By Peter Christensen

Op-Ed Commentary

Zoey was a yearling, a “wildy,” a horse that was born in the bush under no brand. She wandered onto the Lowen ranch late in the winter from out of the Forest Reserve, was skinny, all black in a ragged winter coat, had big feet with hairy fetlocks, a sure sign she was of working stock.

We do not know what happened to the mare or who her sire was, but we do know that she was starving and that the hay put out for wintering horses by the Lowens must have had a stronger attraction than her fear of people. What with wild horse hunters shooting horses for meat to feed animals they raised for fur, predatory wolves hunting them and a long, hard winter no wonder this “wildy” had taken up with the ranch horses.

Some say the “wildy’s” are descended from herds that the native Indians wintered on these small mountain prairies, others say they descended from animals that were let go during the great depression when forage was scarce or let go when machines replaced horses on the farms; people who owned hard working horses could not bring themselves to sell their animals to the canneries so they let them go.

You can believe whatever story suits as probably all of them are true.

Zoey wandered in during the late winter of ‘88 when the snow was hard and stayed long into the spring. The rancher on whose property the little black horse had wintered, decided to give her to the Ya Ha Tinda Horse Ranch up on the Red Deer River for schooling and a career with the Park Service.

The reason the little black horse was called Zoey is a result of the traditions of the ranch, which were written in stone. Yearlings were named by a letter of the alphabet, the horses born in the year of ‘88 or close would have names beginning with the letter Z. They were known as the ‘Zed’ horses: Zepher, Zeke, Zella, Zenda, Zaire and Zoey.

Horses get along in bunch, if they have some room, but they do maintain a pecking order and some are bossy. Zoey, the smallest of the Z horses was mostly ignored, not worth pushing around. However, one day a couple of the T horses, Tarzan and Tip and a W horse named Winston decided to gang up on Zoey and push her off her feed.

The fight was a while in brewing. Zoey was getting angry at being shouldered off her feed, she started pawing the ground, intently watching the bigger horses feeding on the hay she had been tendering. Without warning Zoey grabbed Tarzan, a lanky blonde Saddlebred, by the neck with her teeth and flung him down, then put both her front hooves on Tarzan’s neck, a position from which it was impossible for Tarzan to get up or move.

All the horses from A to Z gathered to watch. After a time, Zoey let Tarzan up. Tarzan bewildered, went over and kicked Tip and bit Winston on the rear. Zoey’s stature amidst the herd was raised; after that none of the other horses picked on the little “wildy” or tried to push her.

Cal, the ranch foremen, who had seen it all and all of this, said “That’s how you can tell a “wildy” alright, they’ll take them by the neck and throw them down. A tame horse wouldn’t know how to do that.”

– Peter Christensen is a Columbia Valley based writer and poet.

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