Horse Lover

by H. Alan Day

  “We’ll sort it out when I get there,” I said. “Right now I need to check the weather, make a flight plan, and top off the fuel tank. I’ll be wheels up within the hour.”

  I hung up and flopped back on my pillow. Sue burrowed next to me.

  “Doesn’t sound good,” she said. I looked at the ceiling, so white and clean, like fresh snow. A sliver of hopeful sunshine ran its length. Who would have thought of horses falling through melting ice? This wasn’t in the handbook of my upbringing.

  “I’ll make a burrito and fill a thermos of coffee. You can take them on the plane,” Sue said.

  I rolled over and hugged her. Sustenance before the storm.

  Flying twenty thousand feet above the problems of the world for four hours afforded me time to think. The problem was I didn’t know what to think. Had I been careless? Or was this an unavoidable act of nature? We always watched the weather reports for winter storms, but in this case we should have been watching for a warming trend. If the possibility of this tragedy wasn’t on my radar screen, was I liable for it? And what exactly did “liable” mean?

  The plane’s wheels touched down on the dry runway. The midafternoon sun splayed its golden rays between islands of gray clouds. The icy air gave no indication that its warmer cousin had been in town. By now the pond probably had refrozen. Knowing that I would soon see the herd and the victims and be able to assess the situation soothed my anxiety.

  An hour later, John and I powwowed in his kitchen over hot coffee.

  “First, a bit of bad news,” said John.

  “Like there hasn’t been enough already?”

  He smiled in a weary sort of way. “One of the mares tried to jump the fence when that chopper was buzzing around, but she didn’t quite clear it. Marty and I found her caught in the barbed wire. She was already dead.”

  Early on, we had noticed the horses react to the sound of a helicopter. If they heard even a distant thump, thump, thump, they would gather and go to running. I could just see it. The news helicopter circling, low and buzzing, just like when the same angry bird captured the horses in the wild. Surely they panicked and ran blindly in all directions, haunted by this past life nightmare. The pilot probably had no clue about the fear he incited. All he saw below was a bunch of wild, crazed, presumably untrained horses. Here I was trying to protect the horses and keep them as stress free as possible. If there was cruelty to animals, it was that fucking helicopter. What was that county attorney thinking, going to the media before we had a chance to talk? Especially since the drowning didn’t seem to be an unprecedented event.

  “Tell me about what happened at the Randall Ranch,” I said. The details might be fodder for tomorrow’s meeting.

  John relayed the sad story. Eight years ago, in the middle of January, a big norther blew in and whipped its white fury on the land for three days. The Randall steers were in a pasture north of a large lake, but the blizzard dropped so much snow it covered all the fences. The cattle drifted southeast, away from the storm, right over those concealed posts and barbed wire. The entire herd tramped out onto the lake. One thousand cattle weighing in at six hundred pounds each. The ice gave way and the cattle crashed through into the frigid water and drowned. No one charged the owner with wrongdoing for the simple reason he had done nothing wrong. He ultimately paid for the accident with bankruptcy. Lost his ranch and ended up moving to a different state.

  “It happens,” said John. “That’s the worst case I know of. And no one said anything beyond ‘I’m sorry for your loss.’”

  My heart went out to this stranger, this fellow rancher who succumbed to what can be a blessing or a curse: the weather. Sometimes the clouds roll in on cue and other times they leave you high and dry. I looked out the window. The sun was calling it a day. I’d have to postpone a visit to the pond until tomorrow, though first on the agenda would be a meeting with the county attorney.

  I walked over to the kitchen phone and dialed the number on the card the county attorney had given John. He was unavailable, so I left a message saying we would be there by nine o’clock the next morning.

  Debbie came in to start dinner, with Megan skipping behind her. “Megan, set a place for Alan.”

  Megan opened a cabinet and took out placemats. “You sit here tonight,” she said, laying one in front of me, “and I’ll sit here.” She laid another placemat next to mine.

  “I wouldn’t want to sit by anyone else but my girl,” I said. It was a comfort at a time like this to be surrounded by people who cared.

  John and I retired to the family room to watch the news. The county attorney had been effective in his media campaign. The local CBS station reported that more than a dozen wild horses had drowned in a pond outside of Winner, South Dakota. Alan Day, owner of Mustang Meadows Ranch, was being investigated for animal abuse, the newscaster said over a clip of the horses filmed from the helicopter. The mustangs ran in all directions, manes and tails flying, as frantic as I had imagined. Distraught from abuse, a viewer might conclude. So much for my mitigating any further damage to the situation; the intensity had just quadrupled. The local news ended and the national news began.

  Halfway through the broadcast, Debbie called us to dinner. John was about to turn off the TV when the newscaster said, “And now from South Dakota, a tragedy on a government-sponsored wild horse sanctuary.” Good grief. A wire service must have picked up the story. Millions of eyes around the country saw the same dramatic images of panicked horses. I almost could hear the collective groan from the BLM executives watching the news from their homes. It echoed mine. Definitely not the publicity I had described to the BLM back in DC.

  John flipped off the TV. The New Year was less than forty-eight hours old and already it had snowballed into an avalanche.

  I have participated in negotiations with tension levels ranging from one to ten. Even those strung taut with anger and anxiety managed to start with a protocol of pleasantries. A hello and shaking of hands, an offer of coffee and a chair. Except for an unemotional handshake, the pleasantries at the county attorney’s office in Winner were frigid. Even my “How you doin’?” didn’t elicit a response from the stern-looking man fortressed behind his desk. John and I pulled up chairs and sat down. I sensed it was up to us to get the conversation rolling.

  “I received the call about the horses yesterday morning at my Arizona ranch,” I said. “Within forty minutes I was in my plane. It took the better part of the day to get here, but here I am, eager to sort out any problems we have.” The county attorney’s face could have been chiseled in the granite of Mount Rushmore. “But you’re going to have to help me, because I’m not sure exactly what those problems are.”

  Starchy silence filled the room. I forged ahead. “John mentioned that you had been out at the ranch yesterday morning and saw the horses in the pond and made some statements to the press about possible criminal activity. I saw the segment on the news last night. Local and national.” This time the man on the other side of the desk nodded. “But I’m having a hard time grasping just what the criminal activity is. How do horses breaking through melting ice translate into a legal or moral or emotional crisis?”

  “The newscast was correct. We are proceeding with a criminal investigation.”

  “I don’t understand. What possible criminal activities could there be?”

  “Mr. Day, there’s no reason for you to be here talking to me. You’ll have to wait for the investigation.”

  “That’s fine. I’ll wait,” I said, my voice filling the room. “But there has to be something you’re investigating.”

  The county attorney huffed like he was dealing with some sort of remedial student. “Our office has cause to believe that the horses under your care are being starved, which would constitute cruelty to animals. We don’t know what we’re going to uncover here. We are proceeding with an investigation.”

  If a person can go into shock two days in a row, I did. What did this noodlehead know about our operation? “Th
ose horses are fed and watered each day. We’ve had them for three years and we’ve never missed a day feeding them.” The man on Planet X sitting on the opposite side of the desk gave me a cool stare. “I’m not sure what your goal is here or why you’re even involved,” I said.

  “This happens at least every five to ten years when we get a sudden thaw,” said John. “Livestock fall through the melting ice and drown.”

  The attorney didn’t bite. “If you’re abusing them, I intend to put you in jail, Mr. Day.” He glared me down like I was a danger to society and we would all be safer if I was off the streets and in prison. He didn’t even bother to fake remorse for the death of the animals. “I want to postmortem six horses to determine if they’re malnourished.”

  This guy had his legal pistol cocked and aimed at me. But what the hell was there to find? Only horses with full stomachs, certainly.

  “I have no issue with that,” I said. “Give me the name of your vet, and we’ll get them over as soon as we cut them out. The cold last night froze them and I suspect they’re in about two feet of ice.”

  He reached for a pad of paper and pen.

  “How will I know when this investigation is over?” I asked.

  “The statute of limitations is seven years. You’ll know by then,” he said. He scribbled on the paper and pushed it across the desk.

  John nodded in recognition of the name. “I know where his office is,” he said.

  I tapped the paper on the desk. “I still don’t understand,” I said, truly clueless to what this guy was thinking and planning. “How long is this investigation going to take? Seven years?”

  The lifted chin, the cool stare. “We’ll come for you with handcuffs if we want to press charges,” he said and stood up.

  No pleasantries concluded the meeting.

  I climbed into the pickup’s cab mystified. What was this fellow after?

  “You’re a big fish around here, Alan,” said John when I shared my befuddlement. “If our friendly county attorney lands you in jail, he can slap that on his resume and present it to voters. It’s like saying, ‘I brought in the bad guy, vote for me.’”

  That thought had never even occurred to me. I was just doing my job. But now, as I was doing it, I stood face to face with someone intent on using this tragedy to stoke his career ambitions rather than balancing the scales of justice. Locking me up behind bars was just the fuel to fan his campaign flames. I felt like I was being profiled and convicted before being tried. But what ground did he have for charges?

  “John, did you feed those horses every day?

  “Hell yes. You know we feed them every day.”

  “And are you feeding them the full ration of thirty pounds of hay per day?

  “Yes, of course. We never miss a day.”

  “Well goddamn, he’s punching at air.”

  We ate a quick lunch at the house, then loaded the pickup with chainsaws, boards, ropes, chains, and other tools we might need. John drove the big blue Ford tractor with the front-end loader attached, and we convoyed across the frozen prairie. The fresh dusting of snow on the road wouldn’t sit still in the wind. We bumped along the icy ground, the wipers smearing tiny flakes across the pickup’s windshield. Thankfully the clouds were not predicted to drop much snow. Three gates and thirty minutes later we entered the leased pasture, the scene of the supposed crime.

  The pond lay over a few hills and to the left. The dark silhouettes of eight hundred less fourteen horses dotted the meadow. We had not discussed moving the herd. Even with the drowning, no rancher would have moved horses in the middle of winter away from a meadow with blocked-up hay and fresh water.

  John and I walked out onto the semiclear ice. Dark, eerie shapes lay under its surface. I could make out blurred manes and tails, legs bent at odd angles, horses layered on top of each other. The side of one horse tilted downward like a submarine going under, its head out of sight. We walked, looking through the ice like you look through a glass-bottom boat. I thought of Candy and the waves from one panicked horse. Imagine thirty, forty, or perhaps, as John suspected and a neighbor reported, several hundred horses fighting for their lives in frigid waters. God, it must have been pure pandemonium for what—five, ten minutes? For a moment I heard the hollow cracking of ice and the panicked snorts, the high-pitched whinnies pleading above the turbulent splash of water. Then stillness. Even with the wind howling its grief, there would have been that stillness. I had experienced that stillness once and would never forget its empty sound.

  We unloaded the truck. I fired up a chainsaw and pushed the screaming blade into the ice near the rump of the horse closest to the surface. Cutting around it was easy work. Lifting the animal-embedded ice block proved trickier. First, we had to get a chain around some part of the horse. That meant dunking our arms up to the elbow in the icy water so we could finagle the metal links around a leg, a neck, a hip. The ice had refrozen to two feet thick, but water slopped up and over our boots. Once the chain was secure, we could attach it to the tractor and pull. Sometimes we needed to pry a body part lose from the ice or another horse with a board or set the board at an angle below the horse so we could leverage it onto a clear area. There, we’d chip away ice chunks around the carcass, then drag it to shore. Slipping and sliding and sweating, we improvised and became more efficient as we went. We didn’t dismember one horse.

  Four hours later, we hauled the last horse ashore. I had accumulated a lifetime quota of this job. Using the tractor’s front-end loader, we stacked six horses in the trailer behind the pickup. Enough afternoon remained for John to transport them to the vet. He headed out the back way, not bothering to return to headquarters to change his wet jeans. In the cowboy handbook, personal comfort takes the backseat to getting the job done.

  I climbed in the tractor cab and blasted the heat. Maybe someday I’d wise up about buying ranches in this climate.

  Debbie, bless her heart, invited me to dinner again. The hearty smell of beef stew and the kids’ chatter about their first day back to school seeped like fresh springwater into the part of me that had drained since leaving Arizona. We all gathered to watch the local news. It concluded with a story about Mustang Meadows Ranch. Here we go again, I thought. But the newscaster slid a surprise in front of us. She said the station was retracting its story about the wild horses being mistreated. Upon further investigation, it was determined that the horses received regular feed and water but had accidentally broken through thawing ice. These are the ravishments of winter on the plains, she said, a travesty that couldn’t be avoided. She looked appropriately solemn.

  What constituted “further investigation” beat me. As far as I knew, in the past twenty-four hours the wind hadn’t blown in any reporters, detectives, or strangers to dig up new information. This mystery I welcomed; it didn’t threaten handcuffs. Maybe the county attorney had tuned in to the broadcast.

  Later that evening in the doublewide, the phone rang. Expecting it to be Sue, I was surprised to hear a neighbor’s voice. He extended condolences about the drowning.

  “I saw the story on the news, and it irritated me a good piece. I know you boys are out there feeding those horses every day. So I went and called up the station and told them just that. I’m pretty sure there’s a few other folks around here did the same thing.”

  Gotta love neighbors coming to the rescue with a phone call. I didn’t need a more temperate climate. This one had more warmth tucked in it than I realized.

  The vet completed the autopsies the next afternoon, and John drove back to fetch the carcasses. The vet told John that the report he would turn into the county attorney would say all the horses had hay in their stomachs and a layer of fat over their backs. John unloaded the six next to the other dead horses at the edge of the pond. Now fourteen mangled horses needed to be disposed of. The BLM owned the horses; it was their call what to do with them. I had been keeping the manager of the Sturgis office abreast of events. He knew what kind of program we ran on Mustang M
eadows Ranch and, despite the fifteen minutes of sour publicity, offered me the agency’s full support. I rang him to share the vet’s findings.

  “Well, darn, if that isn’t finally some good news.”

  “No kidding,” I said. “But now we have to do something with the carcasses. They’re lying out there next to the pond.”

  “What do you suggest we do with them?” he asked.

  I had been grappling with this conundrum earlier in the day. The last thing I wanted was for some politically motivated person to send a shutterbug out to sensationalize the utterly gruesome pile of horses in a photo story with my name smeared across the front of it. “I suggest you tell me to bury them and to do it as soon as possible.”

  He didn’t skip a beat. “Alan, you need to bury those horses and do it tomorrow, if not sooner.”

  I called the county attorney next. “The BLM has instructed me to bury the horses and I wanted to let you know that I’m going to be doing that tomorrow morning.”

  “That’s tampering with evidence, Mr. Day. I could have you arrested for that,” he said, still prancing around like a cock sure of winning the fight.

  “Well, then you best take it up with the BLM, because they own the horses. Or get yourself a cease and desist order because I’ve been given orders by my contractor and I aim to follow them.”

  “We may need to come out and dig them up if we need evidence.”

  “Then you do that, but right now, I want to get them buried. There’s no humane reason to keep them above ground.”

  I felt like I had called his bluff. I owned the ranch. I signed the BLM contract. And now I was being proactive and calling the shots. Still, I didn’t trust the man for a minute. He might just show up.

  I knew exactly where to bury the horses—on the land adjacent to the leased pasture where they had drowned, between the first set of hills in a fairly level swale. Other than a concrete foundation, the remnant of a small barn or maybe a cowpoke’s home, it was pure prairie. John had moved the horses out there already and offered to help dig the hole, but I didn’t want to drag him any further into this mess. The buck stopped with me, and this part was all mine. I suggested he hang around headquarters. If the county attorney showed up, he could give him a lift in the pickup out to the pasture. “Offer him a cup of coffee first,” I said.