Last Chance Mustang

by Mitchell Bornstein

  Exhausted, I closed my eyes and tried to drift off. Riddled with guilt, feeling as if I had abandoned Samson, I couldn’t fall asleep.

  Eleven days later, I returned to the farm fully intact, refreshed, anxious, and nervous as to what I might find. As I inched my truck alongside the perimeter fence, I looked out across the corncrib pasture and instantly recognized that trouble lay ahead. Seconds after Samson and I locked gazes, my problem student launched himself forward like the Roadrunner, bolted through the gate leading into the south pasture, and disappeared in a plume of dust. My gut had it right; my heart had it wrong.

  While at that moment I understood that my absence had created a problem, I had no idea of what I was in for. In just eleven short days, Samson had fully retreated into the dark, solitary abyss that had been his home, shelter, and world for so many years. Feeling abandoned and yet again unwanted, he had returned to the one place where he couldn’t be hurt and the one place that no others could venture. The place where he needed no one and there was no one to need. On this day, as I attempted to rescue Samson from this abyss, I would learn firsthand the power, determination, and destructive capabilities of a wounded horse who believed he was better off all on his own.

  I located Samson in the pasture’s far southwest corner, hidden among the trees and dense brush. His eyes were filled with disdain and distrust. He had ignored his better judgment, surrendered his will, and lent me his heart and I had abandoned him. I hadn’t pummeled him with whips or two-by-fours, but I was no better than all the others who had hurt this horse. The trust we had worked so hard to build was gone.

  At ten yards and closing, I halted my approach, immediately recognizing the signs of an animal in fear for his life and poised to attack. This was not the horse who had accepted the lead line’s control, the bridle and bit’s domination, and the saddle pad and liner’s unyielding presence. Rather, this was the fear-riddled, perpetually doubting, defensive beast that I first encountered months earlier in a locked stall. The old Samson was back.

  “Hey, buddy,” I calmly addressed him, “obviously our little break didn’t suit you. But keep in mind, you and I still have a binding contract.”

  I took one step closer to Samson. Flatly rejecting my overture, he exited his protected spot and galloped diagonally across the pasture to the far opposite corner. For the next hour, I slowly approached on, and then retreated from, Samson. Each time I neared, he would dart off. The south pasture was the length and width of a football field, so Samson knew that he had the upper hand. Looking back, I wish that I had videoed the events of this day so that those more qualified than myself could observe and analyze his actions. Five months of bonding, interacting, and training had been wiped clean in a matter of days. Fifteen years of working with damaged horses and this was indeed a first.

  I had already learned a great deal from this troubled animal, and on this day school was in session.

  Despite his apprehension, Samson had yet to charge on me. This told me that somewhere, deep down, he knew that I meant him no harm. Since our first meeting, I had been the anomaly, the only one who hadn’t tried to hurt him. But now, due to our time and distance apart, I was clumped back in with the masses—the many who had mistreated and abused this horse. Samson’s perpetual fear and doubt of the two-legged predator had been renewed, and though his heart longed for my attention his brain yet again instructed skepticism and defense.

  An hour and a half into the ordeal, Samson and I were standing in the crib pasture just inches apart. As with our very first encounters, the left side of his body was foreclosed to my approach. Moving at a snail’s pace, I clipped on to Samson’s halter. Consumed with fear and doubt, he launched himself into the stratosphere, and my shoulder followed. As I crumpled to the ground in agony grasping my dislocated shoulder, Samson stood over me. For the first time, I saw remorse in him.

  In my head, I heard the sound of waves crashing against the beach—advancing, then retreating, advancing and retreating.

  This incident, combined with the story of the four runaway polo ponies, together demonstrate that whether trained or not, in motion or standing static, horses, like any animal, can be dangerous and highly unpredictable. The trick, the key, to managing, training, and maintaining a harmonious relationship with any horse is set forth in my third, and most important, rule of horsemanship: a horseman must always keep and maintain a command and control presence. Put another way, when things go south, you must always be in command, even when you’re not in control.

  As herd-bound, insecure animals, horses are driven by a fear complex that instructs and mandates flight. Behave like you can control any situation, confront rather than shy away from a problem, exude the confidence of a herd’s lead stallion or alpha mare, and you can limit, if not curtail, a horse’s innate desire to flee. Your confidence becomes your horse’s confidence. When a horse challenges with its behavior, stay with it, don’t run, don’t hide, and don’t act threatened. If your horse becomes frightened, then convince it that there’s nothing to fear. A measured combination of compassion, understanding, respect, and a firm command and control presence will curtail even the most wayward steed.

  Command and control also dictates that each and every horseperson manage and keep in check his or her own emotions. On countless occasions, I have observed insecure riders out on trail, horsemen hesitant to vault over a jump or apprehensive to load their horse onto a trailer, and owners taking out their bad day on their four-legged companion. In these situations, a horse both absorbs and feeds off its handler’s thoughts, emotions, and doubts. A blowup is no longer a possibility but, rather, a certainty.

  If you are insecure on trail, ride instead in an enclosed arena. If a jump is too high, then lower it. If afraid to load your horse, then don’t transport. When in a foul mood, don’t go picking a fight with an animal who can dispatch you with one strike. While there is no place for any of the three, in my opinion ego, fear, and anger account for a good 90 percent of all horse-related incidents.

  As I like to tell my clients, “Before you ask a horse to be at peace with you, you must be at peace with yourself.”

  The final week of March, I tripled my sessions with Samson. It was the only thing I could do to regain lost ground and rebuild the trust that had been lost. As I was already backlogged at work, the hole I dug for myself quickly collapsed into a bottomless void. Again all questioned my commitment to Samson. And again I pressed on. Slowly but surely, starting from scratch, student and teacher rebuilt their bonds and rehashed each and every previously introduced skill. If patience was a virtue, then I must have been Job.

  As the week came to an end, I received word that Samson had a deep, penetrating wound to his right cheek. A neighbor who owned horses had visited the farm to try to assess the injury, but Samson charged on him before he ever made it over the fence. When I arrived and treated the laceration, it was, when compared to Samson’s first facial injury, a study in contrasts. He stood calmly, lowered his head, and immediately submitted to treatment. I was pleased but starting to see the writing on the barn wall. Samson was still wild-at-heart, still distrusting of all humans, and it was starting to look like Samson was a one-person horse.

  Samson’s wound was serious, but he would survive. In Nevada, as the death toll continued to rise, the same could not be said for many of the Calico Mustangs. With the Calico story permeating national headlines, the untimely winter roundup was a debacle and a PR nightmare. Mustang opponents and horse slaughter advocates had the solution: reintroduce horse slaughter and reopen the slaughterhouses across the nation.

  Back in Illinois, a state representative renewed a resolution calling for the reversal of the state’s ban on horse slaughter. The unwanted horse, defined by the American Association of Equine Practitioners as horses who are feral and unadoptable, geriatric, incurably lame, have behavior problems, are dangerous, or horses who fail to meet owner’s expectations because of cost, color, or temperament, was now the root of all evils. Sl
aughter proponents argued that the forty thousand Mustangs in BLM holding facilities, the recently culled Calico horses, and the nation’s countless unwanted domesticated horses could be dispatched in short order once the slaughterhouses reopened. Like my work with Samson, Mustang preservation efforts advanced and then retreated. Protected or not, the wild Mustang remained chronically and habitually threatened.

  Out at the farm for the month’s final session, I realized that if any horse fit the bill, fit the very definition of unwanted, it had been this Mustang. Despite this fact, as the day’s lesson concluded Samson walked up to and then calmly circled the saddle. Horse slaughter advocates, wild horse haters, and their alleged experts had it all wrong. All horses have worth and even the most unwanted horse will find someone who wants him.

  Heading into April, we were now ready to enter the final phase of training: placing the saddle on and then mounting Samson. This damaged horse was ever so close to disproving his many critics—those who had labeled him unwanted, worthless, and less than worthy of the cost of a bullet. I expected that the final month of Samson’s training would be ripe with conflict, willful objection, and violence. What I didn’t expect, what I couldn’t have foreseen, was that a new arrival at the farm would cause Samson to reject my teachings, my plans, and my friendship.

  Just shy of reaching our ultimate goal, I would be forced to reconsider my plans to mount and ride Samson. I would have to consider abandoning him.

  {12}

  BATTLE!

  A horse can lend its rider the speed and strength he or she lacks, but the rider who is wise remembers it is no more than a loan.

  —PAM BROWN

  Through time and across great distance, derogatory labels have followed the wild Mustang as it has grazed America’s grasslands, roamed its immense basins, and galloped across its vast mountain ranges. The wild horse of the 1920s was the evil destroyer of the range. The Mustang of the 1950s was an inbred mongrel. Throughout the 1980s, the free-roaming wild horse was an interloper and feral pest. And as horses in the dozens perished in the days following the winter of 2010 Calico roundup, the ill-fated Mustangs were deemed by many as “unwanted” and the “cockroaches of the West.”

  Back in the Midwest, Samson and I were primed to enter the final phase of his training. We were ever so closer to erasing the hateful and negative terms that, much like chronic abuse and the Samson Rules, had dogged this horse for the last seven years of his sad and painful life. We were inching ever so closer to rewriting Samson’s history.

  My arrival at the farm for April’s first visit signaled that the time had come to saddle my headstrong pupil. With saddle and stand parked just feet away from the tied Mustang, he wasn’t agitated and he wasn’t simmering. Calm, cool, stoic, and collected, he seemed to know what was coming. Since the moment he had been introduced to the saddle, as we had made concentric circles and moved closer to this new foe Samson had been planning and strategizing.

  He was prepared for battle.

  As I picked the forty-five-pound saddle up from the stand, Samson’s respirations increased, his neck turned erect, and his frame went rigid. I stood alongside Samson’s right side—his comfortable side—and the saddle rested on my left forearm as the Mustang, suddenly consumed with fear, appeared primed to explode. I remained in that position for an additional twenty minutes until his panic subsided. Then, ever so slowly and gradually, using my right hand I raised the right stirrup and rubbed his shoulder blade, girth area, barrel, and flank.

  Three massive vibrations traveled through Samson as if he had been shocked with a defibrillator. Nonetheless, the gate remained on its hinges and Samson’s hooves remained on the ground. I then repeated the entire exercise from his guarded left side, and though Samson forcefully objected, in short time he relented.

  “Well,” I commented to my attentive pupil, “I am surprised and impressed by your newfound restraint and control. Perhaps this won’t be so bad after all.”

  Who was I kidding?

  Seizing the moment, I decided to charge forward. With saddle in hand, I slowly approached his left side. Standing tied to the gate, Samson flexed, braced, glanced back over his left shoulder, and shot a hard stare my way. His focused, calculating gaze left me immediately concerned. Confident, even a little smug, Samson was lying in wait.

  I lifted the saddle high above his back and then started to lower it down. It was just inches from touchdown when Samson calmly and coolly crossed and then uncrossed his hind legs. Next he kicked his hind end out to the right and executed a nearly perfect turn on the forehand. He had rotated completely to his right and I was left holding the saddle above nothing but air.

  After a third failed attempt to lower the saddle onto his back, I glanced over at the Mustang. Nearly instantly I recognized the not so subtle twinkle in his eye that had become a fixture of our training sessions. Samson didn’t need to possess the ability to speak for me to know his thoughts: Hey, genius, you taught me this! What did you expect? While I understood that at that moment Samson stood terrified of the saddle, I also recognized that he was determined to make me earn this one.

  Through the course of our relationship, this has remained the one defining characteristic of our relations—Samson has never made anything easy and has made a point of consistently and constantly challenging me and my abilities. Though most trainers would find this behavior unacceptable, I have valued and indeed cherished this Mustang’s ways, for they taught that a good horseman never stops questioning his methods, improving his skills, and learning new ways.

  Once Samson grew tired of toying with me and held his stand, I gently placed the saddle atop his back. Then, after several minutes passed, I removed the saddle before he chose to forcibly eject it. Though I had neither attached nor tightened the cinch, Samson was now a saddled horse. As I looked upon him, I expected the vanquished warrior to appear defeated and downtrodden. But to my surprise, the surly Mustang refused to lower his head in shame.

  Samson now held a secret—a potent weapon to add to his vast arsenal. The Mustang warhorse who had once fought battles with a scorched-earth policy had versed himself in the subtleties of guerilla warfare. He was now, for the first time in his life, both an explosive and violent warrior and a stealth and covert combatant. I had, no doubt, created a monster.

  By the weekend, Samson had amassed his observations and intel and was prepared to engage his rule of three. This time, he would not disappoint. As Samson stood tied to the gate, I scooped Asbestos up from her comfortable spot in the grass just feet away and deposited her nearly ten yards from what I anticipated would be our battle’s epicenter. My calculations and estimations were, needless to say, way off.

  Moments later, as I placed the saddle atop his back, Samson exploded with a single buck that appeared powerful enough to shatter the saddle’s internal frame—the saddle tree. To this day, the sight of my saddle vaulting through the air like a ballistic missile on a straight trajectory toward Asbestos remains a troubling memory. Seconds before becoming a former inhabitant of the farm, Asbestos sprang from her spot in the grass as the saddle crashed to the ground with a resounding thud. Given the mutual disdain between horse and feline, I couldn’t help but think that Samson’s plan had worked to perfection.

  Over the course of the next hour, my frequent-flyer saddle covered all the points of the map—taking flight to the east, west, north, and south. Repeatedly placing the saddle atop Samson, I stood witness to a buck fest with Samson the star and my saddle the hapless victim. And as the minutes ticked by, I realized that this abused and terribly damaged horse and the aged, prideful, and willful Mustang, when combined, presented a formidable and daunting challenge to the successful completion of this project. I didn’t need to be a genius to understand that in a few short weeks I would be the projectile being catapulted from Samson’s back. Yes, the troubled Mustang had let me in, but his dark past had kept him ever doubting and distrusting. Despite the fact that I had forged an unbreakable bond with my s
tudent, I was going to have to earn—through blood, sweat, and probably some tears—the right to mount Samson.

  In Nevada, the tears of humane observers and the blood and sweat of interned Mustangs were clear signs that the Calico carnage had yet to slow. With 125 Mustangs deceased, and bolstered by the ongoing debate over the alleged “unwanted” horse, wild horse critics and slaughter advocates redirected their efforts, appealing to individual state legislators to authorize and reinstitute horse slaughter. Stealing a page from the Mustanger PR spin book of the 1950s, slaughter proponents counseled that horse slaughter would bring wealth and jobs to their constituents and simultaneously rid their communities of the feral and wild pest of the West. In Samson’s home state of Illinois, where efforts to reintroduce horse slaughter remained strong, the state senate president assured horse welfare organizations that the proposed bill to reopen the shuttered slaughterhouses would not make it to the senate floor. The words were reassuring but, in the big picture, provided little comfort.

  For the captured Calico Mustangs and their then forty thousand cousins detained throughout the country, so little had changed. Targeted on the range for acts of senseless violence, they were equally at peril in the BLM short- and long-term holding facilities. There was no safe harbor for this nation’s wild horses. Their survival, their future, remained in doubt.

  Thousands of miles away in McHenry County, having witnessed Samson’s exhibition of defiance, I harbored my own doubts as to whether this wild horse could be mounted and ridden.

  * * *

  The first time I saw the pair, they were standing in the pasture, just inches apart. Samson was smitten with his new mare and he was a changed horse. His eyes were no longer warm; his posturing announced that my approach would be met with bloodshed. With his mare in tow, he had been transported back to the Nevada mountains and his wild ways. Samson the alpha Mustang stallion would not be separated from his newfound harem of one.