, catching, as I was, the last rays of the sun. To breathe and dream sage, so much that a whiff of it now calls back Wyoming. To look down from the saddle to the lupines and fleabane and Indian paintbrush and to feel such a sense of wonder. To feel whatever woes I claim to shoulder just slipping away, like the wind that took the dust of our horses.

  Time and Space and a Horse are what we had out there. For the first time in my life, I felt I was seeing the world from the back of a horse. Another century had me in its grip. My last night in the mountains I hiked up to the ridge overlooking the camp and felt powerful emotions surging in me. (Or was I just out of breath?) I kept thinking about the Shoshone and how they built tepees overlooking the plains. We saw what they saw. Maybe they felt what pilgrims to Chartres or Mecca felt: an overwhelming sense of their own smallness. I rather like that feeling and I felt it the whole time I was out in the badlands, which were not so bad at all.

  David Dary is the Kansas-born author of The Buffalo Book and Cowboy Culture, both of which convey the nineteenth-century west as it really was. In the latter book, he wonders why the flat, treeless plain “left an unmistakable feeling that man was rather insignificant. There was and is the feeling of an ever-present supreme being or force not always found in the woodlands and certainly not in the cities … Why does the vastness, silence, and solitude of the plains affect man as it does? It is a question that may never be answered.”

  The Canadian author Sandra Birdsell, in a much admired short-story collection called The Two-Headed Calf, renders the quiet of the prairie — “a quiet so intense and full,” says one of her characters, “that he used to think he could scoop it out of the air and cup it in his hands.”

  It is what I missed most when I went home: that deep quiet that seemed to propel me, all at once, inside and outside myself.

  A remarkable little book, The Solace of Open Spaces by Gretel Ehrlich, who ended up living and working as a sheep-herder and ranch hand in Wyoming, made sense of that lunar landscape, how it can be so comforting and discomfiting at the same time. Ehrlich writes of sleeping on the ground curled like a dog against the wind. (I remember doing the same, napping at noon under sagebrush on the sun-burned plain.) She writes of a weather front “pulling the huge sky over me,” like a blanket, I suppose.

  Ehrlich also mentions a widow on one desolate ranch who used to bring her saddle horse into her living room for company on winter nights. I did find solace riding Wyoming’s open spaces, and I knew, all of us on that trip knew, you could not go just once.

  Implicit in the letters was the notion that riding across the plains and over the mountains was a journey or pilgrimage. Something did happen on that trip. The letters formed a chorus to that effect.

  Carol R. of Connecticut: “Riding through this terrain and experiencing these spectacular 360-degree views seemed to awaken all my senses. I wanted to learn about the wildflowers, to feel the earth, dig for fossils, drink that ol’ cowboy coffee at breakfast, listen to the coyotes at night, watch the gorgeous sunsets and the rising moon. I wanted to do it all, without constraints.”

  Whatever touched Carol about the experience was rooted in the marriage of horse and landscape. Her horse, that landscape. Free, for a while at least, of all encumbrance. The riding both animated her and gave her a deep sense of calm. Long hours in the saddle acted like a salve, bestowed a sense of tranquillity, gave her time to think about life, to see what mattered, what made her content.

  Carol had come on what Skip calls the “wild horse–mountain ride” with her seventy-something father. Both had been around horses all their lives. But what she had thought might be an enriching father-daughter experience — a sharing of their common love for horses — became something far more. She did not intend for the trip to be in any way spiritual, but her horse, a dun pony named Armajo, quite literally took her to a place she had never been before.

  A journey on horseback will sometimes do that. The horse, first literally and then in a deeper way, slows you down and lets you take note of land and sky. E. T. Hall in his book on human perceptions of time, The Dance of Life, once moved a small remuda of horses in southwestern America several hundred miles and was struck by the impact. It was nothing like covering the same distance in a car on a paved highway: “The horse, the country, and the weather set the pace; we were in the grip of nature, with little control of the rate of progress … it took a minimum of three days to adjust to the tempo and the more leisurely rhythm of the horse’s walking gait … I became part of the country again and my whole psyche changed.”

  Several years ago, a Canadian Broadcasting Corporation producer named Kathleen Flaherty needed a holiday. She was tired and overworked; her beloved cat had just died. Since she had always loved horses — “from afar” — she booked a weekend ride on the Skyline Trail in northern Alberta’s Jasper National Park. Flaherty liked it so much she went again a year later, this time with pounds of recording equipment.

  Her hour-long radio documentary is a striking mix of commentary and texture — horses clipping stones while crossing mountain brooks, horses whinnying to one another, the sound of horses being tacked up, the crackle of campfires and the banter they induce. Like Carol, Flaherty talks about the joys of cowboy coffee, about the vivifying effect of spending time on a horse in such grandeur.

  The slow pace of a walking horse (in her case a bay mustang named Busley), the solitude, the quiet, all work their magic. “I realize I am living exactly in this moment,” Flaherty is heard to say. “My mind finally slows d
own enough to deepen — just like my breathing.” She wonders why escape induces such euphoria, and answers her own question: “Because there is time and space to allow for contemplation and wonder.”

  The documentary ends, fittingly, with Joni Mitchell’s “Night Ride Home” and its haunting lyrics about the pure sweet power of escape.

  The strangers who gathered that first Saturday evening at Skip’s ranch near Lander, Wyoming, to meet the horses and one another all felt much the same as Flaherty did a week later. Connecting with a horse on the bald, empty prairie seemed to cleanse us.

  Carol’s father, John B., the oldest rider on the trip, lives in rural New York State. “When I am with a horse,” he wrote, “my mind becomes a complete blank other than the thought of caring for him — all my worries (if I have any) are dispatched as soon as I am with him.” He called the trip “a horseman’s dream” and he was amazed by the soundness, stamina and endurance of the Quarter Horses we rode. He struggled to put into words what it all meant.

  Tracy T., a young English rider and clearly one of the most capable equestrians among us (the reward for her skills was to be assigned a feisty Thoroughbred-Quarter Horse cross), was similarly reeling from the experience weeks later. I had sent her a copy of the photograph described earlier, which she cherished, for it “somehow managed to capture the sense of us all being overwhelmed by our surroundings.”

  Tracy had typed her note on what looked like sky — cottony clouds adrift on light-blue paper: “I still can’t tell you why Wyoming now has such a grip on me, but there is just something magical out there. Everything is tougher — the horses, the weather, the terrain.”

  Kathy C. of Connecticut wrote in her own hand a five-page letter that zeroed in nicely, I thought, on why we were all so touched. It had a lot to do, she believed, with the view — the view from a saddle: “The sense of the vastness of the land, the beauty you could never see zooming along in a car, the wildflowers and rocks, are all so special when seen from the back of a horse.” Kathy had been going west on riding trips for twelve years and she always came back feeling renewed, as if she had been to a monastery.

  Sally B.’s letter was emblazoned at the top with the computer-generated silhouette of a large black horse and, in bold lettering, “Let’s do it!” This was the phrase that Skip ritually and loudly announced at the end of a break or the beginning of the day when the horses were all saddled and the riders all set. The emphasis was on do it! He could have said, “Let’s move out!” or “Saddle up!” However, it was never anything but “Let’s do it!”

  “Oh, that week in Wyoming,” wrote Sally from home in Vermont. “It is with me all the time.”

  Fran, like Sally, wonders if in another life she was a cowpoke or an Indian. She, too, was hard pressed to find the words for that week in Wyoming defined by the horse: “Only those who were there know what that means.”

  On day one, the Sunday, we would occasionally crest a ridge and see small bands of wild horses in the next valley. No surprise, for there are some 450 mustangs roaming free in the Great Divide Basin. But we never got closer than a few hundred yards before the band’s stallion began to pace and prance and the herd soon vanished.

  I had never seen someone sit a horse as Skip did. Watching him roll cigarettes in the saddle, I imagined he might with equal grace and balance write a letter there, thread a needle, whittle a carving. He started off riding his imperious senior stallion, Mr. T. — called that because of his T-shaped blaze. But the old boy was not up to it, and when Skip switched over to a young paint horse named Spot, Mr. T., big black blue-eyed Mr. T., followed along. Or rather, led. Imposing in every way, he knew the trail as well as Skip did and had the respect, even deference, of every horse in our number.

  Skip wore brown leather chaps and boots with spurs that jangled when he walked. I rarely saw him with boots and spurs off, so below the waist he seemed unduly thick, and the jangling round spurs, ribbed like a gear, made him sound metallic on the ground. In the saddle and above the waist was another matter. His shirts were always open and cut at the shoulder; oftentimes he rode shirtless under the desert sun. The bone necklace, the small blue tattoo of linked eagle feathers ringing one bicep, the headband he sometimes wore, Apache-style hair: all created an effect. On that paint horse, he needed only a lance and leggings to take any observer into the eighteenth century when his ancestors hunted on the plains.

  The son of a Cherokee father and a Czech mother, he playfully called himself a “CheroCzech.” But it was his Indianness, not his Europeanness, that emanated from him on that trip. I had the sense of being challenged and watched over at the same time.

  Funny the things I remember about the journey: Skip’s instruction to me and the others, that first day on the high desert, not to crowd him. How unusually frank he was and how (also unusually) I took no offense by it. How I amused myself on climbs by responding to Radish’s blowing with some of my own. How wet his red flanks were at the end of those climbs and how quickly, even miraculously, he dried and recovered at the top. Radish up to his belly in a watering hole happily pounding the surface with one hoof, like a kid scissor-kicking at the end of a dock. The stark beauty of a dead oak that presided over the mountain camp. Skip’s admonition one time not to break any branches when we passed through a grove of oaks. The way he said it put me to mind of Gandalf the wizard counseling Bilbo Baggins and a gaggle of dwarves in The Hobbit as they entered an enchanted forest. I felt, and resisted, a great compulsion to do just what Skip said we should not.

  I remember the rivers — the Little Popo Agie, the Wind, the Sulphur, the Sweetwater, Crooks Creek. The towns nearby — Shoshone, Arapahoe, Lost Cabin. The geography and “points of interest” from my map of Wyoming — Split Rock, Three Crossings, the Antelope Hills.

  On that Monday, near the end of a long hard gallop I was right behind Skip as he veered to dip into a twenty-foot ravine, not slowing in the slightest. As he descended he turned and gave me this smile that conveyed a snapshot of his own character: the mischief, the joy, the daring and the dare. So you think you can ride with me, do you?

  After lunch that day, Skip suggested that those who were sore and wanted a lighter ride could head back with Bruce, one of the wranglers, because those who rode on with him would be a lot sorer at the end of the day. He guaranteed it. Along with nine others, I opted for (more) soreness. Some riders later confided to me that though they had been around horses all their lives, never had they ridden as hard or as fast as they did that day. Skip reckoned we covered forty-five miles.

  The gallops were sometimes ten or fifteen minutes long, and it was during one of these later in the day that it happened. For safety’s sake we rode cavalry-style, two abreast, up the two tracks of a dirt road through the desert. I kept at or near the lead, because Radish liked to run and because his rider disliked the taste of dust. A ridge rose on our right, then flattened out as we continued the long canter, but it was only when we neared the edge of the ridge that we saw them. Twenty-five mustangs matching us stride for stride and not more than fifty yards to our right.

  Who knows how long they had been galloping unseen on the other side of that ridge? Our own horses had no doubt sensed them, and what we had taken for high spirit was really a keenness to run with their wild brothers and sisters. If that whole week was a film in my head, this was a moment for the highlight reel. Unreal was more like it. We let out whoops; we gasped.

  Gill E., the Suffolk mother of two who had come to Wyoming with her sister Ro, remembered the gallop with the wild horses as “the most powerful moment in my life — primitive even. We were all part of one herd, pounding up the track with Skip as our leader … across that incredible landscape.”

  Led by a black stallion, with many chestnut and paint mares and several foals, the horses could have veered off at any time. They did not. We rode side by side for a few miles, then they put on a burst, crossed the road ahead of us and ran on our left for a few more miles before finally disappearing over
a hillside. How sleek they were. Skip told us that in the spring, many wild horses are thin and mangy. But not in June. After generous spring rains, the coulees still held water and the grass remained lush in the valleys. With their long manes and tails flying, these horses looked impressively healthy — as if a groom had fussed over them all morning. But no human had ever touched these horses.

  Riding alongside a herd of domestic horses would have been a thrill in itself. These, though, were wild horses, free horses, and that lay at the heart of our euphoria. “I think,” wrote J. Frank Dobie in The Mustangs, “that wild horses have more secrets than gentle ones.” The wild horse still symbolizes freedom and high spirit, and always has. Pioneer accounts, penned during wagon train treks west, point to how common it was to see free-roaming horses. Yet familiarity did not breed contempt. Trappers and travelers, settlers and soldiers, thrilled to see them as we thrilled to see them a century or so later.

  2.1 Young filly grazing: the wild horse remains a powerful symbol of freedom and high spirit. (photo credit 2.1)

  After admiring a fine sorrel stallion one day, Matt Field wrote in 1879 from the Santa Fe Trail that “a domestic horse will ever lack that magic and indescribable charm that beams like a halo around the simple name of freedom … He was free, and we loved him for the very possession of that liberty we longed to take from him.”