The Best Travel Writing 2011 - James O'Reilly [106]
One by one, I went around to the rest of the herd, stroking the tamer ones, giving the skittish ones a kind word from a few feet away. A couple followed me closely, pestering me for more attention, while others backed away nervously, preferring to remain untouched. I remembered my camera and snapped a few portraits. One chestnut, whom I now recognized as part of the pair from last winter, was curious about the camera and seemed to like the snap and whir of the shutter. I don’t know how long I spent with the horses, but by the end of our visit, they were searching for grass and milling about, calm and unconcerned to have me in their midst.
Back on the porch, the dogs lay quietly. I rejoined them, sat on the low porch wall, praised their calm cooperation and watched the horses. The camera curious chestnut started to approach again, but I held up one hand, palm out and stopped him. After a few minutes, the herd began wandering away, heads low, searching out the few blades of dry grass. As they left I got up quietly, jumped off the edge of the porch and retreated behind the house, out of sight. Before they could notice, the dogs and I reached the edge of the mesa and descended a steep, rocky path, one the horses would be reluctant to follow.
By December, the desert outside was cold and gray. The herd was still out there, somewhere, but I saw them rarely. A neighbor a few miles down the road was able to get reimbursed for buying a truckload of hay to feed the strays and I had heard they’d been hanging out over there, amassed together on the leeward side of a few sheets of plywood, bunched against the wind.
Nobody has any easy solutions for what to do with the horses come spring. Every now and then, especially on nice days, I catch myself daydreaming about keeping one or two for myself, taming them to carry me bitless and bareback, but I know that plan is best left a fantasy. For the winter they’ll be warmer as a herd and come spring, I’ll be leaving New Mexico and I can’t take them with me.
More than anything, I want the horses to stay on the land. Out here, the desert stretches to the horizons, unbroken by fences. If feral horses don’t belong here, in all this space, they don’t belong anywhere and I don’t want to live in an America without wild horses. Some people say there are no such things as wild horses in this country. That even those born free are mere descendents of ranch stock, pioneer horses or Spanish cavalry. Those people have never watched horses run through open space or faced down oncoming hooves while out on a hike. These horses, born captive and set free, may not be truly wild, but this desert is a wilder place with them in it.
Mary Caperton Morton is a freelance science and travel writer, photographer, and professional housesitter. In the past five years she has lived in nine states—PA, OR, MD, VA, NM, MT, MI, WV, and ME—and hiked in forty-nine out of fifty. Everything she owns, including her two border collie mixes Bowie and D.O.G., fits in a little Volkswagen, and everything she really needs fits in a backpack. Follow her travels at www.marycapertonmorton.com.
JOEL CARILLET
In the Fields of My Lai
“Maybe we can start again…. We’ll start over. But you can’t start. Only a baby can start. You and me—why, we’re all that’s been. The anger of a moment, the thousand pictures, that’s us. This land, this red land, is us; and the flood years and the dust