Last Chance Mustang Read online

  Samson would not go down without a fight.

  {4}

  THE WARHORSE WITHIN

  The essential joy of being with horses is that it brings us in contact with the rare elements of grace, beauty, spirit, and fire.

  —SHARON RALLS LEMON

  As an alumnus of the BLM’s Adopt-a-Horse-or-Burro Program, Samson the stallion found little quarter in the domestic horse market. Nevertheless, to an extent he had fared better than many of his 235,700 fellow graduates. While 36,000 fellow adoptees disappeared in the months following their placement, Samson was neither MIA nor KIA. Unlike three to five hundred other wild horses each year, Samson was not labeled as unmanageable and returned to BLM authorities. And though a U.S. Government Accountability Office (GAO) report found that untold numbers of adopted horses died from abuse and inhumane treatment during their initial year of domesticity, Samson had somehow survived his first twelve months of terror.

  Weeks and then months passed without any news and I couldn’t stop thinking about Samson the maladjusted Mustang. He was the abandoned dog you see walking along the side of the road. He was the feral cat who snakes through your yard and keeps going. Samson was the lost and hopeless animal you wanted to help, but you just didn’t. I felt like the older brother who had failed to take responsibility for his younger sibling, the best friend who had let down his buddy.

  Was Samson still alive, had he been freed from his incarceration, who had been his latest victim?

  When Amy phoned nearly three months to the day since my first encounter with Samson, I was determined to right my wrong. Hindsight instructed that I had been selfish where I should have been selfless. I had turned my back on a horse truly in need and I would not make the same mistake twice. While guilt had ruled my thoughts, there was a stronger emotion that I couldn’t quite identify. It had felt like a part of me had been missing for the last several months.

  Through all of my years working with others’ horses, this was a first.

  Though Amy called to discuss Studs’ rehabilitation, our conversation quickly turned to Samson. “He’s outside, just as you instructed, but other than that, nothing else has changed. He is still bitter, violent, and mad at the world,” she advised. Frustration and anger permeated her tone.

  Over the last several months, Amy had shopped Samson around and there were no takers. Samson the marauding Mustang had run out of track; there was nowhere left to run.

  “I’ve decided he can go to the rodeo and be a bucking horse,” she continued. “That will suit his temperament just fine. He can break bones, mangle a cowboy or two, and I’ll bet they’ll cheer him and make him a celebrity. And if that isn’t an option, well then…”

  I didn’t know if Amy was serious or not, but I instantly recognized that Samson was in the fight of his life. Too far gone for the reputable rodeo circuit, he would end up at some illegal backyard rodeo where his debut performance would be his final performance. And if he wouldn’t be gentled and he couldn’t go to the rodeo, then he would most likely be put down—Amy’s farm was Samson’s last and only hope.

  As our phone conversation continued, Amy pulled back the veil ever so slightly and told of her recent woes. A serious health scare, a failed relationship, and the daily grind of a demanding job had sent her packing for the country. She was tired and spent and needed a break from it all. Samson was not part of the plan.

  For over a century, wild horses in the tens of thousands had been hunted, brutalized, and slaughtered. And with the once-iconic American wild horse now forgotten and displaced, I was determined to find this Mustang, this homeless horse, a place to finally call home. I was going to make a difference; I was going to make Samson and Amy work.

  Samson wasn’t just a Mustang; he was every Mustang.

  Thrown together by a strange twist of fate, horse and human had more in common than each thought. Samson had been locked away from the world; Amy had run from it. Neither had anywhere to go; both needed to hit the reset button and start anew. And though neither realized it, they were perfect for each other.

  One was a damaged horse, the other a damaged soul. Neither was totally broken.

  “I’ll come out this weekend,” I uncharacteristically blurted out, “and we’ll see what we can accomplish.”

  As I drove west from Chicago, congested suburban multilane thoroughfares gave way to two-lane ascending and descending country roads. Rural Illinois’ green valleys, hilly terrain, and endless yellow cornstalks provided a stark and quieting contrast to the overbuilt and overpopulated metropolitan area. Riddled with moraines, kettles, glacial lakes, and knob and kettle topography, McHenry County’s glacially sculpted landscape was geologically atypical for the Chicagoland area. Ironically, Samson’s new home sat in a valley once covered by the Pleistocene ice sheet—a remnant of the Ice Age that had temporarily eradicated his species ten thousand years earlier.

  Whether or not he knew it, whether or not Amy recognized it, Samson had returned home. The sight of a hulking shiny green John Deere combine creeping down the highway announced that I was nearing my destination.

  Years of training hard cases had instructed that there was only one strategy: I needed to convince the battle-tested Samson that he could be schooled and handled without threat, violence, and pain. I would have to turn his world upside down.

  Upon my arrival, I scanned Amy’s property. If viewed from above, the farm would appear as a perfectly proportioned square. Fifty yards of driveway cut the acreage into two equal north-south halves. The ramshackle dairy barn occupied the southern acreage; a dilapidated red siding–framed farmhouse sat to the north. Two pastures bordered the barn. On the east side, a small pasture with mostly concrete footing stretched all the way to the road. To the west sat a small grass pasture with a corncrib once used to house the season’s take. A football field–sized “south pasture” and an equally vast “north pasture” rounded out the far west half of the property. Horse-unfriendly heavy-gauge barbed wire enclosed each of the pastures.

  The “roadside” pasture and its concrete was a definite no; the north and south pastures were far too large to tighten the net on Samson. For our first session, the “corncrib” pasture with its limited green space and small structure would have to suffice.

  Gazing across to the fence that separated the roadside and crib pastures, I observed Studs and the two miniature horses calmly sunning and snoozing. In nearly an instant, and with much greater speed than I believed any of the three possessed, they were off and running to the pasture’s far corner. With the wind in this valley an ever-constant force to be reckoned with, I assumed that loose roof shingles or a dust devil had panicked the threesome and sent them packing. When a dust cloud appeared moments later and engulfed the area where the three last stood, my assumption seemed correct.

  Once the dust cloud dissipated, I realized that a different force of nature, one not previously considered, had caused the commotion. It was not high winds and debris; it was not a dust devil; it was Samson. Like a warrior fresh from victory, Samson—chest out and head held high—pranced back and forth along the fence line as his body language spoke volumes. Ah, yes! The thrill of victory and the agony of defeat; there is nothing better. It did me good to see that Samson the wild Mustang was once again free and his domain’s king. I probably shouldn’t have been so pleased, for I was both his next victim and his next conquest.

  Samson peered over the fence rail, and after three months of separation our gazes locked. Though bloated from parasitic worms and covered from muzzle to tail and poll to hoof in burdock burrs, he looked regal. No longer caged and no longer confined, his stiff neck, pointed ears, rounded back, and fluttering tail all spoke to this fact.

  His eyes were no longer dulled from the monotony of confinement, and I was happy for Samson. This was not to say, however, that he wasn’t in full threat detection mode. True to his ways, Samson stood stationary; he didn’t run and he didn’t flee. Other than his tail, the only part of his body that move
d was his ears—repeatedly rotating forward and then pinning backward.

  Samson’s facial expression signaled recognition; his hard stare suggested that he knew my purpose and that the game was on.

  Still seated in my car, I looked Samson over from top to bottom and front to back. On this, my first true opportunity to view him in full daylight, I took in all that I saw. Like most true Mustangs, he was small, proportional, and sturdy. In a true exhibition of natural selection’s wonders, his eyes protruded wide from his skull, thus affording him the greatest field of vision with which to view the wild’s many predators. His long, narrow legs stood for speed and strength; his deep chest delivered endurance and stamina.

  Black points, including a dark black muzzle, mane, and tail, highlighted his bay coloring. The hue of his legs gradually transitioned from bay to black from just above the knees and hocks on down. In the dim light and low contrast of Samson’s stall, these black points had previously escaped my detection. Now apparent, this two-tone coloring painted Samson in light and dark tones and empowered him as conspicuous in the day and stealthy at night.

  He was a true horse of the wild and a true wild horse.

  Like his Arabian ancestors, Samson’s short, markedly concave back sloped to a high-set tail. His broad, slightly convex forehead tapered to a concave face and slanted, flared nostrils. His wide-set, dark, rich, introspective eyes said that he had a tale to weave. Conversely, his distinctively long face, flat and upright shoulders, and narrow chest spoke to his Barb ancestry. And lest we forget, from all accounts Samson had most certainly inherited the unstable and famously unpredictable Barb temper.

  I could see in Samson the characteristic blend of his Arabian and Barb ancestors—the Arabian swift and sure, the Barb rough and tough—both desert horses, both proud. With Spanish traits recognizable in horses with as little as one-thirty-second Spanish ancestry and bloodlines, the dominant genetic code of the Conquistador horses still canters across the West in the American wild Mustang.

  I shifted the gear lever into drive and turned up the driveway.

  My truck advanced a mere ten yards before coming to an abrupt stop. Two horned goats, one larger than the other, stood in my path seemingly preparing for battle. I inched forward and honked the horn, but the pair refused to budge. Suddenly the impromptu greeting party’s smaller half took to flight, landing squarely atop my truck. With four freshly minted hoof-sized divots on the hood in plain sight, I unleashed an expletive-laden tirade. In turn, the small female responded verbally with what I imagined was a mix of reciprocal profanity and bravado. Concurrent with this animated, high-decibel response, a flurry of dark pellets exited from her hind end—bouncing across the hood like marbles on pavement.

  On the spot, I forgave Samson’s prior trespasses against the goats. They deserved what they got. Moments later, reinforcements arrived.

  Three dozen chickens and roosters—darting about as if they had lost their heads or ingested crack—scurried beneath my car. Nearly twenty ducks and geese followed and huddled together directly in front of my vehicle’s grill. With this ragtag assembly of fowl squawking in high pitched tones and wildly waving their wings, my poor truck and my patience had taken enough abuse. Just as I was preparing to floor the accelerator and create a week’s worth of duck a l’orange, what I believed to be my rescue party arrived on scene.

  A gigantic yellow Lab who looked as if he was a cross between a horse and a dog led the charge, leaping directly into the huddled masses. A medium-sized black mutt covered the flanks, chomping at any unfortunate critter who dared to cross her path. Coming up the rear, a geriatric but no less crazed shepherd mix raced after the stragglers.

  With the rebellion quashed and the insurgents dispersed, the three canines turned their attention to my truck. In a scene reminiscent of Cujo, the yellow Lab stood tall on his hind legs and slammed his face hard against the driver-side window—leaving behind an opaque glaze of drool. The black mutt mauled my oversized Goodyear tires while the old-timer took to christening my muffler with a lifted leg. Within seconds, the wild pack of dogs was running circles around my vehicle and howling as if they had captured a Grade A sirloin dinner.

  From a distance a familiar voice called out, “Now you guys stop that. You know that isn’t the proper way to greet our guests.” Carrying what appeared to be an entire library’s worth of books, Amy walked down the driveway.

  As I watched the hounds race to greet their master, I realized that these rabid dogs, insolent goats, antagonistic ducks and geese, clueless chickens and roosters, and the horses all shared one common thread. Some had wandered onto the property from adjoining lands, others had been dumped by their owners under the cover of darkness, many had been rescued by Amy and Lisa, but all had been unwanted and homeless. Instantly I realized that this nondescript little farm in the middle of nowhere housed the animal kingdom’s rejects and society’s outcasts.

  Like it or not, I was living a modern-day version of Orwell’s Animal Farm. My dinged hood, the sonata of fecal pellets, the unwelcoming fowl, and the bloodthirsty dogs announced the cold, hard truth: I hadn’t even confronted Samson the hateful Mustang and I was already losing the war. Animal rejects one, helpless horse trainer zero.

  Amy approached with books in her arms and books strewn across the lawn marking her path of descent from the house. “I have a dozen books here,” Amy announced “and not a one helped me reform that beast out there.”

  She then continued, “One of these books advised reading poetry each day. This paperback training manual said that I should try to locate and connect with Samson’s inner self. The hardcover book—here it is—instructed that I sing to him each and every evening.”

  Unfortunately, Samson and Amy possessed widely divergent tastes in both music and poetry. Amy’s new-age training techniques had been a total bust.

  Glancing back over my shoulder, I observed that Samson was staring at me, studying me. I also noticed that he was wearing a halter. When I learned from Amy that a friend of hers had used a pole to drop the halter down over Samson’s face, I instantly became agitated. The incident had been ripe with fear and violence and no doubt erased our previous successes. Despite our earlier advances, Samson once again had cause to hate and fear his captors.

  It was early October, and the colder temperatures and change of season would have Samson pumped, rank, and primed for a fight. But I didn’t care; Samson the forever wild Mustang and I were going to be reunited. I felt energized.

  I placed my foot on a strand of barbed wire, grabbed a post, and leapt over the fence. Samson and I, horse and trainer, squared off amid the corncrib pasture’s seventy-by-fifty-foot fenced confines. No longer caged and imprisoned, Samson was statically charged and primed for battle. Standing upright on his hind legs, he unleashed a flurry of foreleg strikes, which found nothing but air. Like a fighter shadowboxing moments before a bout, his blows were intended as both a prefight warm-up and a message to his opponent.

  Bring it on!

  From a distance, I glanced upon Samson. The first lesson was always about where you looked and how you looked—how you carried yourself and the message that you conveyed. Was your posture upright and dominant, or were you slouched and submissive? Did you approach on a direct straight line like a predator, or did you meander and move in on a less threatening diagonal? Was your gait assertive and confident or slow and timid? Did your body language communicate confidence, or did it speak of threat and intimidation?

  Confidence gains command and control of a horse; threat and intimidation gets you punted across the pasture.

  As I slowly angled toward the center of the pasture, Samson’s entire disposition shifted. In mere seconds, his respirations turned shallow and rapid. His spine tightened and his back rounded as he first extended, and then lowered, his neck and head. He flared his nostrils while his eyes seemed to bulge out from his face. His tail circulated feverishly in complete 360-degree motions as he pinned his ears hard against his skull and s
lammed his right foreleg into the ground.

  Samson’s actions and reactions said that he feared for his very life.

  The entirety of Samson’s behavior—the sights and the sounds—could, would, and certainly did evoke a flight response in those of the two- and four-legged persuasion. To an untrained eye, Samson’s actions might have appeared as the manifestation of anger, threat, and contempt. In reality, though, Samson’s central nervous system was merely trying to keep pace with his fear-fueled, raging circulatory and respiratory processes. The “Samson Experience,” as I later coined the phrase, was this creature’s most potent tool in his vast and impressive weapons arsenal.

  This fear and threat–induced response, Samson’s automated last line of defense, permitted him to conserve enormous stores of energy, which he otherwise would have expended via preemptory actions such as bucking, kicking, spinning, and charging. He was, in effect, storing up for the battle. Natural selection, Darwin’s theory that first went to work on this species’ dog-sized ancient grandfather some 60 million years earlier, was now at work on Samson—the dawn horse’s modern-day descendant.

  The impressive nature of Samson’s exhibition made it no less heartbreaking and disheartening. These were behaviors born out of years of pain, abuse, and suffering. This was a train wreck created by man and a horse who seemed beyond repair.

  It was then that I realized that while Samson had been spared the confines of a BLM long-term holding facility, he nevertheless had spent years locked in a cage. Samson’s cage didn’t have bars and it didn’t have walls. His cage was a mental prison, and he was sentenced and then delivered there by those tasked with providing his care and instruction. After years of abuse and brutality, whatever hope Samson held of being handled humanely had long since vanished.