Horse Lover Read Online Free Page B

sitting on Aunt Jemima. We stood on the top of a hill, the prairie below sloping down toward the Little White River. Horses young and old, a spectrum of browns, blacks, and whites, grazed before us. Healthy, thick grass beckoned. Something inside of me was waking up, warming to the idea. A little voice said the mustangs would thrive on that windswept prairie.
    But then another vision hightailed it in. The horses shivered in a blizzard. Could we shelter them from the killing wind? Would we have enough hay and could we get it to them, or would they have to slip across ice, paw through snow, and graze the dead grass? Would older horses survive winter’s grip? The ranch was tuned to caring for cattle during tough winters, but horses might tow a different set of challenges.
    I flitted back to the possible stream of income in this wacky idea. The Bureau of Land Management had a budget in place to pay for the care of horses. We needed that first and foremost since neither Dayton nor I was in a position to give away services. Maybe we could charge a lower rate and save the government money. Could this be an industry waiting to happen? Perhaps. If nothing else, it seemed to be an opportunity to do something gigantic, something that had never been done before.
    “You know, Hawk, this is a pretty interesting proposal. I might very well be able to open the door with the BLM . I can talk to Les Rosencrantz, the state director of Arizona, and I’ve met the national director, Bob Burford, a pretty nice guy. A rancher from Grand Junction, Colorado. I bet we could get an audience with him if we needed to. But there’s an even more interesting thing about your timing.” I leaned forward and spun the basket of popcorn. Dayton looked at me, curious.
    “As it happens I’m in the process of buying a thirty-five-thousand-acre ranch in the Sand Hills of southern South Dakota.”
    Stress lines evaporated from his face, and his body came to attention.
    “Think a couple thousand mustangs might be able to live up there?” I asked.
    I could almost see his mind holding up this piece of the puzzle, the last of the border pieces, recognizing it, and pushing it into place. The only sound that escaped his mouth was a whispered “goddamn.” After a moment of sitting stock still, he let loose a throw-your-head-back yelp that would summon any pack of coyotes. Cowboy hats swiveled. Seeing two faces plastered with three parts excitement and a shot of disbelief, they turned back to their conversations.
    Then in true cowboy fashion, Dayton “Hawk” Hyde said, “Let’s order another drink and chew on this one for a while.”
    Man, was I jacked on the drive from Las Cruces back to Lazy B, and not from the scotch. I had been a cattle rancher for so long that entertaining an idea not involving cattle felt exhilarating, foreign, and daring all at the same time. Not even in my wildest, far-out imaginings could I have thought up a wild horse sanctuary. But here it was, served to me on a silver platter. The miles zipped by as my mind shifted the pieces of this puzzle to see how they might fit together. Dayton had the vision. The BLM had the money. I had the ranching experience and business skills. The land offered space and grass. Then there were the horses, possibly two thousand of them.
    The idea of working with horses felt as natural as the idea of working with cattle. After all, horses were as much a part of my life as my parents, my sisters, the Lazy B cowboys, the land. The benchmarks of my childhood and adolescence involved horses. The first time I mounted a horse without help. The first time I brought a runaway cow back to the herd without help. The first time I roped a calf and didn’t lose my rope. The first time I rode a bucking horse and didn’t get thrown.
    My first horse was a little wild mustang named Chico. He had been part of a herd of twenty or thirty that ranged the flanks of Steeple Rock Mountain, just north of Lazy B. A local cowboy