This show horse was drawn by my sister Monica; she would have been in elementary school when she drew it.
A few months ago I received a package from my father; in it were three drawings that my sister had created with pencil and Crayola crayon, probably when she was in elementary school. That places them at more than 30 years old. I remember her as being quite artistic as a young girl, and she was especially fond of her equine subjects. Unfortunately, the three pieces that I now have seem to be all that remain of her adventures into the world of equine art.
What, pray tell, does this have to do with the plight and woes of wild horses? You will need to go back in time several years.
It was just over seven years ago, on a hot July day in 2002, and the Red Waffle fire in the Pryor Mountains was raging. It would consume 5,000 acres before its hunger was satiated. Smoke billowed out and up until it smothered the stars.
It was here in these rugged mountains, on this border between Montana and Wyoming, where mustangs roamed wild across an often unforgiving landscape. As flames licked the hooves of fleeing horses and scrambling feet of neighboring beasts, the trees and brush crackled and popped while succumbing to their ashy destiny. Greens, browns, and blues melted into black, changing a palette created over many years in mere seconds.
Meanwhile, a few thousand miles west of the fire, my sister finally succumbed to the inestimable pain of her 36 years on this earth. She would make an effort to find her freedom that day, pill by little pill.
You see, my sister was tired of trying to balance life on her own borderline, and as the wild horses know, life can get pretty challenging when you do not conform or fit in to life or the plans of those around you. Rolling up into a fetal ball on the floor, she never woke up.
And that was how she was found, curled up against the world like a soft-shelled turtle.
A moment after the words of my sister’s death hit my brain, I rolled onto the downward plunge of a roller coaster ride, starting first at the tipping point where your stomach gives way then quickly mashes into your heart. I sucked in my breath and held it tight; perhaps not breathing out again would suspend me in time. My lungs became taught balloons, unwilling to give up the last air that they had owned when I thought my sister was alive.
It has been seven years since that moment. That’s a long time if you are a dog. Its not a long time if you are a human and have lost someone you love.
I have gone on breathing, but every now and then it takes on the characteristics of a wheeze, or a gasp, or a drawn out sigh. For some unknown reason, this seventh anniversary seemed more difficult than even the first one. But it passed, and things should have returned to “normal”, the new normal.
This September, though, I found myself trying to come up for air many times as I read about the Pryor Mountain mustangs; they were being rounded up by ambush and terror with giant metal predators with blades. Families and bands were split up and adopted off to unknown fates, left in holding pens, or if part of the few and the lucky, released after being branded and/or sterilized. Their story and their troubles pulled me in and tugged strings that were attached to something fathomless and deep, something unknown to me in the moment.
Then one crisp autumn day I finally made the connection between the fire, the horses, and my sister: the fire in those mountains had been blazing at the same time my sister left this life. Had I watched the news, and seen the fires and horses, the night I received the call about my sister? I don’t remember, but at minimum it was floating around the airwaves at some point in that timeframe. Was all my reading about the recent roundup of Pryor Mountain mustangs triggering the memory of the phone call announcing her death, or did I simply want these beautiful and sentient creatures saved all the more because I had not been able to save my own sister?
Perhaps for me it’s a little of all of that.
Yes, I am anthropomorphizing horses, elevating them to the same level with humans when it comes to a need for family, or herds if you will (although elevating is a bit of a generous compliment sometimes). Maybe humans are not the only species to have attachment bonds to family members. If you have heard the cries of a newly weaned foal or its mother, or watched elephants weave and tremble over bones of dead family members, it gives you pause to think.
A pregnant pause that says life is a lot about connection – the kind of connection that is not solely reserved for the humans on this planet.
Maybe it all just boils down to the amygdala and basic survival instincts of any mammal, and the inherent knowledge that there is safety in numbers – numbers that come in herds, flocks, prides, packs, pods, and more. Instead of looking at the wild horses in the roundup pens as simply horses, what if we tried looking at them as brothers, sisters, mothers, fathers to each other? But then again, we experiment on, abuse, put on display and all but exterminate in the wild our closest relatives the primates (this in addition to all the atrocities humans heap upon each other), so how much hope and compassion is actually available for a few equines?
I cannot bring my sister back, but I can help her memory live on through a few simple pieces of art done with her childhood hands, produced with fine attention to detail and a love of beautiful horses. There was no simple answer for my sister and those who loved and knew her; there is no simple answer for the wild horses.
Why should you care about this? Perhaps the best and simplest answer is contained in a quote from St. Francis of Assissi: “If you have men who will exclude any of God’s creatures from the shelter of compassion and pity, you will have men who will deal likewise with their fellow men”. I hope that in the snows of following days we need not say about the horses, “whose dying eyes no country/regards with patriot love” while cattle and sheep plod carelessly over the bones of the horses’ forgotten ancestors.
“To fight aloud is very brave,
But gallanter, I know,
Who charge within the bosom,
The cavalry of woe.
Who win, and nations do not see,
Who fall, and none observe,
Whose dying eyes no country
Regards with patriot love.
We trust, in plumed procession,
For such the angels go,
Rank after rank, with even feet
And uniforms of snow.”
~ Emily Dickinson