The Island Ponies & The Real Mustangs

First, from the Raleigh NC News & Observer:

A wild horse that roamed North Carolina’s Outer Banks has died, a group that manages her herd says.

The mare, nicknamed Dusty, died at age 25, the Foundation for Shackleford Horses wrote Saturday on Facebook. She was “one of the grand dames of the wild herd” that lives on the Shackleford Banks, which is the southernmost island on Cape Lookout National Seashore. . . .

“Rest well, run free, old girl,” the group said of Dusty’s death.

More than 100 wild horses live on Shackleford Banks, according to the National Park Service, which co-manages the herd with the foundation. . . . .”

I once visited another “wild” band, on Assateague Island, another link in the same outer banks chain with its own band of “wild” horses.

I remember it well. The horses stood around, lounged really, under the watchful gaze of uniformed park rangers. They let my kids walk up and stroke their long necks. Numerous signs told us what to do and not do around them, especially not feed them. The feds made sure they got proper nutrition. About the only thing they had to fear was hurricanes.

When we left, the kids were puzzled at my dismissive comment: “They’re not ‘wild horses,’” I snorted. “They’re Welfare Ponies.”

This disdain reflected memories of my other previous visit with such a band, which happened in 1977, almost 3000 miles west, under starkly different conditions: not the cosseted, beach-surrounded, foundation-protected eight square mile sliver of Shackleford. Instead they roamed a vast chunk of windswept & sunburnt high desert, almost 900 times as large. There was more wilderness in all directions beyond it. No upscale shorefront condos over the next rise; instead threats of death on every side.

Starvation and thirst stalk them relentlessly,  as do hunters with battered cowboy hats, well-oiled rifles, and utter contempt for any government beyond (maybe) a distant county sheriff. Most of the land is federally-owned, and land management agents were scattered across the region, but they kept a low profile, and were not from the National Park Service.

Recalling  the expedition into these other horses’ domain,  the phrase that comes to mind  is from the gospel, of John, The Wind Bloweth Where It Will.   Let me explain why.

Northern Nevada, Summer 1977

It was like living a frontier Disney movie.

“Stallions,” said cowboy Fred.  “Stallions are tough.  Tough to catch, tough to hold, and tough to place.”

I glanced  up at him from the fading campfire, then down at my reporter’s notebook.  I could almost read  it in the brilliant starlight.  

We were sitting somewhere in the middle of the Owyhee Desert,  70 miles northeast of Winnemucca (230 from Reno) in north central Nevada.  The sharp scent of  sagebrush mixed with smoke in the warm late summer air.  The sky was velvet black, stillwater clear, with endless numbers of stars.  Now and then a coyote howled  in the night’s distance.

Fred swigged from a can of  warm beer. “I was up at Palomino Valley last month,” he said.  “North of Reno,  where we keep the horses.  Big corrals.  People come and adopt them.  Most of `em, anyway.  Big old stallions are usually too mean to get adopted.  Had some trouble with a big one.”

The cowboy  sitting across from us spoke up. I didn’t know his name.

 “I remember him,”  he said.  “Huge, macho sucker. Some guy wanted him, though.  Drove all the way from Oklahoma.  Tried three times to get that horse up a chute and into his truck.   The fourth try, we got him halfway up.  Then he kicked a side panel loose and  broke out.”

Fred gestured with the can.  “Five of us chased him with lassoes all around the place.  But he finally found a  post in the perimeter fence that was leaning.  Climbed right over it, and got away into the hills.”

“What happened?” I asked.

Fred grunted.  “We fixed the fence post.  But he’s still out there.”

The other cowboy, happy to help a visiting reporter,  said,  “The guy had to drive back to Oklahoma with an empty truck.”

“We hear him some nights, “ Fred said.  “He comes down and whinnies to his mares.  They all start neighing back, and pawing at the fences.  But he’s not too lonesome.  There’s a band of 30 or 40 of them up there, and he’s probably taken charge of them by now.”

The other cowboy snickered.  “Yeah,” he said, “but his old mares are pretty well hooked on the hay drug by now.  Some of `em wouldn’t leave today if the gate was wide open.”

“Can’t blame `em,” Fred said.  He took another sip of the beer. “It’s no picnic for `em out here.  Especially in this drought.”

The differences between this scene and a Disney movie weren’t visible around the campfire, but they were real enough.  Fred and the other cowboys looked like the real thing, with rough hands, weatherbeaten faces and battered, sweat-stained hats.  Their Levi’s were faded, but from months of desert sun, not some factory’s bleaching machine.  The jeans were cinched tight with wide belts and big tooled  buckles.

But these wranglers were actually federal employees, civil service workers, with clumsy sounding titles like “range livestock specialist”.  Some of them probably knew as much about government regulations as they did about sagebrush.

Nor were we out hunting  mustangs to catch and break and actually ride.  This crew got its orders from Washington, where Congress had  decided to have some of  the wild horses running lose on these vast stretches of government-owned land captured and put up for adoption by other, non-rancher citizens. 

Meanwhile, the horses are hardy. Their numbers have grown, despite the grim weather brought on by climate change. Estimates are there may be 50,000 in Nevada, several times more than what some scientists say the land can safely support. They eat up a lot of the sparse desert flora.

The real ranchers in Nevada herd cattle, which compete with mustangs for grazing, and they don’t like the horses. They used to round them up and shoot them, or sell them for dogfood.  (I remember opening cans of dogfood with horsemeat as a boy.)

That’s illegal now; but there is reportedly still a clandestine trade of  mustangs caught, then smuggled into Mexico and sold for slaughter. In the frequent years of drought, the weather kills them off almost as fast as hunters could. The summer I visited was a very dry one.  The cowboys  I was with were actually on a mission of  mercy.  If they could catch some mustangs, they could save them.

In that campfire scene,  I might have been the closest to a Disney character: a citified reporter,  along for the ride, having an adventure I planned to turn into an article.  Or maybe a story.

The other cowboy  stood up and threw a cup of cold coffee into the fire.  It sizzled and steamed, as he said something about turning in.  I blinked.  Government employee or not, this still looked like a movie to me.

The next morning, Joe the pilot swung  the little bubble helicopter low over the waterhole, a spot of pale green on the dun of the landscape.  I hung on tight to the edge of the metal dashboard. Joe handled the aircraft with confidence.  ‘This is a lot easier than Vietnam,” he told me with a grin.  “No jungle, and nobody shooting back.”  But I was still very aware of how small we were and how hard the desert floor was.

Looking down, I couldn’t see any water, just a wide circle, dark in the middle where there was some mud left, like a bullseye in the center of  a thick outer ring .  The  edges of the ring had once been wet, too, but had long since sun-dried and cracked into an intricate crazed pattern.

Near the middle of the circle lay the whitened skeleton of a colt.  Its small sharp hooves had sunk deeply and fatally into the muck as it searched desperately for water.  Unable to move, it had been left to die there by a band that had no way to help.

The helicopter climbed again, and circled.  The desert  looked to me like an indistinct  carpet of  tawny grey flecked with dark spots of  dusty shrubbery.  But Joe knew how to read the scenery.  “There,” he pointed off to the right.

I looked, and at first saw nothing.   Then I made out a streak of dust  halfway to the horizon.  Joe gave a thumb’s up, and reached for his radio.

“They’re coming your way,” he shouted into it.  “I think I can head `em into the funnel.”

He heeled the chopper hard to the right, and I grabbed again at the handle.

Below and a couple miles to the west, a dozen or so cowboys waited, hidden in the bushes on each side of a half-mile of dry stream bed. On each side of it there was now a fence, painted to blend with the sagebursh and juniper.  The fences made the stream bed into the  long neck of a funnel, which ended in a corral around a bend.  The corral’s big aluminum pipe gate was wide open now, pulled back out of sight.

The copter closed on the swirl of dust, and  in a moment we were passing over a band of  horses, galloping  flat out across the  range, already spooked by the strange machine’s noise.

This was movie stuff for sure: hooves pounding, long  necks stretched out and manes flying.  The band extended in a sinuous line, showing colors from off white to spotted to shiny gunmetal black.

“Time to turn `em,” Joe said.  “Hang on.”

He slowed down, pulling us even with the lead horse, which I could see was a big grey one with a darker mane.  The horse in front was always a mare, I had been told, the lead mare.  She sets the direction, while the big macho stallions take up safe spots in the rear.

I was still watching her,  fascinating, when Joe hit a button on the dashboard.  Suddenly a siren shrieked from under our seats, rising and falling rapidly.  It was a sound from the heart of the city; close your eyes, and it was an ambulance or a police cruiser speeding to a scene of everyday urban violence.  Open your eyes, and it was an utterly alien intrusion on the quiet of the desert.

The lead mare seemed to flinch from it,  veering to her left and  increasing her already frantic pace.

“That’s the idea, baby,” Joe yelled over the noise, “that’s it.”  He slowed the copter again, and the band passed under us again, spreading further apart as several colts fell behind.

Joe considered the group for a moment.  Then he said judiciously, “I suppose we better turn `em a little more.  They might miss the mouth of the trap, and ruin my  whole morning.”

Pulling ahead, he banked sharply to the left, opened a  slot in the door, and dropped several small white tubes through it.  In a few seconds what seemed like gunshots  rang out below:  Bang, Bang, Bang.

Joe grinned at me.  “Great firecrackers,” he said.  “Works almost every time.

He was right. The grey lead mare had veered left again, and  the band was now closing  toward the beginning of  the dry stream bed, where  the mouth of the trap opened wide but invisibly to receive them.

Joe climbed a bit and then hovered.  The lead mare was now past the beginning of the fence.  As soon as the lagging colts had passed,  several mounted wranglers emerged from  behind a screen of rocks on either side of the gully, taking up the chase, shouting and waving their hats.

Behind them several more men scrambled across the width of the trap’s mouth, and lifted a  chest high sheet of  green plastic.  The green plastic would look like a fence with human posts if the lead mare turned the band and tried to escape back the way they came.  Once the band rounded the band and  found itself in the dead end of the corral, the big gate would be slammed shut and latched with heavy locks.

“Like a charm,” Joe said, and turned the copter toward  the camp.  “We’re done up here.”

The horses were being  loaded up for the trip to Palomino Valley when I got to the corral.  Wranglers were perched on either side of  a high-walled chute, shouting and slapping at the horses to keep them moving up and into the big truck.  I found a spot on the chute and climbed up to join them.

Dust swirled everywhere as the horses milled around the corral.  I moved down to the fence to watch them, fascinated.

Most of them were thin, even the big ones, with ribs showing through their patchy coats.  Their manes were matted and stringy.  Many had scars and scabs on their flanks.  Some were from scrapes on desert rocks, but others were from bites and kicks, as bigger horses, especially the stallions, fought for dominance in the bands.  They still looked magnificent to me, though.  Specimens of a kind of  wildness that it was almost impossible not to romanticize.  

The horses were in a blind panic.  Born wild, knowing only the harsh freedom of the desert, they must have felt as if they had been captured by aliens and were hurtling into a bottomless void.  They reared and whinnied and  dashed jerkily first one way and then another, trying to avoid the shouting, arm-waving wranglers.  But the cowboys, who knew what they were doing, kept turning them steadily toward the chute, and one by one the animals stumbled into it and up toward the truck.

A puff of breeze parted the clouds of dust momentarily, and across the corral I saw the lead mare,  the grey one with the darker mane.  She wasn’t moving with the others.  She was just standing there, trembling, her sides heaving, the muscles in her big neck bulging .  What, I wondered, could she possibly be thinking? I had no doubt there was intelligence showing in those wide dark eyes.

In a moment, the question was answered.  Most of the mustangs were in the truck now; their cries were drifting down from behind its high green plank sides.  Only a few were left in the corral.  The mare turned her head to the right, then to left, her gaze sweeping  around the high corral walls, then stopped when she saw the gate, which was almost directly opposite from where she stood.

What was she seeing?  Unlike the board fence, the gate was made of  metal pipes, a wide flattened X shape in a frame.  It was lower, and  plenty of daylight showed through it.  Beyond it the sagebrush and the hills could be seen.  Did it look to her untamed eyes like no barrier at all, like a way of escape?

All at once the mare neighed and began to run, full-speed.  She easily evaded a shoutng, hat-waving wrangler and aimed straight for the gate.  She crashed into it head on.

Her windpipe snapped like a dry twig and she recoiled into a trembling, unnaturally-angled heap.  The dust of her collision swirled around her.  Neck broken, she died almost instantly, eyes open.

A few days later, my reporting nearly finished, I went to Palomino Valley near Reno to take a last look at the newly-captured mustangs.

Fred was there, and  led me through the maze of corrals to where the band  was being kept, in a kind of newcomers’ quarantine.

The fences were high and solid here.  Just inside the gate an oil barrel had been cut lengthwise and filled with greenish water.  A moss-covered toilet tank float ball kept it full.  In the center of the corral stood two metal racks filled with hay.  Horses were munching quietly at it.  A couple paused to look at us, then resumed their meal.  Several colts sat on the ground, their thin legs tucked comfortably under them.  The scabs were still in evidence, the manes were still matted.  But the panic was gone.  They blinked calmly at us.

Fred gazed at them for a moment.  “The hay is like a hard drug,” he said.  “This here is the first regular feed and water they’ve ever had.  They get used to it real fast.  Makes `em pretty easy to gentle and train.”  He grinned.  “Most of them, that is.  The big old stallions are real hard.  `Lot of them still just want to run and fight.”

“What about the one who escaped?” I asked.

Fred glanced toward the hills.  “Still out there,” he said.  “He came down just last night, got the place all riled up whinnying back and forth to him.”

He shrugged.  “But for these horses, that’s movie stuff now.  The desert’s just a memory for them.  They’ve lost their freedom; but they’ve got a life.”

I looked back at the horses.  “Is that how it always is?” I asked.

Fred, the government cowboy, just shrugged.