The Wild Ones

All my life I dreamed of owning a wild horse.  Growing up in Princeton, NJ made that seem pretty unlikey but I loved the stories of Flicka, The Black Stallion, Misty. Wtih no wild ones in sight,  I rode Throughbreds off the track, retired Starndardbreds, jumpers and hunters. I exercised polo ponies and was given seasoned Pony Club horses. I specialized in rehabilitating the hurt and the emotionally damaged. And then, I had years where I gave up my love affair with horses. I was too busy raising my children and attending to my birth center, horses had to wait.

About 10 years after relocating to Orcas Island, I again looked for a horse to 'rescue'.

Red, a retired jousting horse came into my life. His show name with the Seattle Knights was 'Jester'. He was a beauty!  But, oh so sad.  I looked forward to giving him a happier life, and hopefully  doing lots of cantering. He seemed like a really steady guy to help me get back into riding. After all he had seen everything, right?

 
Red had other ideas.  He had deceided he would retire. He was done working. This would be his post-career life. He'd get to explore all the things he'd never had time for before. Like the girls in the herd. Perhaps he'd learn to do watercolors. He was fond of grazing.

 
He never wanted to canter again. How he held it together jousting was beyond me. The horse was an emotional wreck. We went slow, had our good days, and worked in dressage. He was a sweet guy, but what he really wanted to do was just hang out.

Then one day, at the Horse Expo in Puyallup, I met a mustang. There were Warmbloods and Andulusians, Quarter Horses and Rocky Mountain Horses, but it was a Kiger Mustang stallion who seemed to put them all to shame. His name was 'My Tiger Kiger' owned by Kim Kellog. He did not act like any stallion I ever knew, he was so personable, friendly and well adjusted. It appeared that Kim could do anything with him! He seemed to be emotionally healthy and he was beautiful and perfectly conformed, with small hard feet, big eyes and small quick ears.

With all of those hurt and hurting horses,  I made a lot of progress, but frequently there were remaining glitches, some problems that never completely went away. What if I started with a clean slate? A horse raised in an intact family, in a herd, the way nature intended? What about a horse who had been gathered from the wild, and would not be able to go back, one slated for adoption. One like 'My Tiger Kiger'? The BLM had thousands of horses needing to be adopted.

Soon my husband and I were making pilgrimages down to the corrals in Burns, Oregon, where we would spend days dreaming of the day we would adopt our own horses. We frequently fell in love. We talk of many of those horses to this day, horses from the past ten years: Dog Solider. Jester, Double Eagle, Wild Girl, Sooty Face.  Often, we wondered why we would spend two days traveling only to stand in snow and frozen mud, our collars up around our ears in the cold winds to watch the wild ones. But we did, again and again. It called us, and we went.

How about the Buttermilk one?

Dog Soldier I would bet came from the Army Remount program.

We called this pretty little mare 'Hippie Chic"

I desperately wanted 'Hippie Chic'. Of course, she was a bossy piece with a mind of her own. A redhead, again!  And as you see here, her ears are always pricked paying attention to everything!  The wranglers kept suggesting other horses..by then I was listening..So, this pretty little filly did not come home with us.