Six Old Horses Ahead of the Fire

When I pulled out onto the county road, I could see the smoke for the first time.

It stood up off the prairie west of the highway in a tall gray column, and the top of it was bending east, toward us, toward Mom.

Grass fires out here do not behave like the ones on television. There are no big trees to burn.

The grass is cured and dry by October, and the fire runs along the ground faster than a man can walk, faster than a horse can trot sometimes, pushed by whatever wind is blowing.

That day the wind was blowing hard out of the west. I could see the cottonwoods along the draws whipping.

The radio said the fire had started along the railroad tracks and nobody knew yet how big it was.

I passed two volunteer fire trucks headed the other way, toward the highway. The men in them did not look at me. They had their own work, and I had mine.

Mom was on the porch in her blue denim jacket with six lead ropes over her arm, just like I had asked.

Her short gray curls were blowing every which way. She looked smaller than I had ever seen her.

My mother is 72. Six years ago she slipped on the ice going out to break water for the horses and cracked two vertebrae in her lower back.

She healed, mostly, but she cannot lift more than a gallon of milk and she cannot lead a horse that pulls.

That is why she pays the neighbor boy to clean stalls, and why I come out twice a week to trim feet and check teeth.

She still feeds every morning, slow, one flake at a time. She would rather do that than breathe.

Her six horses are all past twenty. Dad bought most of them before he died. Dolly, Duke, Biscuit, Ginger, Shorty and Red.

They are not worth much to anybody else in the world. To Mom they are the last thing on the place that still has Dad’s hand on it.

“Get in the truck, Mom,” I said, and backed the trailer up to the barn door.

“I can hold them while you load.”

“You can hold onto the dash.”

She looked at me a long second and then she handed me the ropes and walked to the passenger side. She did not argue. I think about that, too.

Dolly and Duke went first because they were closest to the door and because they are the two calmest horses on God’s earth.

Dolly is a gray mare, twenty-four. Duke is a big brown gelding with a lip that hangs a little loose now.

The barn was full of noise. The horses could smell what I could smell, that sharp sweet smell of burning grass, and they were circling in their stalls.

Ginger was kicking her door in a steady beat.

I talked to them the whole time. I do not remember what I said. Something about good horses and easy and nobody is getting left. You say it as much for yourself as for them.