The Best Travel Writing 2011 - James O'Reilly [104]
For Christmas that year, my parents promised Saturday and I a fence and the following spring, I helped dig postholes all around our half-acre. Once she was loose, Saturday reverted back to her wild ways. Every time I left the house she’d whinny a greeting but as soon as I neared the fence she’d start pacing nervously and those ears would go stiff. Out in the field there was too much room for her to maneuver her feet and teeth so I couldn’t use my stall tricks to get near her. So instead, I plied her into coming to me. I would jump the fence far away from her and without looking her way begin walking slowly around the field.
I always brought a pocketful of hard candy—butterscotch, peppermint, fruity—any kind worked as long as it had a noisy wrapper. I’d walk around, ignoring my nervous pony and crinkle the candy wrappers. After a few minutes, enticed by the sound of the wrappers, Saturday would slowly sneak up behind me. If I ignored her for another minute or two, she nudge her nose against my back, begging for attention. Only then would I turn, sidle up to her neutral shoulder and say “Well hello, girl,” and give her a piece of candy.
By the following summer, Saturday had learned to play tag. I could jump the fence, go right up to her, slap her playfully on the rump and run away. Saturday would run after me, beside me, ahead of me, delighted, as all horses are, to have somebody to run with. Then she’d bump me with her nose, whirl and take off, prancing showing off her high-kneed hackney gait. My neighbors found our games highly entertaining, so much so that one of the neighbor boys hopped the fence one day, hoping to play. Saturday nearly trampled him.
Saturday did mellow with age, but not before I got years of practice saving unsuspecting children and small animals from her hooves. By watching her ears and body language, I could read her moods and with small gestures and changes in my body positioning, I could control her. Nobody was ever seriously hurt—though she did leave a tiny hoof print in deep purple on my thigh once—and I treasured her wild side.
My next encounter with the wild horses came months later, in late fall, as the first licks of winter wind swept across the high desert. After spending the summer in Montana, I was back for another winter and my return to New Mexico had felt like coming home. My footpaths still lay waiting, radiating from my home across the desert and the wind still blew from the West every afternoon, carrying the familiar scent of dry air and junipers.
But not everything was the same. Over the summer somebody had abandoned a dozen or more horses on the BLM tract, and what was two strays had become a herd. None of my neighbors knew who had dumped the horses; nobody had seen a trailer come and go. But in a few short weeks the desert began to wear under all those hooves and most of the already struggling grass was cropped close. One night the herd broke through the BLM fence and pillaged my neighbor’s barn for hay and grain. Once they were loose, the horses began roaming, creating well worn paths up and down the mesas, plundering the prairie for grass and drinking stock ponds dry.
Calls to animal control were futile. With unemployment rates in New Mexico at an all time high the agency was already overrun with unwanted horses. Even if the herd could be caught, no small task in such open, rugged country, they would almost certainly be euthanized. My neighbors who’d lost hay, grain and precious water to the marauders were told to put up fences around their own properties. This land is zoned as rangeland and the old Wild West laws still apply: roaming animals must be fenced out; they are not required to be fenced in.
New Mexico is not the only place overrun with wild horses. Parts of California and Nevada are so beset, the federal government has taken to rounding them up with helicopters. The animals are run for miles—they