Horse Lover

by H. Alan Day

  Sue savored a sip before answering. “I’m thinking this proposition has hit some chord in you. I can hear it resonating. And if I know you like I do, you’re not going to turn your back. You’re going to throw your saddle right over this baby and run with it as far as you can. So someway, somehow, we are going to make this wild horse thing work. In fact, we’re not leaving this mountain until we figure it out. Otherwise we could be headed for a case of regrets, and who needs that?” She took my hand in hers.

  Through the rest of the wine and into dinner, we carefully laid a foundation under Dayton’s grandiose plan. I racked my brain to identify all the parts we had to play to make the sanctuary a success. First, I would have to spend extended periods of time in South Dakota learning the ranch inside and out. This would leave Sue with a larger role in Lazy B’s day-to-day operations. She would need to work closely with our foreman, Greg Webb, and relay details to me every day by phone. She already was an angel caregiver to my aging mother and even more of that responsibility would fall on her shoulders. For my part, I needed to discuss this venture with my partner in the Rex Ranch, Alan Stratman. My guess was that he would want to focus his efforts entirely in Nebraska. I would continue to be involved in decisions there as we moved forward to meet our business goals, but I felt comfortable turning the reins over to him. I also needed to give John Pitkin the heads-up that the plan was to fill the old Arnold Ranch pastures with horses, not cattle. I didn’t foresee an issue there. Dayton and I would lobby the BLM, and somewhere along the way, I would get educated about wild horses. How exactly did one go about handling a couple thousand renegade mustangs?

  As the campfire reflected off the dark walls of the canyon, Sue and I hashed out detail after detail, stacking them like the rocks in the battlement above us. Only a few embers glowed when we settled onto the lumpy mattress, a light blanket covering us. The choir of a million stars serenaded us with their sparkles. I pulled my wife close, felt her curves form into mine.

  “We’re partners in this one, baby. If something’s not going right, you have to let me know,” I whispered in her ear.

  “I will. I promise,” she said, wrapping her legs around me. It was our turn to serenade the stars.

  I drifted into the depth of night feeling like I was on the brink of a long journey. The road stretched ahead of me like an Arizona highway, untouched by snow and ice and salt spreaders. Smooth blacktop. Bright yellow stripes. Even on freshly paved roads, blowouts occur. Here and there you see scraps of shredded tires on the shoulder of the road, sometimes in the middle, too. Hurdles that you don’t discern until the last minute. One way or another, you get around them. Sometimes you swerve, sometimes you drive over them. I would need to keep a careful eye on this road and a steady hand on the wheel.

  The minute Sue and I returned to ranch headquarters the next morning, I made a beeline to my office. If there was one person in the Bureau of Land Management who would be open to an innovative idea and who had climbed the bureaucratic ladder high enough to help, it was Les Rosencranz. Les and I had developed a friendly relationship during the years Lazy B had been under his jurisdiction. He was a good listener, a straight shooter, and a kindred lover of the land.

  At 8:05 a.m., I picked up the phone.

  “Hey, how are you Al? Haven’t heard from you in quite a stretch. What’s going on?” His upbeat voice held a smile. We caught up on our comings and goings.

  I veered into business. “Les, I’ve got an idea that involves the BLM. You’ve heard me think out of the box before, but I’m so far out of the box I can hardly see it.”

  “Nothing like starting out the day with a little excitement, man. Lay it on me.”

  I felt like I was taking a running start and leaping over the Grand Canyon. “I’m thinking about starting a wild horse sanctuary,” I said in a surreal airborne moment.

  Silence, then what sounded like a coffee mug clunking against wood. “You’re right, that’s one I never heard before,” Les said. “But it’s a hell of an issue for us.”

  Thump. I had hit dirt. Whether it was pay dirt or burial dirt, I had no clue.

  Les listened to my broad-brush narrative of how a privately operated, federally subsidized wild horse sanctuary could benefit government coffers, overgrazed land, and a couple thousand unadoptable mustangs, a narrative I would soon be able to recite in my sleep.

  “So have I lost it or not?” I asked.

  “Well, I’m not ready to call it harebrained, but it definitely is unconventional. I do have one question for you, though,” Les said. “When those horses charge off to the next county, how are you going to get them turned back and bring ’em home?”

  I had been thinking about this prickly issue since the sun roused me out of a sound sleep. Wild horses balk at following directions from a two-legged alien creature wearing a funny hat. You can train a mustang individually, but it would take years to put two thousand through private lessons. I didn’t care what the government might pay, no way was I going to spend my days chasing horses around a ranch.

  I said, “I’m not a hundred percent certain, but I may have a solution. It’s based on a training program we used on Lazy B to gentle the wild cattle.”

  “Gentle wild cattle?” said Les. “Did I hear that right?”

  Gentling the cattle had been one of the improvements I made on the ranch after my dad became less active in managing it. Unlike most ranchers, he had preferred to ranch on foot, so he kept horse riding to a minimum. During spring and fall roundups, the cowboys would drive a herd of cattle into the corral and he would have them off their horses faster than lightning hits the ground. They’d run their legs off opening and closing gates and getting the cattle settled. Of course the cowboys bitched. They wanted to be in the corrals on horseback. But I walked in different boots than my dad. I’d been raised around cowboys like Jim Brister, who practically lived on a horse, and like Jim, I loved working horseback. When I took over the ranch, roundups had more running than a tri-state track meet. Because our cattle weren’t accustomed to seeing a man mounted on a horse, they had become increasingly ornery and wild, and they spooked when you rode up to them in the pasture. With pastures as big as eighty square miles, the herd had a fine time playing hide-and-seek with us.

  My real wake-up call came one spring during roundup. The cowboys and I spent two hard days gathering heifers out of the Cottonwood pasture, where they had spent the past year maturing to adulthood. We finally got them in the corrals at headquarters, a temporary holding spot. The next day I instructed a handful of cowboys to drive half the herd up into the Black Hills, where they would join a larger herd. I should have appointed one of the hands to take up the lead and set the pace, but I didn’t. The cowboys all hung out at the back of the bunch. They told me later that when the group started the two-thousand-foot climb up the rocky canyon, the heifers charged so fast that the cowboys couldn’t catch them to slow them down. Three cows ran themselves to death and died right in the middle of the canyon. I was horrified. I was not going to be a rancher who killed cows by running them to death. I resolved to make major changes in our handling of the cattle.

  But how could we get the cattle to change their perception of us? One way was to invest in more cowboys and faster horses. But that would continue to promote unwanted commotion and distress among the animals. Another way was to bait the cattle with feed, a common practice among ranchers. During the year the heifers lived in the pasture growing from six-month-old calves to eighteen-month-old cows, we could go out with a truck, honk the horn, and spread a trail of corn or hay. Over time, the cattle would recognize the sound of the blaring horn, associate it with food, and not get all jittery. But that didn’t address the imminent problem. Cowboys on horseback would still incite panic, and off we would be to the races.

  I decided the next time we weaned calves, we would put them through an intensive gentling program while they were still in the headquarters corrals. Get them to recognize us. The cowboys thought my marbles ha
d bounced on the ground and gotten buried in the dust. But the boys wanted their paychecks. So after we weaned that next group of calves, three cowboys and I saddled up, went into the corral, and talked to those babies. Real calm, real friendly.

  We held the group of 150 in a corral corner, then started driving them down the side. Of course they broke and ran all over the place, so we gathered them again, all the while chatting like we were best friends. Every time we tried to drive them, they’d scatter. Twenty minutes later, the calves were pooped. We gave them a break but came back three more times that day and went through the same drill. After four or five days, the training started to stick. They began to follow a man on horse and a horse’s butt. They no longer feared us. If a calf left the group, one of the cowboys would race after and run her hard, not harming her, just making her uncomfortable. The lesson learned? If you go off on your own, life is uncomfortable; if you stay with the herd, life is good. Pretty soon they’d follow the lead around the corral, then through the gate and out to an adjoining small pasture. It was an exercise in repetitive teaching, like teaching kindergarteners to stay in a line and file into the lunchroom. By the time we turned those cattle out for the year, they were the best-behaved bunch on the ranch.

  I stopped pacing, plunked in my desk chair, and took a sip of cold coffee. “But we still didn’t have proof the training worked,” I said. Les grunted in acknowledgment. I stretched my feet up on the desk. A slice of sunshine hugged the tip of my boot. “During the next twelve months, we’d drive out in a pickup periodically to check on them, make sure the windmill was pumping water, restock their salt supply if necessary. So the time comes to gather them. I take a full crew out, not knowing what to expect because those heifers haven’t seen us on horseback for a year. In the past, when we rode within a half mile, the cattle would look up and rev up their jets. But this time, we get to the half-mile mark, spread out ready for action, and those cows? They don’t lift a head. A quarter mile, and all is calm. I’m about ready to fall off my horse. Now we’re right around the herd and some of those heifers finally glance up as if to say, ‘Oh, hello, it’s you.’ So I say right back to them, ‘Hey girls, glad to see you. Glad you waited for us.’ The cowboys defaulted into their mode for rounding up gentled cattle, and the day ended without a hitch.” My waggling boot knocked over a jar of pencils.

  What had surprised me even more is that when the babies of those heifers grew up, they weren’t afraid of us either. Their mamas did the cowboys’ jobs. Training became twice as easy. The whole program fed on itself and, little by little, year by year, required less energy. We had next to no runaways. The success still warmed me. I had shaken the dice and thrown them on the table. Lucky me. They had come up a seven.

  “Herd behavior modification training I called it,” I said to Les. “And I think it might just work on a herd of wild horses.” I scooped up the pencils and returned them to the jar.

  A pause filled the phone line. I could almost see Les’s questioning expression. Maybe he was thinking about herds of mustangs having lived their whole life wild. Would they respond to such a program? You could argue that we wouldn’t be training the horses from the time they were colts. Or argue that we could bait them with grain. But when horses are full, fat, and happy, they won’t follow a feed truck. And what if you have to lead them across a river? How do you bait them then? We needed to make friends with the horses like we did with the cattle so they would do our bidding.

  Finally Les said, “Call me a Missourian, because you’ll have to show me that one.”

  His reaction came as no surprise. Cowboys, neighbors, friends, and colleagues all hailed from Missouri when I told the gentling cattle story. One neighbor south of Lazy B had the wildest bunch of cattle that time and time again ran away. After each incident, this frustrated guy would pound in a piece of fence here, another piece there in an attempt to contain the animals until pretty soon he had the most nonsensical fencing ever created. I went to him and explained the program, how it was foolproof, and how he could do it. “That’s a bunch of shit,” he said.

  Telling Les about the herd behavior modification program increased my confidence that wild horses would respond to it. Cocky me. For all I knew, Dayton and I were standing on the drawbridge of an air castle that was about to dump us in the swampy moat. Maybe Les thought so too, but he didn’t let on. He told me who to call in the BLM’s Wild Horse Division. They would be the ones with information about the current state of affairs and the ones who could authorize a sanctuary. At least that’s what he thought.

  “I’ll give them a call and let them know that you’re mostly a reasonable man.” He chuckled and hung up with a promise to let me know when travels brought him near Lazy B. I promised to introduce him to our gentled cattle.

  The conversation with Les set off a chain reaction of activity. I felt like a spider flinging out filaments that would somehow get woven into a web. I half expected my partners to resist the far-out idea of creating a wild horse sanctuary, but they readily stamped their approval on it. Phone calls to the BLM were being returned, conversations lengthening, and support growing. Dayton Hyde made friends in the South Dakota state tourism office. They liked his idea of putting two or three hundred wild horses on his small ranch and opening it up to tourists. The BLM chimed in with a desire to partner with the state. Over many meetings and cups of coffee, we hammered out a document that gave birth to the Institute of Range and American Mustang, a nonprofit organization designed to ensure the longevity of a sanctuary, protect the horses, and preserve the land.

  Then there was the Bureau of Indian Affairs. Of the thirty-five thousand acres that made up the old Arnold Ranch, nine thousand were leased, half from the Rosebud Sioux Indian Tribe and half from the Bureau of Indian Affairs, which meant we needed permission from each group to graze wild horses on their land. I decided to first pay a visit to the person I knew best, Stan Whipple, the range conservationist employed by the Rosebud Sioux Tribe who was responsible for relations with our ranch. He loved our plan, circulated it to the right people, and within a week the tribe had granted us approval. Stan followed up with a fair warning. “Don’t be surprised if you get static from the BIA. They never agree with anything we do.” I decided it best to drive the short part of an hour up to the Bureau of Indian Affairs office in Mission, South Dakota, and meet with our contact, a Mr. Roger Running Horse. Since we would be working with the BIA long-term, a personal relationship couldn’t hurt. John Pitkin accompanied me.

  A slender man with an engaging smile, Mr. Running Horse greeted us warmly. “I heard talk of the old Arnold Ranch becoming a wild horse sanctuary. Quite exciting,” he said. His openness fanned our enthusiasm and we eagerly rolled out our plans.

  “I need to have all this in writing so I can present it to my supervisor over in the Pine Ridge office,” said Mr. Running Horse. “It may take a week or two to get approval, but we’ll get it done.”

  John and I left Roger Running Horse’s office assuming we had a new ally in our pocket and pleased to have avoided any negativity.

  I was lucky if I spent three or four nights in the same bed. Between the blowing and going, I waited for the ranch purchase to close. The banking machinery chugged along in reverse, giving rumors an opportunity to spread like a swarm of no-see-ums. John reported that beer talk at the local bar was pondering the crazy Arizonan buying up ranches left and right in the Sand Hills and aiming to turn the old Arnold Ranch into some sort of sanctuary for three or four thousand mustangs. I could just hear it.

  “Sweet Jesus, those horses will be spread over three counties.”

  “I can see it now. They’ll come blastin’ through the backyard and Mama will start screaming her roses got trampled.”

  “Crazy fellow. What’s he thinking? Hasn’t even weathered a winter yet.”

  “Yep, when a dang nor’wester blows through, he’ll be chasing those damn mustangs up and down the river and hollering for help. He’s settin’ himself up for big trou
ble.”

  I didn’t pay too much attention to what people said behind me or to me unless they got in my face, like the field rep for an insurance company who caught up with me one afternoon on the Rex Ranch. At the time, insurance companies were pushing ranch mortgages and three had offered to furnish one for the Rex Ranch. One of the companies had hired this fellow now standing in front of me, an ex-rancher who I knew had gone broke. He claimed his company heard I was putting a wild horse sanctuary on the Rex Ranch.

  “If you go ahead with it,” he said, loud enough for anyone within ten feet to hear, “you’ll be denied a mortgage with us and probably every other company out there as well.”

  It was all I could do not to say, buddy, you don’t know shit from wild honey. Instead, I reminded him in the same forthright tone that he and his cohorts were in the banking business and I was in the ranching business and maybe we should each stick to what we knew best. The subject never surfaced again.

  Overall, I couldn’t complain about how things were spinning together. Yet through the hubbub, a little voice managed to assert itself. Go see the wild horses, it urged. Learn from the experts who handle them. Ask all the important questions. Would the handlers think training and gentling over a thousand horses a possible feat? How did they sort the horses? What kind of branding methods did they use? Did the horses move easily between corrals? Did the herds have renegades or protectors, and how did those horses behave? What criteria made a horse adoptable? How much did they eat?

  The best place to be a student was the National Wild Horse and Burro Center at Palomino Valley, twenty-five miles outside Reno, Nevada. Before I left, I called my son, Alan Jr., who had been a sounding board from day one of this journey, and asked him if he would fly up to South Dakota to spend a week on the ranch with John. I wanted his take on the ranch as wild horse sanctuary. Al had logged enough years on horseback to be considered a full-fledged cowboy, even though he had opted not to join the family ranching business. He could stay in the doublewide and not be influenced by my presence. He readily agreed. So in mid-August Alan Jr. left the dry heat of Tucson, bound for the humid air of South Dakota, and I rumbled out Lazy B’s ranch road, turned left, and pointed the pickup toward the Silver State.