Wild Horses

They did not know you were there. Or they knew and did not care. Which comes to the same thing.

Wild horses exist at a frequency most people never encounter. Not the domestic horse, which is magnificent in its own way, but a different thing. The domestic horse has made a bargain with humanity, a bargain of centuries, the trade of mobility and strength for food and shelter. The wild horse made no such bargain. It is still running the original terms.

You saw them from a distance first. Small shapes in the landscape. Wrong for landscape, too much movement, the wrong proportion of head to body for cattle. Then you understood what they were and everything else stopped.

They were moving across open ground. Not running from anything. Moving with the easy purpose of animals that cover ground because covering ground is what they do, not because anything requires it of them. The movement of wild horses is different from the movement of all domestic horses. It is purposeless and therefore perfect. No destination except the direction of appetite and habit.

A sound carried. The sound of them, which is ground and breath and the collective impact of multiple large animals moving, a sound felt in the feet more than heard by the ears. They were closer than they looked.

You stood still. Not frozen. Still, deliberately, in the particular way that wildlife requires. Stillness communicates non-threat. Every wild animal reads motion and stillness in the code of survival. Stillness says: I am not pursuing. I am not a sudden movement. I am a neutral fact in the landscape.

Some of them looked up. That feeling. The eye of a horse on you. A very large eye, capable of seeing almost all the way around the head. Contained in that eye: calculation, ancient, fast. You are assessed in a second. The assessment: no threat. The assessment results in: return to grass.

They went about their day. Their day was this field and the horizon and the grass and each other. Simple in description. Complete in experience. There is no animal that looks as free as a horse in open land. The size of them and the speed potential held in the body and the mane and the breath visible on cold air, all of it saying: this animal could go anywhere. And is choosing here, today, for no other reason than this is where the grass is.

One young one ran. No reason. Just ran. Opened into full gallop across the open ground and stopped at the far edge and turned and stood. The pure joy of speed when speed is available. Muscles in a body that were made for this being used for this.

You watched until they moved out of sight. Already knowing that this specific arrangement, these animals on this ground in this light, would not repeat. It happened once, for you, and stored itself in whatever part of the brain keeps things that made it catch its breath.

The field is empty now. But it does not feel empty. It feels visited.

So do you.

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