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“The Luckiest Horse in Reno”
By Deanne Stillman
An excerpt from the author’s new book, “Mustang: The Saga of the Wild Horse in the American West” (Houghton Mifflin 2008)
When the men approached, the black foal might have been nursing.
Or she might have been on her side, giving her wobbly legs a rest, leaning into her mother under the starry desert sky. The band of wild horses had only recently returned to this patch of scrub; the land had been stripped bare of forage by hordes of roaming cattle and it was only in the past year that some edible plants – their seeds dropped here by migratory birds who knows when – began to green up the hills and provide nourishment for the critters which brought us all westward ho. At the sound of the vehicle, the band – all 35 horses – prepared to move and did move at once, for horses are animals of prey and so their withers twitched, their ears stiffened, their perfect, unshod hooves dug into the scrub for traction and then they began to run. The black foal might have taken a second or two longer than the others to rise. Perhaps the mare, already upright, bolted instantly, turning her head to see if the foal had followed. The headlights of the vehicle appeared atop a rise. The men were shouting and then there was another bright light – it trained from atop the vehicle across the sunken bajada and it swept the sands, illuminating the wild and running four-legged spirits as their legs stretched in full perfect extension, flashing across their hides which were dun and paint and bay, making a living mural in 3-D in which the American story – all of it – was frozen here forever, in the desert as it always is, as bullets hissed from atop the vehicle through the patches of juniper and into the wild horses of the old frontier. It was Christmas. Two-thousand years earlier, Christ had been born in a stable.
Two months later on a cold and sunny afternoon, a woman was hiking in the mountains outside of Reno.
She saw a dark foal lying down in the sagebrush, not able to get up. A bachelor stallion had been watching from a distance and now came over and nibbled at the foal’s neck. She tried to get up but couldn’t and the stallion rejoined his little band. The hiker called for help. A vet arrived and could find no injuries. As it grew dark, a trailer was pulled across the washes and gulleys until it approached the filly, about a hundred yards away and down hill.
The stars were particularly bright that night and helped the rescue party, equipped only with flashlights, lumber across the
sands and up the rocky rise where the filly was down. Four men lifted her onto a platform and carried her down the hill and into the trailer.
“She was a carcass with a winter coat,” said a rescuer. She was covered with ticks and parasites, weak and anemic. She was six months old. Two days later, at a sanctuary near Carson City called Wild Horse Spirit, two women helped her stand. But she kept falling. Over the weeks, they nourished her and she grew strong and regained muscle and she began to walk without falling down. But she was nervous, not skittish like a lot of horses are, especially wild ones, but distracted, preoccupied, perhaps even haunted.
Because of her location when rescued, which was near Rattlesnake Mountain, and because she was starving, her rescuers reasoned
that she had been a nursing foal who had recently lost her mother. Without mother’s milk, a foal can last for a while in the wilderness, sometimes as long as a couple of months.
And because a band of bachelor stallions had been nearby when she was found, her rescuers figured that they had taken her in, looking after her until they could no more, standing guard as she lay down in the brush to die. “Something made me stop,” the hiker who found the filly would later say. As it turned out, the filly was the lone survivor of the Christmas massacre and they called her Bugz.
I met Bugz in 1999 when she was about eight months old and have visited her many times. During a recent visit, she was on her way to the hospital for surgery on her right front leg, which she had been having trouble with since her arrival at Wild Horse Spirit, due to lack of nourishment as a foal. Now she had a check, or crooked, ligament, which needed to be repaired lest she develop further and perhaps life-threatening problems.
While doctors operated on Bugz, Betty and Bobbi paced the waiting room for hours, and even after word came that the operation
was over and Bugz was coming out of anesthesia, they continued to pace. The hours after surgery are touch-and-go for a horse – if they fall while getting up after an operation, they could re-injure
a leg or hurt another one and then they might have to be destroyed. But late in the day, Bugz shook off the narcotic and stood up just fine.
A few days later, she went home to Carson City.
As soon as she came out of the trailer, she was greeted by her buddy Mona, a sweet little brown mustang with a BLM freeze brand who had been abandoned by previous owners and picked up by animal control somewhere in the desert. Mona trotted to the rail of a corral and called out a welcoming sound. Bugz whinnied back and then went to her stall for dinner.
She’ll spend the rest of her years with 27 other wild horses who live at the three-acre sanctuary.
Some of the horses have been there for years, such as Sparky, who was captured by Reno Animal Control after they harried him across busy McCarran Boulevard in Reno when he wandered in off the range; others are recent arrivals, such as Cinnamon, who had been culled from the wilderness by the Bureau of Land Management and was headed for auction and then either adoption, slaughter, or life in a government sanctuary in Oklahoma, but the BLM hands couldn’t get her into the loading truck, “even with electric prods,” Bobbi told me.
Bobbi and Betty live in a house adjacent to the corrals and stalls, along with several rescued dogs and cats.
Their house is big and comfortable but can barely accommodate all the horse stuff – art, books, files and so on – that the women have acquired over the years. From early in the morning until late in the evening, Bobbi takes care of the horses along with 24-year-old Mandy McNitt, a neighbor who found refuge from her strict family at Wild Horse Spirit. Art Majeski doesn’t come by much any more, although he did recently hire a pilot to fly over the Virginia Range to see how many horses were there. He counted 68, a number that is far below the state’s estimated 500, and if accurate, would make their days numbered.
At Wild Horse Spirit, Bobbi and Mandy carry on, feeding and watering the horses twice a day, and spending the rest of their time mucking out stalls, grooming them, checking them for ailments, taking them to the vet, making repairs around the stalls and corrals, and finding additional time to hold garage money so they can raise money for feed and equipment. When their work outside is finished, they sit down with Betty and watch the horses on monitors from the living room, because some of them are recovering from injuries or wounds. Late at night, Betty is often online, informing a circuit of people of the latest news in the ongoing battle to save wild horses, and Bobbi is organizing the next day’s work. “Can I call you back?” Bobbi said one recent evening when someone called to chat. “I got two colicky horses I’m trying to get into a trailer.”
A few days later, Betty and I drove out to Lagomarsino Canyon to pay respects, see how it had changed since the massacre, how it felt, seven years later. It was spring time and here and there, the stands of sage were puffy with rain and fragrant. A visitor to the site can know part of the story, just as a visitor to Gettysburg or the Little Big Horn battlefield can bear witness but not fully. But here there are no texts to guide us; no oral histories passed down across time; just skulls and the cages of ribs and shins and intact hooves and manes and tails right where the wild horses were felled, forever preserved in the dry air of the Great Basin which birthed Nevada – mosh pit of America – godforsaken treasure chest of a state which lures big and small spenders alike with five-cent slots and high-roller events and hollow spectacles and all-night pawn and – yes! – “wild horses, just like in the Old West!” says the travel literature – “See them roam free just like they oughtta be!”
“This is horse #1,” Betty said as we walked the site, the one who had prompted the first call from animal control. She
and Bobbi named her Hope.
“She had probably been here for a day or two.” As she continued, it was like a prayer, and I knew it well. Silently, I recited it with her. “She was lying in the sand. She had dug a small hole with her front legs, intermittently trying to get up.” After awhile, we came across the horse known in the Nevada court system as #4. Like the others, Bobby and Betty had given him a name. He was Alvin - the one with the mutilated eye. “There was a stallion watching us that day,” Betty said, “just standing at the perimeter as we found each dead horse. When the sun went down and we got in our cars, he trotted on down the road. His family had been wiped out but we still didn’t know how bad it was.”
As I wandered through the cemetery, I saw that someone or something, maybe a coyote or perhaps the weather, had moved a few of
the large stones in the cross under a juniper tree that Betty had made on the one-year anniversary. To calm myself, I decided the stones must have been disturbed by a natural force – a person who
wanted to make a statement would have wrecked the shrine.
But then I noticed something new: an empty box of Winchester cartridges, lodged between the branches of a nearby tree. Winchester - the gun that won the West, the ammo that brought it to its knees – now back as a reminder, placed intentionally and possibly by the people who killed the horses.
“I think it’s time to go,” I said. As we walked back to the pick-up, a few horses walked down from a rise. Since the massacre, Betty said that she had not seen any in the canyon, and she had visited it several times a year, as a kind of a groundskeeper for the kill site. On my few visits, I had not seen any horses either, nor had I seen hoofprints, which made me think that horses had been avoiding the area because in the desert, things last for a very long time. The horses that approached were brown with black manes – the scruffy and beautiful Nevada horses that nobody asks for at adoption centers, preferring palominos and paints. We stopped in our tracks and watched them and they watched us back. After awhile, we bid them farewell. As we headed down the mountain, I turned for one more look. They were walking across the boneyard towards the stone cross, reclaiming their home.
A few hours later, at the Southwest Airline lounge in the Reno airport, I overheard one of those conversations that explained a
lot of things, a refrain really, the chorus of a song that we all know.
It had to do with the civic religion of the country, our gleeful worship of personal rights. Someone was talking loudly, in the way that only certain big people do in case you should happen to miss them, a big man with a big gut, well over six feet, in a cowboy hat and cowboy boots, on his cell phone. “Oh man,” he says, “I can’t believe this. They confiscated my ammo, I had a clip inside the steel toe of my belt and they actually made me leave it at the security gate.” He’s two seats over and in a cell phone trance, the Second Amendment with a boarding pass. “I told them I was working security at one of the casinos but they made me leave it anyway,” he says. “Can you believe that? But hey I applied for a concealed carry and I should have it next week. Hey, did you hear Al is in trouble? Yeah, lawyers have been called and a grand jury is in session. Looks like indictments are coming…Hey, I almost had me some last night. It was just there waiting for me. It’ll be there when I get back. You know, I like Reno. I like this whole friggin state.”
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