April 2023 - 46

WILD COUNTRY DISPATCH
Foals
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Story by Tom Reed | Illustration by L. Eslick
pring in this country is marked by familiarities, old friends
returning and reminding you how special they are, why
you are comrades to begin with. Song sparrows, drab
little fellows who make up in voice what they lack in plumage,
trill in the bare willows down by the stream, which is full of
itself because it is spring and spring is a time for things to be
full of themselves.
Such as the sandhill cranes that hold nothing
back in untamed exclamation from the
neighbor's hay field well before they wing angularly
above, their flight seeming more of the
Mesozoic than of this era. Or the pearl droplet
of sap at the very tip of the bud of the aspen,
a harbinger of the laughing, quaking leaf that
will spangle your summer barbecue in light
and shade. These are the repeat customers,
the old friends, the heart-lifters.
February and March are stoic fathers, never
rendering compliment or praise. But April?
April bursts forward with the positive energy
of a mother who wants her children to go forth
and be good citizens. Welcome back, welcome
home, you are cherished.
Some springs are different than others, set
apart. I walk these mornings, steaming cup in
hand, on foal watch. Two mares, fine ladies
with good heads and straight legs, mountain
horses who have put proven babies on the
ground, are heavy with foal again this spring.
Aside from nights that are more sleepless than
usual, there's a lift in this ranch beyond the
norm, a quickening, an eagerness.
There's nothing quite like a baby horse, a
new soul still wet from birth, awake in the grass
or straw, head up and alert, neurons firing to
young muscle and sinew telling it to rise in
this predatory world. I am a devout dog man
and while I am very likely to give up my horses
as the frost creeps up on the pumpkin, I will
die with my dog at my side. Yet puppies for
all their wonder and joy, are an intermittent
46 | April 2023
pain in the butt with their house pooping and
garbage strewing tendencies. A horse though?
A baby horse is something that transcends
and transports, that lifts a human's core into
and above the western skyline. Will this be the
horse to ride the mountains of my old age? Will
this be a filly to keep the genetics going long
after I am gone? Will this be a horse to carry
my child or his child? A cow horse? A pack
horse? A horse for the roughest trail? These
are probably all questions that have piqued
the imaginations of horsemen since equine
and human met, partnered, went to war and
the wild beyond as one.
So foal watch. Never a strong all-the-waythrough-the-night
kind of sleeper, this suits
me. I rise in the darkness while the family
sleeps and I slip out to the barn, the patient
mares blinking in the sudden overhead light,
rustling and shifting about in the clean straw.
Yep, still pregnant. In the mornings, my coffee
and horse conversation out in the rising dawn
while the sandhills and song sparrows provide
the surround sound before the frost burns away.
Hello ladies, when you going to have those
babies? Soon, you idiot, we are getting tired
of it, they grumble.
In some 40 years of raising foals, I've only
ever seen one live birth. That was a middle-ofthe-day,
right out in the open event years ago
where we stood and watched and wondered at
the efficiency and gentleness of the mare. Awestruck
by the love and beauty that bursts into
the open when the mare touches her nose to
her baby and nickers softly and the baby replies.
There is nothing that matches the whisper of
love between mare and foal. That baby grew
into a 17-hand, gentle-giant red gelding now an
old man that is almost 25 who carries a friend's
preteen boy into the mountains every year on
summer pack trips and autumn elk hunts.
A few years later, that same lady and another
good mare, both pregnant, gave birth on the
same day to half-brothers that I still own and
love. The brothers graze now in our bottom
pasture beside the laughing April stream where
rainbows come up from the lake each spring
April 2023

Table of Contents for the Digital Edition of April 2023
