Newhorse

It was debated and decided. We would not adopt another horse. Not this year.

Our reasoning was sound. Despite our intentions, the Ranch just wasn’t as ready as we’d hoped. Fencing wasn’t complete. Dominion Energy was late to run line to the well. The silvopasture was finished but unproven. The pasture grass was endeavoring but embattled. Plus: our client list was growing, obligations were multiplying, hours were too few and too short.

We needed another horse, yes. For larger groups, a fourth was imperative. For contingency planning, a fourth was wise. For our efforts to build a sustainable herd, a fourth was essential. For the wild beasts who had been taken from their native home for ill-considered reasons, a fourth was moral obligation.

On that last point… should we explain? We shall. Bear with us.

In 1971, Congress declared America’s wild horses “living symbols of the historic and pioneer spirit of the West” and promised to protect them as an integral part of the public lands they inhabited. It was a rare and beautiful recognition, to say that these animals belonged not merely to history, but to our landscape. They had a claim on the country itself, they were saying.

And didn’t they? Can you imagine this nation without the horse? Every field, every farm, every road, every building, every city, every war, every thing — it was all done in partnership with a horse. These days, our technomonopolists send rockets into space and still judge their power in units of horses.

In the decades since, that promise has been hollowed out almost beyond recognition. Wild horses are now confined to a fraction of the public lands managed by the Bureau of Land Management, while cattle and sheep graze across a vastly larger territory under thousands of federal permits. Even within designated herd areas, horses are often made to compete with privately owned livestock for forage and water. And when authorities claim “this land can’t sustain all these creatures!” can you guess who gets declared excessive? The salable cattle or the symbolic horse?

The wild horses are removed. Hence the helicopters.

Herds are driven for miles across rough country, the blades of the choppers mere meters above their panicked heads. Families are separated. Foals lose their mothers. Stallions lose the bands they have fought to protect. The survivors are loaded into trailers and transported to holding facilities, where tens of thousands now live at public expense, removed from the only home they have ever known.

The BLM describes this as a population-management problem. We see something more fundamental. It’s a conflict over who public land is for, and whose interests carry the most weight. An agency charged with protecting wild horses also operates within a system deeply shaped by the livestock industry and by our immense appetite for beef. The land is public. The grazing is subsidized. The profit is private. And again and again, the horses are the ones asked to leave.

Thanks for reading this far.

For us, adopting one of these animals carries a moral dimension. We cannot restore the range he or she lost. We cannot return family or undo the fear of capture. But we can give land, companionship, safety and a life in which a horse is no longer regarded as expendable.

And so, having decided resolutely to not get a horse this year, we ventured to Doswell fairgrounds anyway. There, every year, the BLM brings dozens of wild horses and burroughs to auction. See them there, these wild beasts from the West, now confined in the East. See them in their curiosity and impatience, their pacing the perimeter, their huddling with what remains of their familiar herd.

These are not the horses of stock photos. They are not skeletal Thoroughbreds or statuesque Quarterhorses or smooth-gated Highlanders or muscular Morgans. They are shorter. More compact and athletic, their manes and tales and conformation don’t ask for race tracks or pastures. The build is built for high desert, rocky badlands, spare wilderness. To them, the rolling, green-grass, wooden-fence paradise of Albemarle County, Virginia is an alien landscape.

And we humans are aliens too.

We went to Doswell on Day 2, when the horses stomping under the big fans in the massive steel arena are the ones unclaimed. On Day 1, the crowds are larger, and the bidding is sometimes fierce. Horse lovers and ranch owners and equine therapists and mustang advocates convene. A peculiar mix of humans whose interest in horses has nothing to do with racing or breeding or other means of maximizing capitalist value. Mustangs resist such reduction and extraction. If you want a mustang, you want it for relationship. It will never outrun a Thoroughbread, outdance an Arabian, outwork a Tennessee Walker.

A mustang will, however, break your heart. A beast that wasn’t bred for your use, wasn’t designed to deliver, wasn’t programmed to perform. A mustang is an encounter with a true Other, a species we approach with the rare remaining sense of mystery and encounter. To stare a Mustang in the eye is to see the Wilderness staring back.

On Day 1, a man bought a horse. He bid and bid again and outbid at last on a gray stallion from Adobe Town, Wisconsin, approximately five years old. Each day of those years spent in colorful clay badlands, sheer rims, towering spires. He ran daily at elevations a mile and a half above Doswell. Why, the stallion must have wondered, did he never feel tired here? In the strange humidity and oddly flat land they call Virginia?

The man would never be able to answer. On the morning of Day 2, he called to say he could not take the horse. And so the gray stallion remained, in limbo again.

He was unmissable. His skin a speckled flint. His mane a curtain over his eyes. Compact, muscular, an equine equivalent of a gymnast.

We had decided. Not this year. We had said all of this to each other, and we had meant it, and we believed we would drive home from Doswell with only ourselves.

We did not drive home alone.

Now there is a fourth horse in our herd. He did not wait for our readiness. (Neither, I guess, did we.

We cannot give him back the mile-and-a-half air of Wyoming, the clay and the rimrock and the running for no reason but the running. We cannot give him back the herd the helicopters broke apart, or the mother he may or may not remember, or the stallion's version of a life he was living before someone decided the land could not hold him. What we can give him is smaller than that and, we hope, not nothing: a place to stop moving. A fence that means safety instead of capture. People who will not ask him to be fast, or graceful, or profitable. Only to be, as he already so completely is, himself.

Welcome home.