Horse Lover by H. Alan Day

down her nose stood near me, her light-brown foal next to her. She wasn’t terribly big, maybe fourteen hands high. Dried streaks of sweat covered the outline of her ribs and her underbelly. The foal, probably about a month old, walked around his mama and came broadside to me. With legs poking out like skinny sticks from his torso, he already showed the results of overgrazing and feed shortage. He nuzzled his mother for a drink of milk but, finding none, walked away and picked at some of the loose hay on the ground.
    Many of the other horses looked like they too had had a workout. How many miles did they have to run from the hated helicopter to be marked with such defined sweat streaks? A terrifying run, followed by jail. At least they were fed well in jail.
    “Fun will start tomorrow,” said Red, coming up behind me. “The vet pulls in around ten. We’ll run the bunch up the chute and get them vaccinated and branded. You’re welcome to watch.”
    I was eager to see the interaction between man and animal and get a glimmer of whether or not I could work with mustangs. Even though everyone had told me in one way or another that I wouldn’t be able to do it, something deep inside of me said that I could. Yes, these horses seemed different from those I had known. They looked different, too, and they had lived such a different life than the ranch horses I grew up with and had worked with all my life. I would have to accept that I wouldn’t have the same relationships with wild horses that I had with my ranch horse friends like Chico and Aunt Jemima, Blackberry and Saber. And certainly not like Little Joe. Now there was a horse that grew up acting more like a dog than a horse.
    I still remember the first day I met Little Joe. Jim Brister was riding in the back of the pickup, instead of on his horse or in the cab next to Leroy McCarty, the ranch foreman who was driving the pickup in from the east pasture. At first I thought maybe Jim had hurt himself, because even by age ten, I knew he felt his best on a horse, not in a four-wheeled vehicle. Leroy pulled the truck up next to the barn. I abandoned chasing an imaginary bandit around headquarters buildings and ran over to greet them.
    A head popped up next to Jim and a foal plopped its nose awkwardly over the truck bed’s side. “Who’s this?” I said, petting the baby’s fine, soft hairs. A tuft of gray mane stood up between his ears. The foal blinked at me.
    “We found him in the pasture circling around his mama, dead on the ground,” Jim said. He jumped out of the truck and swung down the back gate. “She must have just died ’cuz the coyotes didn’t get to her yet.” He reached in and pulled the colt by his legs, then lifted him and set him on the ground.
    The baby’s loss pricked my heart, especially since the other broodmares would be reluctant to adopt him. He stood there, skinny legs splayed, looking out of sorts. I put my arm around his neck and gave him a hug.
    Jim said, “Go get a bottle of warm milk from your mother. You can feed him down in the corral.” I ran to the barn to get the bottle with the nipple that we used to feed orphans. My mom always left warm milk on the kitchen counter. I dipped the bottle below the layer of cream and filled it.
    For the next three months, I fed Little Joe a bottle at least once a day, sometimes twice if I wasn’t in school. Gradually, he came into his coloring. He was a blue roan, handsome even at a young age, with a peppered light gray on his flanks and darker hairs around hips and neck. His nose, mane, and eyes were black. I don’t remember who started calling him Joe, but it didn’t take long before he was known around the ranch as Little Joe. And was he known.
    When I went down to the corral, he would be there waiting for me, bobbing his head and flipping his tail. He would watch me unlatch and swing open the gate, then he’d skip out, come to a stop, and look at me to see what the plan of action was. We’d