He Trots THE Air

Her horse had stayed by her side for 25 years. Now it was time to let him go.

- Pam Houston

Last summer, I put my old roan horse in the ground. But there’s way more to the story than that. Thirty-nine years on the planet, 25 of those with me.

The first thing I noticed about Roany was that he had a kind eye; the second was his size—just under 17 hands (five foot eight) at the shoulder. The Santa Fe cowboy who sold him didn’t tell me much apart from his age, which likely had a year or two shaved off, and that he went better away from the barn if you wore spurs. Within days, I came to understand Roany’s intensely good nature. Each morning when I went out to feed him, he greeted me with a just happy-to-be-here chortle.

He was as solid a trail horse as I’ve ever ridden, never flinching in big wind, or while crossing water, or when mule deer twins who’d been stashed by their mother in some willows leaped in front of him. He was so bombproof that the county search-and-rescue team enlisted his help a few times a year to find and deliver a wayward hiker.

I bought Roany the same year I moved to a ranch in Creede, Colorado, because Deseo, my alarmist Paso Fino, was deciding that Colorado was the scariest place he’d ever been. First off, there was snow—a whole lot of it. The predator-to-livestock ratio was not to his liking, and the pasture was surrounded by hundred-foot spruce trees that often sang in the wind.

I grew up in an unpredictably violent household, so my temperament ran a little closer to Deseo’s. I counted on Roany to keep the whole barnyard calm, not just Deseo and the mini donkeys but also the ewes and lambs, the recalcitrant rams, the aging chickens, and me.