The Kill Pen Mare Who Won the County Rodeo

The Sale Barn

The horse sale was the second Saturday in March, at the sale barn two counties over.

They run cattle most weeks and horses once a month, and the horse sale draws everybody: ranchers looking for a ranch horse, families looking for a kid horse, traders, and the kill buyers.

I had never been to one before. Dusty had, plenty of times, but he was working that Saturday, so it was Josie and me in his pickup, pulling his old stock trailer behind us, with a stack of cash in my purse and instructions from my husband ringing in my ears.

“Don’t buy anything that’s lame,” he’d said. “Don’t buy anything with snot coming out its nose. And don’t let Josie pick on looks.”

The ring sale ran in the morning. We sat on the wooden bleachers and watched horses go through, some of them ridden by kids, some of them led, a few of them running loose with their heads high and their eyes white.

The auctioneer rattled along so fast I couldn’t follow half of it.

A lot of the thin ones and the old ones and the ones nobody wanted went to the same two men in the front row.

They bought by the pound, more or less, and they didn’t look up much.

After the sale, we walked out back where the pens were. That is where the kill buyer keeps what he bought, until the truck comes to haul them south to the slaughter plants across the border.

Some of them get sold again out of that pen, to people like us, if the price is right for him.

There were twenty-some horses in that pen. Old ranch geldings with gray around their eyes. A pony with feet so long they curled.

A big draft cross with a scar down her shoulder. And they all stood the way horses stand when they’ve given up on being picked: heads low, weight off one hind leg.

Josie walked the whole fence line without saying a word. I let her.

I stood back by the alley with my hands in my coat and watched her go, and I said a little prayer, which I don’t do often enough, that she would find the right one and that I would know it when she did.

Then she stopped.

There was a sorrel mare in the corner. She was a pretty red even under all that dirt, with a white blaze running crooked down her face.

She was so thin you could count every rib on her from twenty feet away, and her hip bones stood up like the ends of a sawhorse.

But her head was up. She was the only horse in that pen with her head up.

And while Josie stood there, the mare walked across the pen, put her nose between the pipes, and blew warm air on Josie’s open hand.

“Mom,” Josie said, and that was all she said.