Six Old Horses Ahead of the Fire

He had moved Lyndon’s three horses out of the far pens and into the stalls at the end of the same row.

“Rather keep everything together,” he said when he saw me watching. “Easier to water.”

He did not say anything else, and I did not ask. But I have known Elroy a long time.

The third trip was Shorty, alone.

Shorty is thirty-one years old. He is a little bay paint, half blind in his left eye, and he kicks anything that stands next to him in a trailer without a divider between them.

Dad used to say Shorty had one opinion and it was always no.

I knew I could not put him in with Red. Red is too old and too gentle, and in that open box Shorty would have kicked him the whole seven miles.

So Shorty went by himself, which meant one more trip than the math wanted.

The smoke at Mom’s place was thick enough now that my eyes were running. I tied my red bandana up over my nose and mouth.

I could hear something I had not heard before, a low steady sound from the west, like wind in a field of standing corn.

That was the fire.

Shorty, bless him, walked right into that trailer like he was going to a parade. Maybe he could not see well enough to be scared.

Maybe he was just tired of all of us. I latched the gate and got moving.

On the highway a deputy waved me through a roadblock without stopping me.

He had seen the trailer, and he lifted two fingers off the wheel of his car like we were passing on any ordinary day.

When I came back the fourth time for Red, I had to make myself slow down on the gravel.

The smoke was so thick in the low spots that I could not see the ditch on either side.

Red was the only horse left in the barn. He was standing in the middle of his stall with his head low and his ears turned back toward the west.

He was not kicking. He was not calling. He was just waiting.

Red is a sorrel gelding, twenty-nine years old. Dad bought him as a weanling the summer I turned sixteen and told me he was mine to start.

He was the first colt I ever put a saddle on, in the round pen in front of this same barn. He bucked me off that day, and Dad put me right back on.

Every horse I have trained since then, I trained a little bit because of Red.

“All right, old man,” I said. “Let’s go see Mom.”

He came out of that stall like a gentleman.

He followed me out of that dark barn into the smoke and walked up into the trailer with his head down, and he stood quiet while I latched the gate.

Before I got in the truck, I looked back at the barn. Dad built it in 1981 with three of his brothers.