Mustang Dreams

Prologue-The Gifts of Vision and Voice


Sweat pouring off of her body, she awoke shuddering from the remnants of a dream, her head slamming to one side of the pillow, over and over again. In the dark, warm room, usually so peaceful, her body was screaming “NO!NO!NO!”, unable to control the movement , “NO!NO!NO!” Breathing deeply , willing her eyes to focus, she gradually brought herself back to the room. Thanking God for that part of her, sometimes so small and quiet, that always came through, holding her sanity in tact, yet one more time.

When she next awoke, it was morning, still dark, but morning. Stumbling out of bed Jan Barrett grabbed a bathrobe, wondering why , if she hated cold feet, she kept forgetting to buy a new pair of slippers. What she really wanted was a shearling pair, a soft, warm, cushion for her feet that would translate itself up through her whole body, but some vestige of her quasi-vegetarian past prevented her. Slightly abashed, she grimaced as her feet padded down to the kitchen, getting colder by the moment. Well, something else for her list of things to do- first things first, coffee.

Greeting dogs, cats and whatever other creatures were currently about the house (this time it was a vacationing pet rabbit), Jan poured herself a cup of coffee into a mug (she did buy a self starter coffee maker some years back, shortly after Rick had died) , and curling up on the couch, began her day.

Almost every day began like that and had for more years than Jan could remember. Prior to the birth of her children, she would sleep late into the morning, her day always set up so that she could work at night. In those days, she savored the daylight, air and whatever

changes the light brought, and then at about 4:00 or so hunkered down to whatever project she was working on. It had worked well. Once her children were born, she got up well before everyone else, giving herself at least a couple of hours to simply be.

Simply be. How hard she worked to simply be. Wondering if there had ever been a time that had been easy, when asked to pinpoint the “beginning” by doctors or other interested parties, she really couldn’t. The dramatic moments hit when she was in her late teens, but when she had finally been strong enough to leave some of it behind, some twenty-five years later, it seemed to her that it had always been percolating- a brutal, oozing mass. She had once seen a container of molybdenum grease her mechanic was using, it’s silvery brown sheen with an almost intangible slickness, seemed a good likeness. That mixed with “The Blob”, a movie that had so frightened her in the Saturday morning stillness of her college apartment. She wondered if she would now find it funny, like she did “Peter Pan”.

Not knowing that it was different for other people, she carried on, trying to do just the simple daily tasks. She knew something was wrong, but she thought it was an internal laziness, a laziness she had been accused of as a child. Maybe it was the wrong food, the wrong job, something she was doing wrong, never exactly knowing what it might have been.The oddest part of all was that because she was so “functional”, doctors and therapists would deny her her troubles. “You’re going to work.You’re able to get up in the morning, aren’t you? And look at all that you have accomplished.There is nothing wrong, it’s all in your head”, not realizing that what she had done was set up a routine to follow, to plug into, much like the coffee maker, to turn her day into a possibility, no matter how bizarrely she felt. She knew that if it were x period in the day, it was time to do y. With tremendous willpower, she made it into her forties.


It was after hearing a program on NPR on the treatment of clinical depression, that had left her weeping by the side of the road, as she heard her own story told time after time,that

Jan would ultimately turn to medication, when she realized the effect she was having, or not having as the case may have been, on her children.Her husband had been used to the “wall” as they called it, but she could not take refuge anywhere near “it”, fearing for the safety of her at the time twelve and fourteen year old daughters. With the help of a curiously empathetic physician, she finally found a medication that gave her an inkling of what it was to not struggle moment to moment, day by day. Her only great sadness was that Rick had not lived to see the release from the prison of her depressions. It would have meant a lot to him.

It was her marriage with Rick that had given her tremendous solace. It was also his stability and their stablity that gave her a first insight to the fact that she was different. That most of the rest of the world could be warm and enveloping rather than the brink of terror. Even with Rick’s death, at 46, the sense of stability remained, given the many years that they had managed to spend together. She’d always thought of him as her sunshine man, a precious gift from the gods, and despite the hurt, oh God, how it had hurt, she still kept the feeling of grace that she had felt the moment he had taken her on their first date.

Jan’s two daughters were now grown, one entirely different from herself, a young lawyer
and the other an almost clone of herself, tempered by the gentle humor of their father. She and they had pulled together resources that none of them knew they had, after the unexpected death of Rick, some ten years earlier . The winter was the time that she would spend reflecting on the months that she had spent in the mountains, writing, painting-whatever took her fancy. She was grateful for the financial freedom that her husband had left her, allowing her the luxury to simply be.


Jan, in thinking about her daughters, felt that it was time to organize her story. When they were young she had anxiously watched them, wondering which of them would inherit her crazy head, if either. She was most concerned about the second child, though when she

grew past the age of eighteen without major incedent, Jan’s fears diminished. Both girls knew that the medicatons that she took were “stabilizers”, but the story, or stories themselves she had kept to herself. She’d never really shared them in depth with Rick. She’d never really shared them in depth with herself. Well, she thought to herself, it certainly makes an interesting tale.

Between the wisdom of age,and the safety of the medications, the lean, muscular, silver haired woman wanted to look back and see what her journey had given her. What dreams were followed, poetry felt , untangling of nightmares attempted, creativity graciously trusted-
the gifts of vision and voice.

It had seemed to Jan that there was always something to capture her attention, whether it was light playing on trees, colors of buildings or watching and listening to people. Within each of these attention getters there was always something magical, little epiphanies everywhere. If she thought about it, people’s daily lives always have incredible stories in them. You scratch the surface, and there is so much there. It may look like the guy over there paying for the cup of coffee-of-the-day-cream-no-sugar, the same way he does every day, as you order your usual, small-au-lait-to-go, wearing his predictable business suit, going to his office where you are pretty sure he is the chief financial officer’s assistant, with an eye to moving-up-in-the-business, is untouched by anything beyond his ambition. In a passing comment you realize that he is talking to someone about watching his eighteen year old daughter (he looks hardly over 35! ) graduate, and how proud he is of being her father, how much he’d learned about love and life, the daughter’s cancer in remission, they prayed, permenantly, only time would tell.

Once, at a restaurant, before her hearing irksomely began to age, as she was clearly not paying attention to a word that he was saying, Rick jokingly asked her what the people at the other table were talking about. Giggling, she passed on, verbatim, what had been supposed to be a private conversation at a table for two at a tiny, dimly lit, Italian restaurant

in mid-town Manhattan. It was so long ago that she couldn’t remember the details, but in the retelling, she remembered him being so taken with it, that they spent the rest of the meal with her giving him updates. It was, she supposed rather rude and invasive, but it was, well, intriguing. She found that she lived for these epiphanies and that when they stopped happening there was complete devastation of her concept of the universe.


She had always been very intense. She loved to build and create. Her own philosopical bent brought her more and more to be involved with simplicity. It may have been a
survival technique, echoing the needs of her illness, that may have developed over
the years of coping. Her work tended to be very clear, very clean, showing a precision that belied the jumble that was her brain. She wondered sometimes if the simplicity and precision were the innate part or the jumble. Whether innate or learned, the grounding of precison and clariity were her godsend.

The oil embargo of the 70’s and the fear of a world running out of oil, had a profound effect on both she and Rick, catapulting their idle what if ‘s to action. As the word began coming out about global warming, rather than denying it’s veracity, they decided to act on solutions to limit at least their impact on the Earth. She never could understand how the lessons of that could have been lost in just over twenty years, at least in the United States. She had to laugh, listening to the High Plains Radio tout the “new simplicity movement” in response to the influence of advertisements, the embodiment of capitalism gone mad. She’d always hoped that she could in some way influence the begining of a change of economic philosophy where the reapings of the capitalist economy were used to foster the health of the Earth and those beings that needed the special balance of the Earth to live, herself included. So much for altruism, she thought ruefully.




Standing at the edge of the range land, raw peaks, covered with perhaps centuries old snow in the never melting bowls, sparkling in the distance with the joy of their geological youth, she watched her horses flying over the grassland in pleasure. The crisp air was a relief from the searing heat of the high plains summer. It was here that she settled back into the magic and rhythm of her being. As much as she was mildly chagrined to admit, it was being with the horses that brought her back. It was the riding, the training, the daily care and varied communication that these animals required, whether she was in the mood or not, the sweet boring pleasure of routine, that gave her the space to dream. Breathing in the sun warmed crispness, she turned to her companion, the hired hand who had worked with her
for the ten years since her husband’s death, musing,

“You know, I wonder about these things, how it is that every day we can simply watch the horses like this, and still get such a sense of pleasure and freedom. They are such generous souls with their gentle humor.” Of course “gentle” and “humor” hardly fit the little mare and the two foals somewhere out of sight , but then genralizations were like that.

She had to laugh, because Jim, in his predictable way, nodded his head, smiled and politely answered with a grunt of bewildered consent. She knew that he took a lot of drubbing in town for staying on with her. It was not an easy place to eek out a living, and those that came from “away” with their east coast notions, their east coast educations and their east coast money, were regarded with a mix of suspicion, irritation and envy. Suspicion
that they would take away the livelyhood of these decendents of pioneers, irritation because they could be the stupidest idiots without a grain of common sense, and envy, because they could either pay to make things work better or leave when things got too tough.

The way Jim saw it, Jan, never did leave, she did have common sense, at least with the animals, and he knew that the towns folk did not envy her pain and loss. They did, on the


whole, admire her tenacity and her hardheaded, hard working ways, even if she was a woman, and even if she acted like she was something of a damned horse whisperer. Despite his east coast upbringing, her husband was of their same pioneer stock, his familly having been ranchers here for several generations, and that she did not simply sell out after he’d died said a lot for her. That she was still here ten years later was pretty remarkable. He felt that part of his job was to remind them of that every so often, if the subject came up. She paid well, spent wisely and scrimped on herself before she scrimped on the ranch. Then, there were her daughters, two of the most different people he had ever met coming from the same womb, but that wasn’t his business. They too, were decent people, who
could have been uppity, given their wealth and privledge, but underneath it all weren’t.


Well, he could live and work with her oddities, and that was that; and, if pressed, in his more private moments he had to admit that he liked the way she was with the land and the animals. There was a certain peace to it. Even had to hand it to her that she managed to hold onto and act on her notions, even while having to come to terms with the harsh reality of Montana, ranching, horses and fate. So what if he had to nod his head politely, every so often, then walk off with a subsequent shake of the same head, chalking it up to eastern city ways.

He smiled at Jan as he turned away to check on that crazy mare and her 2 wild foals that they had worked so hard to save. Who would think that she’d know enough to come back to the ranch for help. But those foals, those tiny, wild, foals had that damned mustang blood.
Could go either way, either way. Damned quirky, that mustang blood.

It was late summer, and the weather was starting to turn. She knew (they all did) that the brief, albeit equally intense, respite from winter was almost done. It was hard to believe that they were already getting ready to bring the stock down from the upland summer pastures. Montana was a harsh country in almost all of it’s seasons, but when the snow first started to

fall, which it would, and soon too, there was a moment, before the inevitable hunkering down, where one was just not quite prepared to take it on. It was at this time of year that she would return to the ranch proper, and spend the icy sometimes brutal winter at the ranch house. This she’d just ignore it for the time being.

In the short time that was left to the warm season, she would be out in her in her airy world of earth, sky and sun, a part of each of the minute details she saw being absorbrd into her psyche. She loved this land, land which she knew intimately like a young child or a lover,
and the minute by minute changes, the little epiphanies.

A year ago, looking up from her desk, Jan had heard a whinnying back and forth. She was curious about what was causing the racket. The horses were clearly agitated by something- it was the middle of the day, the heat of early summer not having it’s usual drowsing effect on all of them. It was in the cool of the evening when they woke up. Genrally during the day the horses stood there looking a little dopey, their eyes half closed. If it had been a particularly rambunctious night , they would clumsily lie down and stay there, not moving for anything, given half a chance. And the look of pain and suffering given to you if you required them to move themselves onto their feet to ride- “Oh, such misuse,” they would silently transmit to you, “such misuse, but because you can’t help being a human, and I forgive you for what you can’t help, I suppose I can roust myself and cooperate.” Jan wondered sometimes if horses were naturallly nocturnal or if it was determined by weather and length of daylight.

There he was, that little black stallion, on the hill, hawking his wares, as it were. He hadn’t yet begun the calling, but there he was strutting. It must have been driving him nuts for some time, all of those mares in estrus at once. Most of the mares ignored him, well, all of them as far as Jan knew. It wasn’t until later when the horses were hayed that it appeared that one of the mares


had gone through the fence and taken off with him. It figured it was her. She had been a bit of a handful from her arrival at the ranch.


The mare had taken off through a break in the fence line, nothing new in that. She had always been looking for a way out. What was different was that she was in estrus just at the time a young stallion was off on his own, begining a herd of his own. She was born on the range, picked up by a ranger when he’d seen her sniffing around at her mama who had been shot accidently by an elk hunter. The filly was about six months old at the time, old enough to be weaned from her mother, but not old enough to survive in a herd, unless another mare took her on as an orphan. Fear of the hunter had driven the band off, fear of the ranger kept them away. It would be matter of hours before the filly was eaten by a mountain lion or other predator.

The ranger knew of an ranch that ran auctions every so often, that had worked successfully with mustangs before, so once he caught her (requiring a tranquilizer dart-she had no intention of trusting a human, especially at that moment) he called to warn them that he was on the way. They knew that the best thing to do with them was to give them enough space and let them be until the predictability of the ranch’s daily cycles would calm them down enough to take the steps necessary to gentling them.

It never occured to him that the age factor was going to be such an issue. Prior animals had been much younger, still reliant on mare’s milk. This one had been ready, almost, to be reliant on herself.

Jan and Jim had gone to the auction to find a good working horse. Instead, it was this mare that had come home with them.





They tended to look at the auction every once in a while, because they often found fine animals in need of a new chance. Many of the horses had been well taken care of, some abused, some neglected. All were at auction and depending on type and personality, all had potential.




Jan’s horses had pretty much all come from auction for two reasons. She felt really awful for all of the horses- the abused and neglected for the obvious reasons, the well taken care of
because of their confusion. These horses had generally been loved, trained, well cared for
by owners who for reasons unforeseen could no longer provide for them, sending them to

auction because of little other option. To find themselves in stock farms, a commodity rather than a pet was completely baffling. They look like lost children.

The mare was of the neglected ilk of auction horse. She was malnourished, fear and stress preventing her from eating. In the short while she’d been in captivity, she had become little more than skin and bone, virtually no muscle to speak of. John Stevenson, the auction house owner said jokingly “You catch her, you can have her- none of us can get near her.” Jan and Jim looked at eachother, then at the wretched dark colored creature, fur dull and patchy, color hard to tell, eyes sunken, ribs countable. It was her eyes that were striking. Her eyes did not look lethargic and depressed. They made it clear that she wanted out.

“Mustang filly, caught as a near weanling, seperated form injured mother at about six months. She was pretty much weaned,but still with the downed mother. A ranger saw them, brought them in, with the thought of vetting the mom for release and putting the filly with a familly to raise and train, if possible” John explained.

“’If possible’ was the operating word,” he continued,” she was pretty self sufficient, this little mustang mare, and terrified of humans. Hell, even six or seven month old stable bred foals are pretty self sufficient. For mustangs and other wild horses,for Christ’s sake, they’re dead if by that time they can’t be on their own, some of ‘em even ready to breed by nine or ten months old [CHECK]. They need raising by humans like they need rattle snakes.”

This three socked, little starred, probably dark bay was no exception. Despite all, they could see that she had been beautiful. When they’d brought her in, under the grit and grime, the sheen she had was not to be fathomed. Her first coat of fur was shedding, the second just starting to emerge. She’d been fully nurtured by her mama’s milk, no growth delay, as far as could be told from a distance, despite the trauma. She had lacked nothing and it was

obvious that she was one of those who would have done better on her own, in the herd where she’d come from. Sometimes the arrogance of well meaning people is something
else and the tale went from sad to worse. With the best of intentions this filly had gone form sleek and wild to destitute and wild.


“And pissed,” added Jim, “ just plain pissed.”

It was her eyes that hooked Jan and her potential that hooked Jim. He knew what fine cutting horses, let alone cow and reining horses, these wild ones made and a mare like this had real breeding potential for sturdy, healthy stock. More to the point, both horsewoman and horseman loved a project, and Starchaser’s Dream, as she was to be called, certainly proved to be that. They did not have a clue as to what they were in for, Jan because she had little or no breaking or experience, Jim because he had lots.

Catching her proved damned near impossible, so calling the vet over, who was there to check the health papers of a new shipment of horses from Texas[CHECK], she was again sedated by dart, and loaded onto the trailer. Getting back to the ranch quickly, they unloaded her, still slightly dopey into a smallish paddock near the outside range. Left on her own with oat hay to start [CHECK IF THEY DO THIS IN MONTATNA LIKE THEY DO HERE], alfalfa in the morning adding small amounts of grain and rice bran, a little more every day, they began the slow process of gaining her trust. Each week found her more filled out and as the weeks progressed she walked, then jogged and then ran the paddock around and around and around, leaping, prancing, dancing to a tune that only she could hear. Until, that is, she would realize that someone was watching her.

It had been early summer, and normally the most of the horses would go up with the cattle and sheep to the summer pastures[CHECK], grazing on the same green grass that fattened up the stock for the Fall sales. The original idea had been to send Chaser up there

as well. But the best laid plans of mice and men....

A shrill whinny on the wind brought Jan back to the present, and curiosity about this mare and foals, returned her focus to her next project- the taming and training of the foals, the re-taming and the re-training of the mare. This time it would be easier, that much she knew.

She shuddered remembering the moment she first saw the mare return. The mare clearly
had not been OK. She wondered if the mare would have come back anyway. If not for herself, had she had come back to save her foals? At first, Jan had thought that the mare had been poisoned, but no one she knew of in this area would do something like that. It was well known that ranchers in many areas found the wild horse herds difficult, because of their competing with sheep and cattle for range food[CHECK INFO], but in this area the upland mountain lushness and limited herd numbers made the feed issue moot. No, it had to have been something else. God knew she’d hoped it wasn’t encephalitis or something that could infect her herd and possibly those around her. But she’d also known that she would do whatever she could for this little mare, yet one more time. For better or worse, it gave her a bit of pleasure to think that just maybe the mare knew that, and that was why she returned, at least for a little while.