field notes

My perspective has been reframed by a set of sorrel ears. Everything is better with a horse. I have ridden Resero every single day since we arrived in this basin and assembled the tipi. Last night after riding, I untacked him, put him on a long lead, sat down in the grass with a book and let him graze around me — a casual togetherness in a beautiful place. Every now and again I spooled him up, spoke to him softly until he dropped his head and muddled my fingers with his lips and then with the comfort of closeness to him, I settled back into reading and the last warmth of the sunset. I am charmed by him when he is aloof, when he’s being savage and sensitive and without confidence, when his head is up high and his eyes are focused on something distant and futuristic in the sagebrush and he is completely unaware and uncaring of me. I am charmed.

I have been passionate about horses since I was five and I figured out how to overturn a grain bucket and scramble up a white mane onto the warm back of a palomino. I have ridden all my life and sought equine companionship as often as possible, leaning and reaching over barbed wire fences for soft muzzles on country roads in different states where withers and swaybacks matched the curve of distant ranges. It’s only now, now that I have him, that I can say I am officially a student of the horse. I study him with a curiosity that is as wide as these Idaho valleys and every detail I learn about him and his kind is like a white mountain looming up before me, an exultation of illumination.

Day by day I learn the power of his mortal being and the curious workings of his mind. His essence is complicated because a portion of him belongs to the wind and so he remains, at his very core, ethereal and ever changing.

I can call his gentle warmth the zephyr. I can call his changing from coldness into warmth, his softening and resulting calm, the chinook. I can call him tempest, gale, squall, breeze and when he moves with strength and confidence, I can name him jet stream. But no matter the shape he takes in any given moment, he moves with a freedom and power, no matter how strong or weak our connection in any given moment. Though I am with him, though I ride on his back in a way that renders us dependent upon each other, we remain separate until I channel him to such an intensity that our passage through space is effortless, my communication invisible and his responses become the definition of fluidity.

His very self is utterly natural, who he is today may not be who he is tomorrow. Yet, he is true to who he is, moment by moment, so that every bite of grass or breeze-braided piece of mane is God given, humble and brimming with quiet destiny.

He is simple. He is true. Being with him makes me wonder about my own homeostasis. Who am I when this spinning world sets me down in silent rest? How far or close am I to my intended self, the beautiful design of my God-hungry spirit, the unfettered cloak of my crackling soul (in me is a flame that requires no fuel)?

When I step forward through the sage, I, too, am all the names of the wind. I shuck the four walls that seek to bind me, the pressures that attempt to define me in a singular way, the crush of the things that hope to press me into being one thing, but not another. I look out, I turn in place, I see four directions and I set out into space. I am free to move fast and to rise in the gloaming so the sinking sun becomes my halo and I am rich with the gold of the world.

This is my house, this crown of peaks in this gaping wilderness. I forget where I come from. I can’t recall where I’ve been. There is the spin of cycles and seasons — moon, wind tides, blood, breath, earth spin, sunrise and sunset, planting and harvest, the headwaters of a river, the holiness of the springs as they pour forth from stone. Every blade of grass rises up in worship. Every living thing sings praise.

The material of life recycles itself in infinite ways and I watch the rotation of elk into wildflower into river riffle into exhaling trout into riparian zone into bear tooth into mule deer whisker into me. And more or less cosmically, in me there is the very life and death of the innumerable cells that build and bind my body together, the everturning wisp of a thing in me that shines outward to illuminate beauty and understanding and closeness to the eternal so that everything I encounter is as large and as small as a burning star and a sage leaf, thrumming and holding steady through the span of time.

While hunting last night the wind came up like a cat-of-nine-tails, raking at the grass, ripping at my vest and the damp corners of my eyes, turning the steel of my gun to ice. It was as good a place as anywhere to do my confessing, there in the spareness of tumbling and towering volcanic stone, there in my uplands cathedral. I muttered my darkness aloud to myself and the gale ripped the words from my mouth, proving their smallness, lifting the viscous spit of my black emotions into space and dissolving the wet muck of my soul somewhere in the great distance or dashing it to smithereens against the grit of dry stone. I felt the righteous violence of the air; God’s great spirit slapping my cheek while gently taking my hand to lead me forward.

The raven came over on stiff wings, tacking hard against the wind, feeling the impossible angles of the currents with every inky feather. I raised an open hand toward him, I saw him look my way and respond to my summons. He drew nearer. I spoke my prayers, bright and pure, up into the winter air and watched as he grasped them in his curved claws, carried them higher into the heavens, to deliver my praise, my joy, my gratitude, my hopes to Whom they are intended.

The clouds dropped lower, encircling basalt buttresses in ether and wisp, shrinking distances and time. A skittering of snowflakes clunked across my nose and cheeks, the hard snow of the uplands where everything spends its lifetime in toil, living so hard to thrive. I stood up straighter, my burdens dissolved. We walked on.

There was a coyote in a draw, barking at the dogs like a fellow dog, teasing them, teasing them for their tameness, occasionally breaking into a yipping howl to reveal his true nature.

He was just a wild little whelp with fleas on his ears.

High Hunt Field Notes

Owyhee Field Notes: Part One