Last Chance Mustang by Mitchell Bornstein

Author:Mitchell Bornstein
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781466864290
Publisher: St. Martin's Press

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DETERMINED FOUR-LEGGED CAPTIVES

A horse gallops with its lungs, perseveres with its heart, and wins with its character.

—FEDERICO TESIO

When the BLM announced that it planned to move forward with the Calico Mountains winter roundup, twenty-seven hundred wild Mustangs living on 550,000 acres in five Herd Management Areas instantly became targets for the low-flying BLM contractor’s helicopters. It was a new year but still the same old story: horses were being removed for their own protection and horses were being relocated to prevent rangeland degradation. The decision was especially surprising given the sworn testimony by a local BLM wild horse expert two years earlier that “… there’s significantly more animals out there than what we thought were, so I would have expected the monitoring data to show higher levels of use than what I collected. And I guess I’m learning it’s a big country, animals move.”27 With 180 acres of rangeland previously available to each free-roaming horse, life would drastically change for the Calico Mustangs. Chased, harassed, and then interned, the Calico wild horses who survived the fated winter roundup would soon be relocated to holding facilities with a mere seven hundred square feet per animal.

As the new year started, Samson the formerly wild, maladjusted Mustang had claimed yet another casualty. Only this victim hadn’t been charged and run off from deep within the pasture, hadn’t been mercilessly kicked, and hadn’t been bodychecked to the ground. This casualty had never even crossed paths with the unruly Mustang.

Samson’s latest victim was in fact my girlfriend, Jamie.

Weeks earlier, I had told Jamie of my intention to move out to the suburbs after eighteen years living in downtown Chicago. The weekday commute back into the city would be nowhere near as time-consuming as the countless hours I had spent driving to and from the numerous horse farms that dotted the outlying counties. Jamie and I had been dating for only about nine months, so I didn’t think it necessary or appropriate to seek her approval. Her response was brief and to the point: “It isn’t my business; do whatever works for you and your horses.”

I couldn’t tell if her statement signaled hurt, anger, indifference, or a combination of the three. Perhaps if she was a horse, I would have been able to decipher what it meant; perhaps not. Either way, in the three weeks since we more or less had had nothing to do with each other.

And then, on New Year’s Eve, as Chicago’s lakefront fireworks display heralded the start of 2010, as the reds, blues, and greens exploded above our heads, our relationship imploded. Jamie was angered by my refusal to take a trip out of town and leave Samson, and her feelings of rejection boiled over. My recent actions had been thoughtless and my priorities had been skewed—the sentiments that seemed to sum up her feelings.

“You care more about that horse than you do about me,” Jamie declared in summary.

While I certainly tried to understand Jamie’s position, the smirk on my face said that I could not.

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