When the men approached, the black foal might have
been nursing. Or she might have been on her side, giving her wobbly
legs a rest, leaning into her mother under the starry desert sky.
At the sound of the vehicle, the band prepared to move and did move
at once, for horses are animals of prey and so their withers
twitched, their ears stiffened, their perfect, unshod hooves dug
into the scrub for traction and then they began to run. The black
foal might have taken a second or two longer than the others to
rise. Perhaps the mare, already upright, bolted instantly, turning
her head to see if the foal had followed. The headlights appeared
on a rise. The men were shouting and then there was another bright
light — it trained from the roof of the vehicle across the sunken
bajada and it swept the sands, illuminating the wild and running
four-legged spirits as their legs stretched in full perfect
extension, flashing across their hides which were dun and paint and
bay, making a living mural in 3-D in which the American story —
all of it — was frozen here forever, in the desert as it always
is, as bullets hissed from the vehicle through the patches of
juniper and into the wild horses of the old frontier. It was
Christmas. Two thousand years earlier, Christ had been born in a
stable.
Two months later on a cold and sunny
afternoon, a man was hiking in the mountains outside of
Reno. Something made him look to his left, up a hill. He saw a dark
foal lying down in the sagebrush, not able to get up. A bachelor
stallion had been watching from a distance and now came over and
nibbled at the foal’s neck. She tried to get up but couldn’t and
the stallion rejoined his little band. The hiker called for help. A
vet arrived and could find no injuries. As it grew dark, a trailer
was pulled across the washes and gulleys until it approached the
filly, about a hundred yards away and down hill. The stars were
particularly bright that night and helped the rescue party,
equipped only with flashlights, lumber across the sands and up the
rocky rise where the filly was down. Four men lifted her onto a
platform and carried her down the hill and into the trailer. “She
was a carcass with a winter coat,” Betty Lee Kelly, a rescuer,
later told me. She was covered with ticks and parasites, weak and
anemic. She was six months old. Two days later, at a sanctuary near
Carson City called Wild Horse Spirit, Betty and her partner Bobbi
Royle helped her stand. But she kept falling. Over the weeks, they
nourished her and she grew strong and regained muscle and she began
to walk without falling down. But she was nervous, not skittish
like a lot of horses are, especially wild ones, but distracted,
preoccupied, perhaps even haunted. Because of her location when
rescued, which was near Lagomarsino Canyon, and because she was
starving, her rescuers reasoned that she had been a nursing foal
who had recently lost her mother. Without mother’s milk, a foal can
last for a while in the wilderness, sometimes as long as a couple
of months. And because a band of bachelor stallions had been nearby
when she was found, her rescuers figured that they had taken her
in, looking after her until they could no more, standing guard as
she lay down in the brush to die. As it turned out, the filly was
the lone survivor of the Christmas massacre, and they called her
Bugz.
Bugz was a member of the
historic Virginia Range herd, the first mustangs in the country to
win legal protection (which they have since lost). Like the other
mustangs of the West, their history in this land runs deep, as DNA
has shown; they are direct descendants of the horses of the Ice
Age, which flourished in the West, crossed the Bering land bridge,
fanned out across the world, went extinct here and then returned
with conquistadors, quickly re-establishing themselves and
ultimately heading into the nether reaches of Nevada to be left
alone.
Several years ago, I drove out to the kill site
with Betty Kelly, to pay respects and see how it’s changed since
the massacre. We climbed the rutted road leading into the Virginia
Range, parked and walked up a rise. It was spring time and the
stands of sage were puffy with rain and fragrant. Except for our
footsteps, it was quiet. The horse skulls and cages of ribs and
shins and intact hooves and manes and tails were still there,
forever preserved in the dry Mojave air. There was a pair of leg
bones, crossed, as if running in repose. Betty knew exactly which
horse this was, and had told me about her on our first visit to the
site. Of the 34 horses killed in the massacre, she was horse #1 in
the court record, or Hope, as she and Bobbi had named her after
being called to the scene on the day the bodies were discovered, as
they always are when mustangs are in need — which is often.
Branded as pests that steal food from livestock or
renegades that range into town and destroy lawns, they have been
under siege for decades, enduring government round-ups and vicious
killings. The murders are rarely solved, although in the case of
the 1998 massacre, three men were arrested and one of them
ultimately pled guilty to a misdemeanor charge — killing a horse
that another member of the trio had already shot to put it out of
its misery.
“She had probably been
here for a day or two,” Betty recalled, and as she continued, it
was like a prayer. “She was lying in the sand. She had dug a small
hole with her front legs, intermittently trying to get up.” I knew
the story well and in the bearing witness there was comfort and
then Betty’s voice trailed off and we walked on. After awhile, we
came across the horse known in the Nevada court system as #4. Like
the others, Bobby and Betty gave him a name. It was Alvin. He was
the one who was shot in the chest and whose eye was mutilated with
a fire extinguisher. His carcass — the barrel of his chest — was
picked and blown clean by time, wind, and critters, rooted always
in the great wide open.
As I walked the site this time, I
saw that someone or something, maybe a coyote or perhaps the
weather, had moved a few of the large stones in the cross under a
juniper tree that Betty had made on the one-year anniversary. But
it was still very much a cross. And then I discovered something
new: an empty box of Winchester cartridges, lodged between the
branches of another tree. Winchester — the gun that won the West,
the ammo that brought it to its knees — now back as a reminder,
probably placed intentionally and maybe by the people who killed
the horses. Did someone have us in their sights? I wondered as I
looked across the range. “I think it’s time to go,” I said, but as
we walked back to the pick-up, there came a wonderful sight — a
few horses, down from a rise. Since the massacre, Betty rarely saw
them in the canyon, and she had visited it several times a year, as
a kind of a groundskeeper for the cemetery. On my visits, I had not
seen any horses either, nor had I seen any hoofprints, which made
me think that they had been avoiding the area because in the
desert, tracks last for a very long time.
The horses that
approached were brown with black manes — the scruffy and beautiful
Nevada horses that nobody asks for at the adoption centers. We
stopped in our tracks and watched them and they watched us back.
After awhile, we bid them farewell. As we headed down the mountain,
I turned for one more look. They were walking across the boneyard
towards the stone cross, reclaiming their home.
Deanne Stillman’s beat is the desert, and her previous
book is the bestselling Twentynine Palms: A True Story of Murder,
Marines, and the Mojave. This piece is excerpted from Mustang: The
Saga of the Wild Horse in the American West, just published by
Houghton Mifflin.
This article appeared in the print edition of the magazine with the headline The luckiest horse in Reno.
Republish our articles for free, online or in print, under a Creative Commons license.
