Fire and Ice, continued...

Most days that spring, smoke streaked the sky. By night, comet Hyakutake flared across the heavens, perhaps an omen, despite which, I kept on rescuing horses.

One blazing Friday afternoon in June, I went to the Valley Livestock Auction just south of Albuquerque, New Mexico. The horses for sale that day hinted at how bad the drought had become. One pen held horses and foals with Navajo brands. A mare caught my attention. She was a spectacular buttermilk buckskin, jet black on snow white. Yet she was so thin it hurt to look at her. As she moved listlessly, a nearly newborn filly shadowed her.

I copied the numbers on the oval tags glued to them. The law says all stock sold at auction must carry these tags to identify the sellers.

I followed a sandy lane between welded pipe fences, then a TV Western boardwalk to get to the front office. A big-haired blonde rifled through papers and found the numbers. “They came from different places.” Interesting. The starving mare had the compassion to adopt an orphan.

I got the filly for $32.50 and the mare for $87.50. I hoped I wouldn’t have to call the “Your New Mexico Used Cow Dealer” van for the mare. In some places, they call those guys knackers. I phoned my fiancé, Mike. “I might need help.”

Once we got them home to Rattlesnake Acres, as we tried to unload them, the mare collapsed on the horse trailer floor. A leg wedged under the divider between the two haves. But with Mike’s help, we finally got her out.

The next day she walked into the fishpond and fell. She struggled a moment, then sank down, head barely above water. She made no more effort to get out. Teen daughter Virginia and I didn’t want to bail out the pond andrisk killing the koi and goldfish. So we wrapped ropes around the mare and pulled. Finally she heaved to her feet and we dragged her out.

The mare collapsed next to the pool and lay there for hours. When she finally was able to walk, we moved her and the filly into a pen shaded by Navajo globe willows.

Two days later -- Monday afternoon, June 24, 1996 – finally, finally! – the first rain of the year fell. The rain gauge showed eight-tenths of an inch.

Yet by the next morning, all that water had seemingly vanished without a trace into the thirsty soil. I watched, astonished, as my two big geldings raced each other, and they were throwing rooster tails of dust.

I was so darned tired of dust.

Four days later it rained all night. When the lightning stopped, Virginia and I went out with flashlights. We waded through a gentle flood covering half our land and prayed thankgivings. We heard spadefoot toads singing. We saw them mating as their eggs, clear with black yolks, floated in gummy clumps around our ankles.

The next morning I discovered that the rain had chilled the orphan filly. She had stood beside her adoptive mother out in the open instead of taking shelter because range horses usually are afraid to go inside barns.

That evening she spiked a fever. I moved her into the tack room for intensive care. I injected penicillin every day and it quelled the infection. Probiotics kept her insides working, although she just about flooded the tack room floor with sloppy manure. I fed her milk from our goats and calf manna.

She put on pounds and I turned her back out with her adopted mom. Soon she was frolicking with our other foals.

Three more times, gentle floods spread across our valley. Ponds teemed with freshwater shrimp, tiger salamanders and tadpoles. Evenings the spadefoots sang. Grass and flowers grew. The buttermilk buckskin thrived and I soon sold her. The neighbors to the west bought her adopted filly, and their grey mare took over mothering her.

What a wonderful ending, I thought, to the drought.

I was wrong.

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