Mustang: Wild Spirit of the West

by Marguerite Henry

  “You’re home free!” I cried fiercely, and fell sobbing in the sand.

  18. Found—a Champion

  PA WAS at home. He was out back mending harness for some child who’d been given a pony cart. He’d had his lunch and was smoking his pipe. And there was such a look of happiness and peace about him that it started softening my hurt. He looked up at me, and a smile of pleasure spread across his face. Then he saw that I had been crying and he began treating me just the way he used to when I was a little kid with a skinned knee. He would wash all around the wound with warm sudsy water, not coming anywhere near the bleeding part for a long, long time.

  Now he was doing the same thing. As his needle curved in and out of the leather, he began talking all around my hurt.

  “Pardner!” he said. “I’d bet my last sack o’ tobacco you couldn’t guess what I been cogitating on.”

  He expected no answer. I sat down on my heels, and began rubbing the palms of my hands where my fingernails had dug in. Pa acted like he never noticed my hands or my red swollen eyes or the desert dust all over my skirt. He kept on working while he spoke.

  “This morning,” he said, “I was barrelin’ along from the Douglas place with a load of wool, and seemed like I was the only critter alive in the hull world. I could see mile on mile, clean acrost to the Bear Lodge Mountains, and not so much as a fly between me and the Almighty. Nothin’ but earth and sky and a blue shimmer over the hull thing.”

  I felt a warm sense of peace, watching Pa work.

  “Y’know, Annie, I got to thinkin’ why Nevada folks is bigger’n most.”

  “Why, Pa?”

  “Wal, a man’s got to think twice afore comin’ to this lonesome, empty land to live. But when he does, he’s purty much a man! Leastwise, most of ’em is.”

  I thought of the mustangers and my skin ran prickly up the back of my neck.

  “I said, most is!” Pa repeated. “Most of us love the lonesomeness. And because they’re so few of us, we’re all on the same footin’. Take, f’rinstance, when I gets to town this noon I meets up with an Injun from Nixon. Now he’s got a right to hate every dang white man in the world, ain’t he?”

  I nodded.

  “Instead, we enjoyed a pipe together behind the old Post Office. And then guess who I meets?”

  “Who?” I asked. In school we’d been taught to say “whom” but Mom told me when you’re with Pa, it’s like being in Rome. You got to talk his language.

  Pa was still trying to cheer me up, to ease my hurt. He broke into a great roar of laughter. “Why, I runs spang into Congressman Baring! Now name me another state where you got only one Congressman in Washington and you kin call him Walt, and pass the time a day with him like he was just any old cowpoke.”

  Pa snapped the leather to test the stitches he’d made. Satisfied that they held, he went on.

  “Baring’s a man with an eye as deep and gentle as a doe’s. And he’s got shoulders mountain-big, and that’s as it ought to be ’cause he carries a lot o’ worry on ’em.”

  Pa carefully put his needle away in a box. The harness was neatly mended now and so was my heart. I went over to him and kissed his warm leathery cheek.

  “Child, child,” he said very softly, “I know somethin’s hurtin’ you deep down and you’d rather not talk about it. Remember,” he chuckled, “we’re blood-fed by the milk of a long-ago mustang. An’ that gives us somethin’ extry to fight with.”

  I was scarce surprised next morning when Mr. Baring strode into the office. He came often to see Mr. Harris when he was in Reno.

  I thought, Pa’s right. Mr. Baring is not just a name in the paper or a picture on a poster. He’s a friend. My friend! My very own voice in Washington.

  I heard him say a pleasant good morning to Ruthie at the switchboard, and as he walked down the aisle to Mr. Harris’ office he stopped by my desk. “Had a good chat with your Dad yesterday,” he said. “He’s mighty proud of you, Annie. As for Charley . . . well, he’s taken the place of the son he lost.”

  A whole flood of memories washed over me, then something inside made me jump up. “Mr. Baring!” I almost shouted. “How soon do you go back to Washington?”

  “Next week, Annie.”

  Suddenly I was speechless. There was a long silent moment before he asked, “Anything I can do for you?”

  “Oh, yes!” Catching my breath I said, “It’s about the mustangs, sir. The air roundups are still going on. Those men want to grind up every last one. Soon there won’t be any left! Can’t you do something in Washington?”

  Mr. Baring sat down in the customer chair beside my desk. He picked up my glass paper weight with the little forest of trees inside. He shook it intently and made a snow flurry as if he hoped to find the answer there. A fire siren wailed in the distance, and a box elder bug crawled slowly along my desk. Finally he said, “Nevada has a reputation as a gambling state. Our citizens are rough, rugged men. But everyone knows that deep down there is a core of tenderness.” His face creased into a sudden smile. “Saving the wild horses, Annie, might be proof to the world.”

  I waited in suspense.

  Then he began to question himself. “But with all our economic worries and our foreign problems, it won’t be easy to arouse interest in the vanishing mustang.”

  “But we’ve got to do something!” I insisted. “You’re the only one who can.”

  He stood up, and out of his deep kindliness he said, “Suppose you write me the whole story, Annie. Give me the mustang’s role in history. Give me figures on mustang population, say, fifty years ago and now. Present both sides of the picture, honestly—the need to conserve the range and the need to save the horses. Then, Annie, end up with a sound solution. After I have all this ammunition, I’ll write a bill.” He hit my desk with his fist. “By thunder, I’ll write a bill that will make airborne roundups as criminal as treason.”

  I seized his hand and wrung it as if we’d already won. Again I had found someone big to champion the mustang’s cause.

  19. The Power of Children

  THIRTY DAYS and thirty-two pages later a bulky package, plastered all over with special delivery and airmail stamps was on its way from the Double Lazy Heart to Congressman Baring in Washington.

  For two weeks there was no word. Each day I waited in growing tension for the mail. At ten-thirty in the morning my eye was on that slit in the door like a cat at a mousehole. Once I even made the postman rummage deep in his bag to see if he had overlooked an important letter from Washington.

  I wanted so terribly to bring good news home to Charley. He had developed a cough, a kind of wheeze, like horses have when their hay is dusty. All of Mom’s favorite homemade remedies did no good. We tried lemon juice mulled with honey, and steaming camomile tea, and goose-grease rubbed on his chest and kept smelly-hot with a red woolen stocking. Nothing helped.

  Finally we called on good old Doctor Obermeyer in his crowded office with bottles and jars all over the walls. He diagnosed the cough as a kind of bronchitis.

  Charley laughed in gay good humor. “Bronc-itis!” he repeated. “I’m surprised it’s not mustang-itis!” He seemed enormously relieved, almost pleased by the verdict.

  While Charley was dressing, the doctor called me aside. He was a little cricket of a man and wore gold-rimmed glasses that kept sliding down his nose. He spoke slowly, gravely, looking dead ahead, trying to keep his glasses in place.

  “It’s a condition of the lungs,” he explained, “in which they refuse to bellow in and out normally. They just can’t take in enough oxygen.”

  I listened, rigid. Unbelieving.

  “But it could be a year or several years, Annie, before Charley’s lungs actually fail. Meanwhile,” the kindly voice said, “live those years richly.”

  The doctor’s telephone buzzed then and I could tell from his clipped orders that it was an emergency. I stepped out of the office with questions whirling through my mind, but knowing in my heart that nobody on earth could answe
r them.

  Charley and I went on with our life. We got a boy to help in the fields. At first Charley bristled. “We don’t need help! What’s more, we can’t afford it.”

  But I said, “The boy is desperate for work; he has three little sisters and a mother to support. What if we didn’t help him and he turned to a life of thievin’?”

  That did it. The boy was hired, and he fitted into the Double Lazy Heart Ranch as neat as the last piece of puzzle fits into the pattern.

  Charley’s interest now switched from the ranch to the mustangs. He wanted to see that bill through. Each night when I came into the house—even before I dumped my groceries on the table and while the dogs were still yelping for joy—his eyes asked: “Have you heard?”

  Then one morning the glad news came. Mr. Baring had presented our bill. It was a strong one, all right. Anyone using an airplane or a truck to capture wild horses could be fined $500 and sent to jail for six months. “A committee is studying it now, so it shouldn’t be long, Annie”—that’s how the letter ended.

  Within the week there was a second letter, hand-written on three sheets of stationery. Alone at my desk I read it all through, and over again. But there was only one line that mattered, making my world all gray and bleak. “Congress has adjourned,” it said. “Our bill never got out of committee.”

  I dreaded breaking the news to Charley, but he took it without flinching. “Why, Annie! My dear Annie!” he said. “You’re not going to give up now, are you? The goal’s in sight! Walt Baring will just present the bill again next session.”

  I swallowed hard and listened. Charley seemed as excited as a coach on a winning team. “You’ve got just a few months,” he prodded, “before Congress meets again. In that time, you’ve got to prove to the world that compassion is mightier than money. You can do it, Annie.”

  “Maybe we can do it, Charley, but it’ll mean giving up our weekend children.”

  Without hesitation he agreed. “They’d be the first to understand.” And that’s how we dropped another hard job for Charley, and that’s how I had the time and the courage to begin all over again.

  All this while we had depended on grownups for help. But now we turned to boys and girls. Year after year they had been winning blue ribbons with mustangs and half-mustangs at horse shows and county fairs. This was their war as much as mine. Why hadn’t we thought of them before?

  Charley made a gay stencil of wild horses high-tailing it for the hills, and this became my letterhead. Then to schools all over the country I wrote:

  “No matter where you live—in a crowded city in the East, or on a farm in the Middle West, or in the wide-open spaces of the Far West—I know you care what happens to our American wildlife. It belongs to all of us, to you, and to your children.

  “I used to think,” I went on to say, “that the horsemeat I fed my dogs came from old, old horses who were tired of living, or ones who’d been injured and mercifully shot. But now I know that most of it comes from free-running wild horses. You should know this too.” And I told them what was happening to the wild horses, all the brutal facts of their murder. Then I ended with the plea: “It might be your letter to your Congressman that will help save the mustangs.”

  Charley and I had no idea of the power of children’s anger. Once they became aware of the cruel roundups their hackles rose, and they did something about it.

  The way I heard it later, three little girls, still wearing their riding breeches, showed up at the home of Congressman James C. Wright down in Fort Worth, Texas. They had been all over the neighborhood getting names signed to a letter on which one of them had typed:

  We are writing a letter to Mr. Wright, Kay’s Daddy, hoping that he can help DO SOMETHING about these horses!!!!! If you would like to sign your name to this paper, it will probably help save some of them . . . maybe all of them! Imagine . . . making DOG FOOD out of horses . . . even wild horses! We feed the birds . . . the squirrels and the chipmunks . . . to SAVE them! Let’s see what we can do about saving the beautiful wild HORSES!!!!!!!!

  I could just picture the scene that night. There he was: that tall, red-haired, bushy-browed Jim Wright, pacing up and down in his library, trying to unravel all the knotty problems in his mind. What to do about taxes, how to vote on foreign aid, how about Russia, how much more money should the government invest in getting a man to the moon, and how about his weekly Newsletter? He had to get that out, too. The thousands of people who had elected him always expected it. He was striding out his thoughts, sentence by sentence, and at the same time fingering a sheaf of notes he had made.

  Jim Wright suddenly tossed all the notes into the waste basket and, grabbing the petition in one hand, he sat down at his desk and thrashed out his feelings into his dictaphone. Somebody sent me a copy of what he shouted, and this was it.

  Any Congressman is likely to receive a petition every now and then, but this week I got one which really struck home. Among the signatures appeared some familiar names, those of my daughters, Ginger and Kay. The petition was the idea of two of their playmates. By the time it reached me it had the names of practically all the kids in the neighborhood and a goodly smattering of their parents.

  It seems that some crass and thoughtless men have been cruelly mistreating a species dear to the hearts of childhood—horses. Out West, profiteers have been rounding up the dwindling herds of mustangs, peppering them with buckshot, running them to exhaustion with trucks and planes, and delivering them to the rendering plants, where they are sold by the pound and slaughtered for cat food.

  My colleague, Walter Baring of Nevada, has introduced a bill to make it unlawful to hunt wild horses on Federal lands with trucks or aircraft. He is supported by a rancher’s wife, and by the kids of the nation.

  These youngsters are in dead earnest. A fierce purposefulness showed in their eyes as they presented me their petition. This is no light matter with them.

  Am I going to be susceptible to pressure? Am I going to be influenced by a bunch of children? Am I going to support this bill because kids—mine and others—are sentimental about the wild horses? You bet your cowboy boots I am!

  That same week a lanky thirteen-year-old boy stepped up to the front of his seventh grade classroom in Ottumwa, Iowa. Even with a broken collarbone from a fall off his horse, he wanted to help the mustangs. His voice cracked slightly as he said, “I make a motion that we have everything but the ice cream at our class picnic and that we send our ice cream money to Wild Horse Annie for her campaign.”

  The donation came, in dimes sticky with pink frosting and chocolate cake. With it Charley bought pages of stamps, the pretty ones with a flag on them, to stick onto more letters to more children, asking them to write to more Congressmen.

  With the flood of mail going out and coming in, Charley’s and my days were brimful. And we were strangely happy, giving ourselves completely to the cause, and shutting the door on our own personal worry.

  20. A Growing Storm

  IT WAS the boys and girls who helped us most. They were weaving a web back and forth across the land, touching many people, pulling them together. They were the ones who aroused the nation and turned the tide.

  Help began coming in from everywhere. A big California paper, The Sacramento Bee, printed the boys’ and girls’ letters and headlined its own opinion of the ruthless slaughter:

  DESERT HORSES FACE EXTINCTION BY HUNTERS!

  Spattered across the page were gruesome pictures; they made me live all over again that terror-filled morning at Black Rock Desert. When I saw that the story was written by Al Trivelpiece, I almost wept. He was the one in Carson City who had chanted: “Here comes Wild Horse Annie!” He called me that in the article, too, but now he made it seem a badge of glory.

  The voices of protest were growing louder just when we needed them most. Mr. Baring had presented his bill again. It had a number now—HR 2725. I sang it over and over as I swept our floors, as I peeled potatoes and ironed Charley’s shirts, as I brus
hed Hobo, as I drove to Reno; it was like a secret code that could spring a trap and set the wild things free.

  Al Trivelpiece’s fiery story scorched a path all the way across America. The Reader’s Digest noticed it. They sent a famous reporter, Robert O’Brien, out from Connecticut to see what the ruckus was about, to see if the mustangs were worth saving.

  He chartered a little Piper Cub from a Wyoming rancher, Chug Utter, and the two of them flew over our crinkled ranges, trying to find some wild horses.

  “Why, there’s room enough here for millions of mustangs!” O’Brien said as he looked down on lava spillways, and brown treeless hills, and mountains scarred with landslides. From sky-high there was no life at all. Only mountains, tipped and tumbling. Only tiny, tiny trails no wider than thread. O’Brien kept his eyes glued on them, knowing that hoofs of vagabond animals had long ago carved them out, flinty hoofs of mountain goats—or maybe generations of wild horses in search of browse, in search of water. But now he saw no moving things.

  “Looks dead as a moonscape!” he muttered.

  Chug caught the boredom in his voice. “Here, you take over!” he said. “I’ll do the navigatin’. Keep your nose on the horizon and bear left.”

  Minutes went by. And more minutes. The needle of the gas gauge was getting close to the red.

  “We’d better be heading for home,” Chug warned.

  Just then, far far below, there was a whisker of motion. O’Brien cut his speed and began a slow descent. He skimmed toward the movement. It was only a tiny whirl of dust. But all of a sudden the roar of his engine set the dust into motion. And blossoming out of it—horses! A whole string of horses!

  “You take over!” he yelled to his partner. “I’ve got to see this!”

  Chug gunned the engine, went into a spiral to hold altitude, then eased the ship fifty feet down, a hundred feet down. He was flying alongside the mountain now, parallel to the horses.