Horse Lover

by H. Alan Day

  And show up she did, on the appointed day. I happened to be in the barn when I heard the crunch of gravel. I knew the Suburban was in the lot and John, Marty, and Russ out on horseback on the ranch. So it had to be her. A woman in jeans and boots, with a clipboard tucked under one arm, introduced herself.

  “I’d like to take a look at your horses,” she said.

  “Not a problem. We can hop in the Suburban here and go out to the meadow.”

  I asked if she wanted a cup of coffee or lemonade first, but she declined, so we got down to business.

  “You have a herd of fifteen hundred horses?” the rep asked.

  “Yes, we’ve had that many for three years now.”

  She didn’t ask the usual questions about the ranch. What’s it been like to care for fifteen hundred wild mustangs? Can you train them? Did you have to change the ranch to accommodate them? Nor did she comment on how calm they were when we drove through the herd. Her comments were more like, “Stop here for a moment,” and she would proceed to look in every direction and make notes on her clipboard. We spent a good two hours meandering the truck through the herd. She would point in the direction we should go. I’d see horses that I recognized. The big blue roan with only one eye and scars running down the left flank. The squatty chestnut mare, one of the smallest horses in the herd. And the palomino sisters. These were a few of the unadoptables that formed our family, and I couldn’t help but be proud of all that we had done together. As we went along, I daydreamed. A couple of times I got out and pulled on the grass. I made a mental note to tell John we’d best move the horses in three days.

  I wasn’t paying attention when the rep said go to the left. I knew the ground there was soft because a spring ran nearby, and what did I do but drive right into the mud. I felt the truck sink. No way could I drive it out. I put my arms over the wheel and looked up at the bright sun above. Good thing it wasn’t raining.

  “Well, it’s almost lunchtime,” I said. “How about a little hike back to work up our appetites?”

  On the way back, we small talked about her career with the BLM and a bit about the ranch and this part of South Dakota. John, Russ, and Marty already had arrived in the kitchen when we got there. They hadn’t seen us walking in on foot. I told them about the Suburban getting stuck and said that I’d get a tractor out there after lunch and pull it out of the mud. We finished the sandwiches Debbie had set out before leaving to run errands in town.

  “Anything else you’d like to see?” I asked the rep.

  “No, I’ve seen all that I want to see. I do have a few more questions before I leave.” The boys took this as their cue to excuse themselves. She asked how difficult it was to handle the horses. Could we sort them easily? I explained we had them trained and yes, it was easy to bring them in and sort them. For a moment, I thought she might inquire as to how we had accomplished that feat.

  Instead she said, “I want you to cut seven hundred horses. Cut the largest animals by weight and size. We’ll schedule drivers to pick them up. Can you do that within two weeks?” Her placid expression seemed to indicate that this request was quite ordinary.

  But I had just been thrown on the ground in a wrestling maneuver and had the wind knocked right out of me. I stared at the sweating glass of lemonade in my hand, stunned. This is what the BLM had in mind when they called?

  “You want me to cut seven hundred horses? That’s almost half our herd.” She nodded. “What’s the BLM going to do with them?”

  “We’re putting them in the adoption program.”

  The disbelief that flooded through me had to have registered somewhere on my face. Our horses had been deemed unadoptable. They were brought to us because no one wanted them. Many of our largest horses were scarred or crippled. They were not pretty horses. If they hadn’t been adopted the first time around, they weren’t going to be adopted the second time. Unless there was another reason. I took a sip of lemonade.

  “So the BLM feels these seven hundred will be adopted?”

  The woman sitting in the chair next to me nodded yes. Her expression remained steady.

  “And it doesn’t matter if they limp or are missing an eye or have scars all over? You want the seven hundred largest animals regardless of physical abilities?”

  “That’s correct.”

  “Regardless of color? Health? Looks?”

  “Yes.”

  “You want the largest horses. The ones that weigh the most.”

  She looked down at her clipboard as if to check it and nodded. Right then I saw through it. Their transparent plan. It wasn’t even cloaked in plausibility. Earlier in the year the price of horsemeat had taken a significant jump up to eighty cents per pound. If you adopted a horse, you couldn’t legally sell it for a year, but after those twelve months you could sell it to whomever you wanted. As far as I knew, no one policed sales to make certain they didn’t happen during that first year.

  My mind scrounged for options. We had the first-ever government-sponsored wild horse sanctuary and were bestowed with the responsibility of caring for these horses. We had A ratings across the board. We had made improvements in the ranch to accommodate the horses and we were now operating a well-oiled machine. This didn’t seem to matter to the BLM. Some people somewhere saw dollar signs and were making decisions. In my opinion, which didn’t hold an ounce of water, they were the wrong decisions. The BLM owned the horses and could dictate what they wanted to do with them. I was landlocked here. I had nowhere to row.

  “Circumstances sure must have changed for seven hundred unadoptable horses to now be adoptable,” I said. If I had had eighty cents in coins in my pocket, I would have laid it on the table. As it was, the number hung in thin air between us.

  “Can you have them ready for us in two weeks?”

  I shook my head yes.

  The rep pushed back her chair and stood up.

  Her last words before climbing into her car were, “I’ll have someone call you to schedule the pickups. I’m sure it will take some time to haul the horses out. I know the trailers only carry about thirty or forty horses.”

  “Forty,” I said.

  “Forty. That would be about twenty-six trailers.” She was quick with math. She probably had already figured out that a thousand-pound horse at eighty cents per pound would bring in $800. Some buyers would be willing to pay the BLM’s $150 fee for an unadoptable, wait a year, then sell their real estate to a slaughtering house for the $800. The BLM could get rid of horses, which they were always trying to do. The spirit of the law said horses couldn’t be slaughtered and technically the BLM was honoring that spirit. But the veil was sheer. This was slaughtering with a straw man in between.

  I watched her drive away. She hadn’t been friendly or unfriendly. She was doing somebody’s bidding, but I didn’t know whose and suspected I never would. This was a huge shift in policy that would not receive any fanfare or public announcements. Perhaps if I were the muckraking type, I could dig around for a trail and go sniffing along it, then raise hell. But I preferred the smell of healthy green grass and the animals that fed on it. In my mind, the sanctuary was a permanent home for unfortunate horses. At the moment, though, it felt more like a pawn on the government’s chess table. I shifted my thoughts away from the game and onto the needs of the horses.

  I climbed onto the tractor and swung it toward the stuck Suburban. For the first time, I was glad that Happy was no longer here.

  That night I talked to John. We had a new issue to face. In less than a day, our thriving, profitable ranch had lost 50 percent of its income. What effect would this have on our future? We needed to do something to keep the ranch solvent and running. We had the water tanks, windmills, grass, corrals—so much had been improved on the ranch.

  “Maybe I could lobby for more horses,” I said to John. He took a long drink of beer and shrugged his shoulders.

  “I’m not sure you can count on the government to give you more. Seems like they’ve been taking away a lot mo
re than they’ve been anteing up.” He looked as skeptical as I felt. It was hard to dredge up the energy to think of dealing with the BLM to get more horses. “What about running cattle?” he said.

  I had thought about this. We had a ranch designed for horses, but we could make some changes to accommodate cattle. We could replace the seven hundred horses with about one thousand head of cattle. Did I want to do that? Not particularly. Did I need to do that? The bottom line voted “yes.”

  It took us six hours to sort the seven hundred largest horses. Once that task was completed, we turned the remainder of the herd out in the pastures and kept the selected horses in the corrals until the BLM’s two contracted trucks arrived. We’d load the trucks then wait for their return. It took seventeen loads and one month to haul them all away. The horses went out to five separate adoption centers. I never heard whether or not they all got adopted and didn’t have the heart to ask.

  I didn’t call the congressional representatives who had sponsored our bill. They might have spoken to the BLM and objected to the whole thing, but I retained a sense of optimism. Time and again we’d proven ourselves good caretakers of the horses. If the BLM now had a better plan for caring for horses, I had no objection. I was interested in the well being of the animals, not in the underlying politics. For some reason, the BLM didn’t take any of Dayton’s horses. I never found out why.

  Since the horse herd was cut in half, our ranch was now under-stocked. I couldn’t get the BLM to talk to me about bringing us more unadoptable horses, so John and I started gearing up to bring in cattle. It’s more difficult to run a ranch operation with two different types of livestock. When all we had was horses, we could focus on them at all times. Cattle need as much, if not more, attention than horses.

  The eight hundred remaining horses still looked stately out on the pasture and I still loved them, but I could feel a hole, a disconcerting emptiness. I needed a friend. Aunt Jemima. She would be the perfect companion right now. I drove down to Lazy B, loaded her in the trailer, and hauled her up to South Dakota. I’m not sure if it was a good thing or a bad thing for her, but for me, it had the flavor of a family homecoming. I put her in a stall next to Clyde.

  Marty took one look at her and said, “All your Arizona horses so small?”

  “She may be small,” I said, with a brush of irritation, “but she has a huge heart. Takes up half the space in her.”

  The South Dakota horses were bigger in every way, including having hooves like paddles that could ride the sand like snowshoes. Jemima’s hooves, however, were made to traverse the rocky terrain of Lazy B. For her, traversing the prairie was like walking on a sandy beach. When she took a step, her hoof sank a good five inches. Pushing off the soft soil required different muscles and extra energy. Consequently, the other ranch horses could travel faster and farther. Although I couldn’t take Jemima out on long days, we did quite a little work together on easier days.

  Shortly after Jemima arrived, I purchased four hundred head of cattle. One day the boys and I rounded up a group of cows and herded them into headquarters. I was riding Jemima and she was happy to be in her element. We had pushed the cows against the gate and they were just about to go through it into the corral when a little doggie calf bolted away from group. We knew this little guy. His mama had died when he was quite young, and he had survived by sneaking up on nursing cows and stealing their milk. Often a cow won’t pay much attention to a nursing calf, assuming it’s her own. In this fellow’s case, when the cow took notice of him, she kicked him away and wouldn’t share her milk. The calf was smaller than he should have been, but he was a feisty little survivor. Before we knew it, he had run over to the swamp on the other side of the corrals and jumped in. He splashed out in the muddy water happy as could be.

  Aunt Jemima saw the doggie turn out from the bunch. She just wasn’t about to let that calf get away, so boy, she went right after him. She raced right up to the edge of the swamp and without a second of hesitation jumped in with me still in the saddle. Jemima swam toward the calf playing in the reeds on the far side. Her legs churned and she grunted. A big hump of grass stuck out of the water in front of her. Maybe Jemima thought she could get a foothold on it because she swam right up to it. Her momentum pushed her on top of the island and there she sat, high-centered and stuck, her circling legs unable to dig into the mud or propel her forward. I slid off and got wet clear up to my neck, but I was able to pull her off sideways and drag her to a place where she could get some traction. I was laughing and trying not to swallow water.

  After all this commotion, the calf decided that he had had enough of us chasing him around so he splashed over to the swamp’s edge and scrambled out. Aunt Jemima followed him and slogged out, dripping water. The cowboys witnessed the entire event and had a few remarks when I rode up covered in mud. I got a kick out of Aunt Jemima showing her big heart. She wasn’t going to let that calf get away and would have followed him to hell and back. That was Jemima, though. She got the job done. That was our shared philosophy: you do what is required of you, even when you might not want to do it.

  18.

  Order to Kill

  Rather than accompany John Pitkin out on the range after lunch to repair a windmill, I remained at headquarters. Jerry Norbert had called a few days before and scheduled a visit for 2:00 p.m. In preparation for today’s visit, Jerry had asked me to identify the twenty-five horses that were oldest and in the poorest condition and pen them for inspection. It had taken half a day to drive our current herd of eight hundred horses into the corral, sort out the twenty-five oldest, and return the rest to the range. The BLM operated on shifting sands, so I had no idea what Jerry had in mind and he hadn’t offered an explanation.

  The day was chilled around the edges with a lackluster gray sky, normal for early November. A cloud of dust rising above the road signaled Jerry’s arrival. I met him at his pickup to shake hands and exchange a few pleasantries.

  “Let’s go see those horses,” he said.

  We walked through the large corral, the red barn on our left, then through a second, smaller one and into a third, square corral about a hundred feet wide. I shut the gate behind us. Jerry eyed the horses. Their ribs rippled under scruffy and dull coats and hipbones stuck out. The average age probably hovered around twenty-three or twenty-four years. They were eating good feed, but due to lack of appetite or weakened digestion had started to thin. They were approaching the end of their road.

  “If you don’t mind, I’ll drive out and take a look at the rest of the herd,” said Jerry. I busied myself in the barn for the forty-five minutes he was gone. I had just finished brushing Clyde when he returned.

  “Clearly, Alan, you cut the thinnest horses out,” he said from the doorway, “just like we asked.” I put the brush down, patted Clyde, and stepped out into brighter light.

  Jerry looked back toward the penned horses a few corrals beyond us. “Now we need you to euthanize them.”

  I didn’t move. Neither did my brain. It was trying to wrap around what it heard. I felt it resist like a horse resisting an open gate.

  “Jerry, my contract with BLM doesn’t call for me to be killing horses,” I managed to say. This wasn’t a mere shift. This registered as a major quake on the horse care Richter scale. I scrambled to maintain my footing. “Why don’t we continue doing what we did last year? Let them die when nature calls.”

  Jerry rubbed one of his elbows. “My orders are to kill the oldest, thinnest horses,” he said.

  My conscience wasn’t accepting his orders.

  “Look, we had no problems last winter. What do we accomplish by killing these horses?”

  “I was told to have you euthanize them. Life is no longer any fun for them.”

  What was running through the minds of these people? What right did we have to assume life wasn’t any fun for them?

  “I didn’t have an issue the first year when your bosses said cut out the oldest and thinnest and give them extra care. We di
d that. They didn’t have to compete with younger, more aggressive horses. Goddamnit, they stayed healthy all year.” My voice was growing louder. “Then you tell me to cease and desist that game plan. So we treated all the horses the same and some of the old ones died. Okay, so Mother Nature won. I’m fine with that. She always wins. But now you want me to outright kill twenty-five breathing, living horses?”

  Jerry nodded. “It’s an efficient way to deal with them. There’s no reason for these horses to suffer.”

  And here I thought giving extra feed and attention to the older mustangs was a kinder, gentler way of taking care of them.

  “This sanctuary was set up to give comfort and care to the horses and treat them better than they were treated before. You’re telling me to kill them. That’s just contrary to the tenet of the whole sanctuary. I can understand euthanizing crippled horses or horses in pain. The quality of their life is questionable. But I don’t know about arbitrarily playing God and killing horses just because they’re old.”

  All I could think of was that they were taking me out of the care business and putting me in the kill business. It was like telling a doctor to kill a patient who hadn’t requested to be euthanized.

  “It’s been decided, Alan.”

  A fly buzzed past my ear. It was too late in the year for flies to be out. It landed on my arm, and I watched it crawl, slow and lethargic with ugly black eyes. I brushed it away.

  “If you want the horses killed,” I said, my voice barely audible, “you’ll have to do it yourself.”