Of wild horses and girlhood

A requested piece about my first heart-horse

(I emailed my paid subscribers a while back for story ideas and got this fun prompt from intrepid poet and friend Katy H. Of course I love to write about my horses so this was an easy one… but if you have an idea for a story I should write, upgrade your subscription and reach out!)

Just outside the northwest corner of my folks’ ranch was an old wooden corral, probably ten to twelve feet tall and lashed together with thick rubber electrical wires, an attempt at “reduce and reuse” that I’m certain was not what the environmentalists had in mind. It had wooden gates on each side and an obvious path for driving livestock in and out. It was a wild horse corral, now left to moulder, once used to capture feral horses on federally-owned National Forest land and load them into horse trailers and off to who-knows-where.

It felt a bit like visiting the Alamo or some other old fortress, like there were stories of war to be remembered in that deep pine loam. I always felt like the stomping of hooves might still be heard if you stopped and listened closely enough to the breeze whistling through the corral boards and the creaking of the trees.