Little Bluestem: Stories from Rural America

Casey let the first one in, the gray mare with the look of the Arab in her. She went in easily and her filly foal followed. Her younger sister, though, had not been there before. She walked past the barbed-wire fence, through the gate and into the pasture, and then, when Casey was looking at the gray mare getting acquainted again with the yearlings and the two year-old bay gelding, the younger mare turned and walked back out.

  Nobody panicked. She stood there on the pavement of the county road in the gathering pools of the darkness and soft hush of the land waiting for night and looked at them, humans and horses, looking back at her from the fenceline and the green of acres of pasture, waiting. Besides, her baby was there.

  “Di,” Casey said softly and Amanda gave that low whistle of hers.

  “Diamond, get over here,” Casey said once more, swinging the gate wider, and she dropped her head and blew out a soft, almost guttural snort, her nostrils flaring at the warm stones in the pavement where she was standing, and then she slowly strode, demurely and elegantly, into the green beyond the fenceline.

  Green freedom of fifteen acres.

  Amanda watched them sorting, settling, getting reacquainted, the two older mares and their two foals mingling in with the two yearlings and the gelding: ears forward and back, little explosions of air, slight nips with reachings and turnings of necks, dance of hoofs jostling bodies together and apart.

  Contact.

  She wondered what they might be saying, if anything, beneath and in all of this: Where have you been? What is this place like? Do I trust you anymore? Who’s our leader, now? But they seemed to know what they were doing, as if questions were never an issue. The lead mare, the gray, turned and gave a snort and trotted away from the gate and into the tall grass. It was almost dark now, so the swish of the grass and the hollow sound of hooves on the ground told Amanda that the trot was changing into a soft canter, and then she saw floating forms, the winding serpentine line of horses galloping this way and that up the ridge. The younger ones, who were familiar with the place, thought of the high ground to the west and they broke away from the mares, only to turn back when the lead gray disregarded this invitation and curled back towards the fenceline, her force as the number one horse drawing the others back into the long winding snake of their progress, until she stopped, took a long look at them watching and then dropped her head for her first mouthful of grass.

  “They look pretty settled, don’t they?” Casey said, his hands curled around the top rung of the metal gate.

  “Yes, they do, Casey,” Amanda said, “looks like the two older ones remember this place.” She put her hands on the top rung of the gate, too, and watched them encountering, exploring.

  They were running again: running, trotting, stopping, then turning, heads high, surging through grass shoulder high in places, grabbing mouthfuls, snorting, trotting, running again. Maybe this dance was a sensing and remembering. Maybe. Maybe it was just pure freedom. The words and the language of response to this new place were being played out in muscle and bone, carried to the circumference of their bodies—carried to skin of shoulder and flank, to nostril, orb of eye and loose soft lip. It was more than dance that she was seeing. It was delight.

  Casey ran the rope through the lower part of the gate as a safety because the chain of the top only hung by a nail and the wood of the post was getting pretty soft. But even as he did it, Amanda knew that they wouldn’t try the gate. This was their place. It was big and spacious and grassy, and the two creeks that joined just on the north side by the road came from cold springs less than a quarter mile away to offer them abundant water in the one stream that ran diagonally across the land. In the evening and all through the night, they would drift to the high ground for their night pasture and then work their way down low by the water and the two burr oaks by mid morning for the heat of the day, fighting off flies, standing nose to tail in the humid air and the shade before starting off their high ground migration again in the soft evening light, working their way slowly, grazing their way along the nice run of flat land by the stream before slowly climbing the hill.

  “They should be fine,” she said to Casey and to no one, because it was so clear that they would. She felt sad, leaving them here, even though it was just a mile from the place—even though it would mean no wrestling with small square bales, breaking them apart each day, a winter’s work in summer, before they all came down here.

  “Let’s go,” she said, and her twelve year old visitor obliged. The dome light was out in the truck so both of them still had their night vision when she turned the key and started the engine. They look one last look at her brood, her babies, already forgetting them with each moist mouthful of rank, sweet grass. Then she slipped it in gear, found the lights and drove away, the gate on the back of the trailer rattling away in the sudden blackness of night.