Red came to live with us when I was sixteen. He was a quarter horse, trained to run the western barrel race event, but he had gone lame in his old age. There was plenty of physical evidence that he had been mistreated by an early owner, and I was told I could ride him when he recovered, but not to push too hard. I had to use a hackamore, which is a bridle with no bit, because he had scars inside his mouth. 

Red was not a handsome guy. He had what in the horse world would be called “pronounced withers.” In layman’s terms, that meant he had a hump (my mother was fond of saying that he was one quarter horse and three quarters camel). His coat was a washed-out sorrel, hence his unimaginative name. 

I was advised to ride him at a walk only, but I ignored that advice, and soon he went lame again. So, I didn’t ride him at all, but I brushed him and talked to him. We would sometimes leave him out in the yard to graze; he was beyond docile and would never dream of running off. 

That is, he never dreamed of running off until Blizzard the Retired Welsh Pony got a hold of him. Blizzard and his soul mate Polly were also taking their ease on the farm at that time. Whenever Blizzard got out of the pasture, which was one of his missions in life, he always made a beeline to the farm of his birth, even after living with us for twenty years. One night we left Red out the graze. Blizzard and Polly got out (we know whose idea that was) and they took Red on a junket. We got the call from the neighbors and had to go down there and catch all three of them and bring them home. Polly was as hard to catch as ever, but we managed it. Blizzard just said “What?” and went home without a fuss, and Red followed suit. 

We continued the practice of leaving Red out to graze, certain that he wouldn’t go anywhere if Blizzard was safely in the pasture.

One evening I was working at my job at the local store, and somebody came in a said a horse had been hit on the road. I called my mother and asked her where Red was. She answered that she didn’t know; he had disappeared from the yard. Somebody gave me a ride to the accident, and there was Red, half lying in the road, stuck in a posture of trying to get up. Someone led me away while a kind neighbor put him down. My father and a friend came with the tractor and a small trailer. They carried him back to the farm and buried him in the back pasture. My father even put up a stone, and I carved his name.

Red was my last horse. A few years later I finished high school and not long after that I went to Alaska. In 1981 I enrolled in a poetry writing class, and this was one of my very first efforts:

Red’s Dying

1981

He went walking one night

When the stars were out

And the roadside grass wet with dew;

The wind must have called him.

The highway was a new place for him,

A broad moon-lit shining;

A mystery beckoning, writhing away;

A satisfying clatter underfoot.

And that night there were no reins,

No cruel bit and no saddle—

Only the wind and the road,

And a new kind of servitude.

His dying seemed easy, a passing instant,

A sharp crack and then quiet,

And his head sinking as in sleep.

There were scars on him, deep ones,

White flecks where spurs dug

And across his ribs a puckered seam;

One beating in a great many.

But these things have faded now,

Like stars at the first touch of morning.

He is resting, as I had hoped he would,

And while my flowers wither on his grave,

The stains of his blood have faded,

And the grass over his bones has grown tall.