"Death by Bureau of Land Management."

I thank you both for taking the time to read this piece. I am going to keep the "tense" as it is. It is my perspective on a series of events that actually happened. Maybe I should remove the foot note and let the piece stand on its own. Out in Nevada, where one can see quite literally for miles...as far as the human eye can, you think that there is a lot of forage for wild horse herds-Mustangs. You would be wrong. Most of the open range in Nevada needs to have the wild horse herds culled and brought down to a size that the range can manage. Else you find dead and dying horses out in the desert. The Wild Horse Act of 1974 was specifically designed to prevent that. What has followed has been 34 years of controversey and abuse by the Feds. ever since. The Stallion in this poem was from what is called a "Retired Herd" His mares were too old to breed and he was too old to try and make them. He was apparently captured around the Lost Cabin Springs Range in North Central Nevada. His mares were sold to various bidders at a wild horse auction. However no one wanted to bid on the 17 year old stallion. The BLM field workers didn't want to sell him to a dog food manufacture-(which has happened and is also highly ileagal.) So they drove the horse 35 miles West from Las Vegas into my nieghbors property. We both lived in the Spring Mountain Range-Specifically Mount Potosi Mine area. The BLM Employees drove up to my nieghbors pasture...pulled a quick U-turn and began unloading the truck. The BLM Employees had by the way taken off thier trucks liscence plate! They had removed their metal name tags. We were only able to find out information on the stallion, by reading his freeze brand on the side of his neck.-We did this when he was so tired and hungry that he would finally come up to where we left a bale of hay out for him. We tried to get the BLM to retrieve the horse...to no avail. Once he left that trailer they did not want to admit that they had ileagally dumped a horse, and did not want to make it good by shipping him back home...which incidentally was about 200 miles north of where this elderly stallion actually found himself. A location where he didn't know the local water sources or where dangerous animals lived. Even though we could see the lights of Las Vegas gleaming at night, We had Mountain Lions prowling the ridge lines and valleys of the Spring Mountain Range. About a month after he had been abandoned, he walked down a dirt road to where State Route-(highway) 1-60 crossed over the mountains. He waited for a tractor trailler that was headed down the pass towards him. He waited till the truck didn't have time to swerve or stop. Then he looked straight at the driver and deliberately walked in front of his Semi Truck. I know this because I was the Assistan Crew Chief on the Mountain Springs Volunteer Fire Department's First Response Vehicle. We had to rescue the driver from his battered truck and sadly remove the torn body of the stallion. The whole time we were using the Jaws of Life to cut the trucker from his rig, he kept saying, "He looked me straight in the eye and walked right out in front of me. Me with my horn blowing! Damndest thing I have ever seen!" I think I will keep this story in a past tense. Its odd form is from cutting and pasting from my old personal and private web site. Now that I have posted the whole story behind the piece, maybe I should pull the footnotes at the bottom. Peace my friends. As Paul Harvey would say..."Now you have the rest of the story." -DS Baker