The Best American Sports Writing 2011 (20 page)

J. Frank Dobie wrote the history of America's wild horses in his 1952 book,
The Mustangs.
Wild horses tramped across the plains and the western United States, but Texas was their true home. "My own guess is that at no time were there more than a million mustangs in Texas and no more than a million others scattered over the remainder of the West," he wrote. The mustang's history and our own are inextricable. Mustangs galloped in Comanche raids on the Llano Estacado, pushed Longhorns across the Canadian, busted sod at immigrant farms in central Texas, bore Texans into war. Their glory stirred souls.

Among those who chronicled the mustang in Texas was Ulysses S. Grant, who in 1846 served as a lieutenant under Zachary Taylor in the U.S.-Mexican War. Grant rode a $5 mustang. He was a few days outside Corpus Christi when word came of an immense group of mustangs near the head of the column. "As far as the eye could reach to our right, the herd extended," he wrote in his memoirs. "To the left, it extended equally. There was no estimating the number of animals in it; I have no idea that they could all have been corralled in the state of Rhode Island, or Delaware, at one time."

No one seems to have recorded when the last wild horse in Texas was roped and put to work. It might have been a horseman named Ben Green, who trailed a wild band from Big Bend into northern Mexico and Arizona during the Depression. Dobie closes his book by musing that the mustang's days were over.

Well, the wild ones—the coyote duns, the smokies, the blues, the blue roans, the snip-nosed pintos, the flea-bitten grays and the black-skinned whites, the shining blacks and the rusty browns, the red roans, the toasted sorrels and the stockinged bays, the splotched appaloosas and the cream-maned palominos and all the others in shadings of color as various as the hues that show and fade on the clouds at sunset—they are all gone now, gone as completely as the free grass they vivified. Only through "visionary gleam" can any man ever again run with them, for only in the symbolism of poetry does ghost draw lover in hope-continued pursuit.

The book is a wonderful balance of scholarly research and folklore, but on the utter demise of the mustang, Dobie was mistaken. A federal law passed in 1971 protects feral horses on public lands. Today the BLM oversees nearly 34,000 wild horses and several thousand burros that graze across 26.6 million acres in ten western states. For most of his life, Cheatgrass was one of them.

 

Have you studied a person who can do something well? Have you seen how effortless the work appears? Teryn Lee has that with horses. He never hurries. He never seems indecisive. He never becomes angry or worried that he's messed up. One action to the next flows like water.

"A horse has all the qualities I'd like to possess as a human," he said more than once this summer. "They're curious, not corrupted. They only know what they're taught. They're a mirror of the person riding them." That's not necessarily how horse gentling has always gone. There's a reason it's called "breaking." Dobie wrote that "one out of every three mustangs captured in southwest Texas was expected to die before they were tamed. The process of breaking often broke the spirits of the other two."

Teryn Lee doesn't follow those old, brutal ways. "Every time Cheatgrass has seen men, he's been poked with a needle, been freeze-branded, or been castrated," he said. "If I were him, I don't think I'd like people very much. Horses are the most forgiving animal there is."

On day two, not long after the sun has crested Goat Mountain, Teryn Lee walks into the pen, catches Cheatgrass by the lead rope, and rubs him steadily all over with one hand.

"Here's where he'll get mad," he says, and his hand makes its way along the horse's belly. Cheatgrass bugs his eyes and begins to quiver. His ears swivel furiously, and Teryn Lee gives him a moment. Every time the horse does what he asks—or tries to—he gives the horse a release, whether it's a momentary rest, a stroke, or allowing it to slow. Once Teryn Lee starts an action, he carries it through very deliberately. He lets Cheatgrass sniff the saddle pad and smoothly drapes it onto his back. He rests the saddle on his hip and allows the horse to go over it with his nose, then carefully sets it on the mustang. The horse's head is jacked up and his nostrils flutter. Slowly, the cinches are tightened. Teryn Lee slips off the halter and backs away.

Cheatgrass is frozen for two beats and then,
bam,
he jams his head to the earth and his shoulders to the clouds in a series of seesaw bucks. Time slows into freeze-frames: the C-shaped horse suspended in air, the hip-high dust, the rigid-legged horse pounding the ground. Just as suddenly as he starts, Cheatgrass stops and looks at Teryn Lee, his ears tipped forward.

"That wasn't too bad!" Teryn Lee exclaims.

"We've had domestic colts that buck for much longer," Holly says.

Teryn Lee leaves the horse to get used to the saddle and returns in an hour, pointing to the dust in the pen.

"You can see where he got down and rolled on the saddle a few times," he says. "Horses can move left, right, forward, backward, up, and down. I'd like to get him comfortable moving in all those directions. He went up and down. Now I'll have him go forward and backward."

Teryn Lee uses his body and the flicking of a rope to move Cheatgrass around the pen: more pressure and a kissing sound from Teryn Lee means lope; stepping into his path makes the mustang change direction; turning away from the horse makes him slow or stop.

"A large part of training is feel," Teryn Lee says. "I can feel what they'll do before they do it. If you can't feel it, you can't fix it. You have to move with a purpose but be sensitive about it."

Within a few minutes, he's at the mustang's side. He puts a foot in the stirrup and bounces a couple of times before standing up in the stirrup for a second or two. There's no preamble to this—he just does it, on both sides. The horse's mouth is clamped in a prim line.

"He's pretty tight, but he's taking it real good," says Teryn Lee. "Confidence is a big thing. If he's confident, everything else will take care of itself."

***

Wild mustangs forage on land that is populated by antelope, deer, and elk and share food and water sources with domestic cattle owned by ranchers with grazing leases on public land. Nowadays they live mostly in Nevada. According to the BLM, mustangs can double in population every four years, and when there are too many horses for the available acreage, the herds must be periodically thinned.

"The land can only support what it will support," said Sally Spencer, the head of marketing for the BLM. "The land needs to stay healthy, and the animals need to stay healthy. We want to make sure the mustangs are there for all Americans to see forever and ever."

From BLM holding facilities, captured mustangs are carted across the country to different public adoption events. Horses in unusual colors—pintos, buckskins, palominos—are likelier to get adopted than a plain bay or brown horse. Older horses aren't typically adopted either. Those that are deemed unadoptable are shipped for long-term holding to private ranches primarily in the Midwest, which contract with the BLM to maintain the horses for the rest of their lives.

But the BLM has received biting criticism for its gathering practices, which sometimes result in injury or death to mustangs as they're rounded up. Mustang advocates argue that the horses are pushed off the range in favor of cattle that ranchers run on land leased from the government. Advocates also say there are too many horses in holding facilities. Cheatgrass, for instance, lived 15 months at a Colorado short-term holding facility before being picked for the Makeover.

And none of this is cheap. The wild horse and burro program cost $63.9 million to run in 2010, 57 percent of which went to keeping horses in holding facilities. Adoption rates have fallen in recent years. "The program we have is not sustainable," Spencer said. "We need to figure out another way the horses can be managed on the range."

Madeleine Pickens, the wife of oil billionaire T. Boone Pickens, is among the people working on solutions. "The horses that are in short-term holding cost the taxpayer $2,500 per year, which is very costly," she said. "The conditions are pretty severe, when you consider they're animals that roamed freely and they're suddenly put in a temporary corral. They're only supposed to be there three months, and some are there for three years."

Pickens is passionate about mustangs. She's been in talks with the BLM since 2008 on her proposal to place as many as 30,000 mustangs on more than 600,000 acres of public and private lands in northeast Nevada. In the plan, her foundation, Saving America's Mustangs, would oversee the ranch and develop it into an ecotourism facility. In return, the foundation would receive $500 per year per horse, which is about the same rate contractors receive for horses that live in long-term holding ranches on private property. According to Pickens, the deal would offer transparency that the privately run holding sites do not.

"The government has a fiscal and moral responsibility, since they've moved horses off of public lands," she said. "Let's fence it in, have a nonreproductive herd, and let the public come and enjoy it."

Pickens sees the mustang ranch as nothing less than preserving an emblem of America.

"One hundred years ago there were two million horses on the range," she said. "If we're down to the last thirty thousand or so, as the BLM says, we're getting closer to extinction, and that's when people start to pay attention."

That's where events like the Supreme Extreme Mustang Makeover come in. "The research shows that if a mustang is gentled, the odds of it getting adopted jump," said Patti Colbert, the executive director of the Mustang Heritage Foundation, which puts on the Makeover. "I figured we could take talented people and turn wild horses into something that was viable as a riding or working partner. It's a piece of Americana that you're taking into your home."

The Makeover grew from a single event in Fort Worth in 2007 to eight contests held all over the country this year. The previous contests offered prizes, but mostly the winners got bragging rights. Teryn Lee earned third at last year's Makeover in Fort Worth and walked away with two grand. Fifty thousand dollars, though, is a different story.

"I say not to think about the money," Holly told Teryn Lee one day in the first week of training. Holly has round blue eyes, yellow braids, and an Oklahoman's practicality. She's an ace cutting horse rider, but she leaves the training to Teryn Lee. At any given time, he has 20 horses in training, and he rides each of them every day. While he's riding, Holly bustles around the pens, feeding, filling water troughs, saddling her husband's next mount, and bathing the one he's just finished with.

"Nothing would be different if we won," Teryn Lee said. "We'd just have more operating capital."

"Still," she said, "you shouldn't count on things before they happen."

 

On the third day of training, Cheatgrass is saddled and tense, pawing in frustration. The action of his circling foot is too fast for the eye to follow. He rumbles a snort.

"The third day is the worst day," Teryn Lee says cheerfully. "They're sore and tired of being messed with, but I think I can talk him out of bucking."

He introduces the bridle, and there are several long minutes while he holds the bit to Cheatgrass's mouth until the horse takes it. After a one-two-three bounce from the stirrup, he swings a leg half over Cheatgrass and then steps off. He does it again, but this time he settles in the saddle.

Cheatgrass pauses, trembles, and jettisons into bucks that roll like a current in a river. Teryn Lee sits still and yielding at the same time, his hands well in front of him and the reins not tight. The bucks decelerate into a ragged lope. At Teryn Lee's instruction, Holly waggles a plastic flag to keep Cheatgrass going forward, because a horse moving forward is less likely to also go up. They trot and lope until Teryn Lee allows him to walk and uses the reins to gently guide Cheatgrass a few steps to the right and left. He gets off. Cheatgrass sighs.

"He got scared when I swung my leg around, but he wasn't scared at the end and that's what's important," says Teryn Lee. "That wasn't too bad. Tomorrow we'll ride outside."

The next morning Teryn Lee hops twice in the stirrup before landing lightly on the mustang's back. Holly waits on Big Gray as the gate swings open. Cheatgrass follows the gray at a lope down a ranch road and up a draw. Ten minutes later, they appear on a hilltop, picking their way through the rocks at a walk. Cheatgrass jigs and his tail flags behind him.

"Today he understands what is going to happen to him," Teryn Lee says. "It's fine for him to accept that he's going to be doing this for the rest of his life."

Cheatgrass was ridden nearly every day during the summer. By day 10, he moved free and soft, with simple changes in direction. By day 20, he was loping long, straight paths across pastures. He was bathed, brushed, and shod. He was taught to back, circle, and stop. He sidestepped and snorted during bridling and saddling, but after he was ridden and turned loose, he'd follow Holly around and sidle up for a pat. He grew accustomed to ropes and squealed with excitement at the sight of cattle.

"For a six-year-old with less than forty-five days on him, he gets working cattle," Teryn Lee said. "I didn't think he'd enjoy it, but he enjoys the heck out of it." In June and July, when Teryn Lee was hired to work on other ranches, he used Cheatgrass. They negotiated rocky hillsides, stepped through thorny brush, and forded water. Cheatgrass loaded into trailers and stood tied in the warm-up arena while Teryn Lee and Holly competed at shows on other horses. Word got around that Teryn Lee had entered the Makeover. Railbirds watched him trot the mustang around the fairgrounds after a show in Las Cruces, New Mexico. Cheatgrass had been in training about 80 days.

"What will he do?" one of them called out.

"He'll tie and work off a rope," Teryn Lee replied.

"Was he ever handled?" another asked.

"Nope."