Mustang

by Marguerite Henry

  “Yes!” I cried. “Just tell us, how do we go about it?”

  Mr. Slattery didn’t even have to think. “Storm the newspapers!” He clipped out his orders. “Write to every paper in the state. Get all the support you can from all the groups you can—schools, churches, clubs. The more folks who know about the plight of the mustang, the safer he’ll be. Yes, sir! That letter you wrote the lawmakers, Annie, was good strong stuff. If you can get the public as stirred up as you are, maybe . . . maybe there’s just a chance . . . ”

  I stood up to go. I could hardly wait to begin. The Slatterys stood up, too. “Come!” the Senator laughed. “You’ve got to see those little pigs before you hit out for home.”

  As I looked down at the mountain of a sow, and held one of her soft-as-silk little squealers in my hands, I knew that anyone who would protect five little pigs would surely put up a mighty battle for the mustangs.

  14. Failure at Fernley

  PA ALWAYS said, “Scatter enough seeds and some are bound to sprout.” And that’s how it was with my letters to the newspapers. Most of them probably landed in the wastebasket. But quite a few showed up in “Letters from the People” pages.

  And one sprouted bigger than a sunflower. It landed on Mark Twain’s battered old desk at the Enterprise in Virginia City. Lucius Beebe sat there now, with the old six-gun still hanging handy above it, and he made that desk roar as it used to roar in the old days when Twain had his dander up, spitting daggers and brimstone, fighting for something worthwhile.

  “Don’t shoot the horses!” Beebe shouted. “Shoot a legislator!” The words burst from him like steam. “What have the wild horses done to deserve butchery and mass extinction? The mustangers who make a living at it are savages. They enjoy being filth at five cents a pound for live horseflesh!”

  Beebe couldn’t stem the flow of his words. He didn’t want to! He rolled up his sleeves and shook his fist at the injustice. “Passenger pigeons,” his stub of a pencil growled, “used to darken the heavens with their numbers. They and the buffalo were slaughtered by the millions. For what? For blood money, that’s what! The American people will never recover from the shame of it!

  “Man!” He spat out the word. “I rightly believe animals are his superior. Man is the only thing on earth where the supply exceeds the demand. How can he justify his existence?”

  Now his voice rose to its fullest boom. “We at the Enterprise demand passage of the mustang bill. The only opposition it can possibly provoke is greed, brutality, and a total contempt for wildlife.”

  I was all out of breath when I finished reading the thunderous roar of Lucius Beebe. I couldn’t wait for Pa to hear it, so on my way home I read it to him and Mom in their steamy-warm kitchen. When I had done, Pa jumped up, almost upsetting his plate of corned beef and cabbage. He was waving his arm like he had a flag in it.

  “Rings like the Bible!” he said in awe. “Or like elegant swearing!”

  The word spread. In the heart of our cattle country, a ninety-year-old cowboy got his say-so into the Elko paper, in spite of their bitter stand against us.

  As a little string-bean boy, he’d watched wild mustangs paw and roll in waterholes.

  “It was dumbfounding,” he said, “to see what their pawin’ and rollin’ did. No masons could of sealed that bottom better. Why, it’d hold water until late summer. And in winter when snow piled deep, many’s the time I watched the horses paw and uncover feed for other animals as well as theirselves. Even their manure scatters seed and richens the land. Them mustangs ought to be kept, not kilt.”

  I saved that letter. It sounded so much like the things Pa used to tell me about horses.

  Everywhere but in Reno, the papers took a stand. Here they kept silent as mice, except for my friend Lura Tularski. She dug into the history of the horse and made the mustang as important to America as George Washington. Her column kept up a running chatter of questions and answers. How is the Quarter Horse able to beat the fastest Thoroughbred for a quarter of a mile? How can he outdash a motorcycle? How does it happen he can twist and swerve and spin on his hocks to make the best cowpony in the world? Where did he get his short back, his sturdy legs, his little fox ears? From the mustang! From the mustang! Week in, week out, she proved that mustang blood gave swiftness and stamina to the Quarter Horse, to the Morgan, to the Saddlebred, to all American breeds.

  But in spite of everything, the war grew bitter. The enemy grew stronger. The skies roared with black-market roundups. Yet even in the darkest hours I had only to gaze upon the wide sweeping plains, the walking shadows on the mountains, the meadow of bright stars at night to know again why freedom was worth the fight. Even on that day when I learned the U. S. Wildlife Service couldn’t help.

  Kindly as he could, the big square-built government man said, “Try to understand, Miss Annie. Since the mustangs were once domesticated, they are not considered wild, like birds and fish and buffalo. So for that reason—although running free for generations—they do not qualify for protection under our Wildlife Service. It’s crazy, I know; but that’s the way the law sees it.” Even on that lost day, I would not let myself give up.

  One late afternoon when I felt the mustangers were closing in on me, a stranger suddenly appeared at the office. I looked up and there he was, a swarthy mountain of a man. His eyes kept darting right and left so that I seemed to be looking at the whites of his eyes, never really seeing into the man.

  In a voice like a smothered foghorn he mumbled his name, quickly adding, “If you ever squeal on me, I’m dead.” And with his hand he made a slash across his throat.

  I shook my head, too frightened to speak.

  “I’m a truck driver. I haul mustangs to the rendering plants,” he croaked in his foghorn voice. “If I don’t move ‘em, somebody else will,” he explained with shame and confusion in his darting eyes.

  And still I couldn’t speak. He leaned over farther until I could feel his breath in my face.

  “I got my orders to pick up a load of mustangs tomorrow. At Fernley, near your ranch. They’re there now. Dead-beat and thirsty. If it’s evidence you want . . . But Jees, if you ever squeal on me . . . ”

  My hands were trembling, but my voice was steady. “I’ve just named you Zeke,” I said. “I didn’t hear your real name, but I’ll never forget your help.”

  Like a lumbering bear he was out of the office, and gone.

  That night I raced for home. We had to work fast. Charley and I both knew the spot at Fernley. We used to check it often for captured horses. But since the meeting at Virginia City the place had been deserted as a graveyard.

  We didn’t bother about our own supper. We filled our old pickup truck with hay and buckets of water, and drove out the ditch road, with the canal yawning on one side and the Truckee on the other.

  It was dark night, wild with wind, and only the car lights to probe the blackness. They showed up the rutted road and the rabbit brush that grew rank alongside. We traveled slow, trying to keep the racket down. Then at a bend our lights caught the corral, and there were the horses . . . huddled in a furry bunch, rumps to the wind. The wind swished their tails and lifted their manes, and the only sound was the wind.

  As we drove closer they spooked, shying on legs as stiff as fenceposts. You could see their eye-whites and hear their snortings. Even as we tossed our hay over the fence they couldn’t trust us. We were man, the enemy. We smelled like mustangers.

  We set down our buckets, one in each corner, then we backed the truck away so the horses could eat and drink in peace. We turned off the car lights and played our flashlight over the bunch, watching them tear at the hay, fight over it.

  “I count fifty-three head,” Charley said, focusing his light on a crippled mare too weak to struggle.

  “Charley!” I cried. “You’ve got your wire cutters. Let’s cut the fence!”

  “No,” he said with slow and bitter contempt. “We don’t dare! The horses are on private property. We don’t know how they
were rounded up or where. And———”

  I clutched his arm. “Listen! I hear a truck!”

  “Shut your door, Annie. Quick, before there’s trouble.”

  Instead, I grabbed my camera and jumped out. Before Charley could stop me, I scrambled onto the roof of the cab and lay there flat and still, waiting my chance. Scarce breathing, I screwed in a flash bulb. I watched a big truck turn in, maneuver in the narrow road, then back up to the corral. I heard the tailgate slam down, heard the guttural voices of the men. Now, a lasso swung out and looped the crippled mare, tumbling her heels over head, and dragging her up the ramp.

  This was my picture! I stood up, splay-legged for balance. I snapped, and reloaded, and the lasso went out again. It missed its mark! The truck was rolling now, tailgate dragging. It was coming toward us! My flash had given us away. It was going to hit!

  I fell flat on the roof, gripping with my fingernails, waiting for the crash. Then I saw a glint of metal below. Charley was leaning out the window and his six-shooter spoke the old persuasive language of the West. The driver understood. He made a sharp swerve, just clearing our bumper. Limp as a dead fish I slid onto the bed of the truck. Charley gunned the motor and we were off.

  We had our evidence, but it would not help the fifty-three mustangs that would soon be dead and canned.

  15. “Wild Horse Annie”

  AFTER OUR failure at Fernley, I didn’t go out to see Hobo that night, or for days. I was bowed down with shame and helplessness, and I couldn’t shake free of my deep disappointment.

  I remembered one time when Hobo got a mean gash across his chest from running into a barbed wire fence, and the vet came, and he put a lip twitch on him. The pinching rope and the long stick dangling from his muzzle worried Hobo so much that he paid no mind to the sharp needle pulling the wound together. That’s the way it was with me. My days at the office were like wearing a twitch. I was so busy I couldn’t feel the big pain still burning inside me.

  But the moment I got into my car and was all alone I felt failure pressing against my throat, my chest; I could hardly breathe. Even the mountains that I loved seemed to close in on me, and I thought about the wild ones hidden in their folds. I imagined I could see shapes of them, dancing in the dust, zigzagging from ledge to ledge. At the slightest rumble in the sky, I’d pull off the road and look up. I had to know if it was a big passenger ship, or a small plane spitting buckshot into the shadows.

  And so a week went by, and not a word from Senator Slattery. And another week. And then one night when I was washing up the supper dishes and I’d just persuaded Charley to ride over to the Slatterys with me, the telephone rang, sharp with insistence.

  “Must be long distance,” Charley said. “You better answer.”

  With soapy hands I reached for the phone. It was long distance all right. Carson City calling.

  “Annie!” came the Senator’s resounding voice. “Two pieces of news for you, young lady.”

  “Oh?”

  “The bill went to the right committee—the Public Morals group. They’ll give us as good a chance as we could hope.”

  I found my voice. “Fine! And what else?” I asked eagerly.

  “The Humane Society is trying to help.” There was a chuckle in his tone.

  “Why, that’s wonderful!”

  “It ought to be, but it’s giving us problems. They’re worried about too many things.”

  “Like what?”

  “They’re moaning about the use of chickens and rabbits as pets, and they’re even suggesting protection for coyotes and prairie dogs! By comparison, it makes the wild horse seem so big and brawny he doesn’t need our help. How about your coming to the hearing tomorrow?”

  I went, all the way to Carson City, even though I had the payroll to get out and could stay only an hour. But that hour was long enough for a lot to happen. It gave me something new to fight for, and with. A new name!

  As I entered the stately senate chamber, I could feel an expectant hush like at a play before the curtain goes up. People were already in their seats—cowmen and sheepmen, giving off their warm, earthy smells; and welfare ladies, some pretty and buxom, some lean as a flagpole; and reporters with pencils behind their ears; and the committee, solemn as owls. As I crawled over knees to find a seat, the little man from the Bureau, the one with the duck-fuzz hair, spoke out in a stage whisper loud enough to wake the dead: “Well . . . ll . . . ll, if it isn’t Wild Horse Annie!”

  “Yeah! Yeah!” Al Trivelpiece, a reporter, took up the cry: “Here comes Wild Horse Annie! Wild Horse Annie!”

  Something in me wanted to explode. I wanted to yell back at the Bureau man, “You! You’re nothing but duck fuzz! And you, Mister Trivelpiece, your name suits!” But all of a sudden I felt hotly proud to be called Wild Horse Annie. Proud, I tell you! And I was about to tell them so when the meeting was rapped to order.

  The first person called upon was a tiny woman, delicate as a teacup. Her mission was to put an end to Easter brutality—rabbits dyed purple and twirled about by their ears, and chicks colored pink and sold as pets to youngsters who squeezed them to death.

  Someone in the room laughed, but I couldn’t laugh. I was back in our kitchen, a very little girl, holding in my hand a fluff of yellow that had hatched itself in my pocket. No, I couldn’t laugh. I was closer to tears, remembering the beady shining eye and how I breathed on the little thing with half a breath, and the fluff was too wetly new to stir.

  A restless audience tore me from my memory. Coughs and harrumphs all around, chairs creaking, boot-heels scraping, heads turning to the clock on the wall. I glanced too. My time was running out. Much as I sympathized with the woman and her concern, I was anxious to get on to the mustang bill.

  With only fifteen minutes left for me, a solid, towering man stood up. He had a nose, large and long and blunt. Grandma called noses like his a mark of intelligence; they got that way from poking into many books and other matters of true importance. And so it was. He asked for recognition and it was promptly granted.

  Then, as if there were all the time in the world, he coolly took a watch from his vest and checked it against the wall clock.

  “Mr. Chairman,” he said in a quiet, controlled voice, “time is of the essence. We are here to talk about a bill to prohibit mechanized roundups of wild horses, and I wish to cite a pertinent incident.” He paused just long enough to make everyone wonder what in the world it could be. And still he didn’t tell us.

  “This incident,” he said, “should convince anyone in this room who is teetering on the fence of indecision.”

  There was a respectful silence throughout the chamber.

  “As a lawyer,” he went on, “I am now handling a case for a client who has three young daughters. They in turn have three horses who have won enough blue ribbons to delight the soul of three little girls.”

  The quiet controlled voice made an icy correction. “That is,” he said, “they had three horses.” Then his anger burst and his face went purple-red. “Those horses,” he exploded, “were rounded up by plane and truck and sold to a slaughterhouse to be stuffed into a can.”

  There was a buzzing sound all around the room. In the commotion I had to leave. Payrolls wouldn’t wait. They meant groceries for hungry children.

  • • •

  But within the week I had news. As I turned onto the ditch road for home one evening, I saw Charley waving me in. “Long distance from Carson City!” he yelled, making a megaphone of his hands. “Hurry!”

  I ran to the house and gulped a breathless hello into the mouthpiece.

  “Annie?” It was Mr. Slattery’s voice, but it wasn’t big and booming and friendly. It was dry and husky, like the sound a pine cone makes when it rolls downhill and hits rock. “Annie,” he repeated, “listen carefully.”

  The words came fast now, to get them over with. “The committee will recommend passage of your bill, if . . . ”

  He paused, and I could feel my heart thumping ag
ainst my ribs.

  “If,” he said, “it leaves to the government men the right to hunt wild horses by plane and truck.”

  My mind raced back to my afternoon visit with the Bureau man. “But, Mr. Slattery,” I cried, “if they thought the grazing land was being hurt, they could kill off every single mustang.”

  “I know.”

  “And, Mr. Slattery, with so much of Nevada being public land, our bill will cover such a tiny part.”

  “No need to tell me, Annie. I’ve been tumbling it over in my mind until I’m dizzy. How can a flyer see boundary lines across a desert? How can he know when he’s over public land or private land?”

  “He’ll make his own boundaries,” I said, “just where he wants them.”

  “Exactly! And how can a sheriff who’s trying to enforce our law tell whether a flyer is hunting stray sheep for a ranch, or wild horses for a rendering plant? Or, for that matter, stealing pet horses?”

  I remembered the three horses that had belonged to the three little girls. And I thought of Hobo, and what might happen to him if this dreadful murder went on.

  I was all mixed up in my mind. “What can we do, sir?”

  “It’s up to you, Annie.”

  “What would you do?” I asked, trying to hang onto his coattails, trying to reach for help.

  “It’s your bill, Annie. But I warn you, the Bureau won’t budge. They insist that federal land be excluded. After all, they represent the national government, and we can’t fight Washington in Carson City.”

  My heart sank. “Is it that serious?” I asked.

  “I’m afraid it is. The big ranchers are bringing a lot of pressure on the men in Washington. Most folks back East probably don’t know—or care—about the mustangs way out here in Nevada.”

  “But they’re Americans. The mustangs belong to them, too.”

  “I know—but . . . ”

  “Well, what would you do?” I insisted, pleading again for help.