The Wild Ones

Grouped by age, the colts came first. Ten yearlings leaned into one another, burying forelocks into the next colt’s mane, the herd mentality so deeply learned: safety in numbers, move as a pack. Makeshift bridles ran beneath their jaws. Hooked to the string, a tag with a number: 1529, 1917, 2460. White waves scarred their hips; some hadn’t lost their winter coats; shag clumped on croups and bellies; sagebrush barbs hung in tails—those remnants of wild. Taped to each pen, a bidding form.

The mustang is arguably the most familiar symbol of the West. Beer commercials. Rodeo posters. T-shirts puff-painted with stallions bolting across American flags. The most enduring U.S. sports car. The mascot of my high school. The inspiration for countless pop songs. They couldn’t drag us away, sang the Stones. May no man’s touch ever tame, warned Ray LaMontagne. Throwing caution to the wind, I’ll run free too, promised Natasha Bedingfield. The mustang (as an icon, at least) seems inescapable. And though I grew up near the basin of the Owyhee Mountains, a stretch of high desert bluffs home to Idaho’s largest herd, until the Bureau of Land Management’s (BLM) Wild Horse and Burro Adoption, I’d never been so close to the real deal.

The desert erupted with flashing lights and megaphoned carnies and the howling sirens of victorious ring tossers. Corndog stands and Tilt-A-Whirls. Packs of tired children sobbed through their cotton candy. Past the main entrance, a fountain splashed. Tired mothers soaked their feet, and in the bandstand, a cover band sang Creedence Clearwater Revival and Moody Blues numbers. No one stopped at the stage, but at the end of “Proud Mary” the singer, a pot-bellied man wearing a tank top and a mullet, fell to his knees and pointed to the passersby. A big finish. Behind the stage, a huddle of mobile kitchens. Pork pulls. Elephant ears. Brooklyn deli. Chicago pizza. Onion rings. Curly fries. Lemonade. Slushies. Pronto Pups. Old West BBQ. The food court abutted a twenty-foot slide and a row of Whack-A-Moles. The rides went on forever. Ferris wheels. The Flying Scooter. Three houses of mirrors. A carousel. Four rollercoasters. Bumper cars. Big Circus Side Show. Dance Dance Revolution. Skydiver. Superman. SuperStar. The High Striker. The Yo-Yo. The Zipper. A petting zoo. Past the petting zoo, the livestock. Swine and sheep and cattle. A bidding floor where ten-year-olds led thousand-pound steers to the center of the ring. From the stands, bidders hollered and steers sold and children beamed.

Behind the barn, a dirt path bisected a field. Horses, tied to trailers, waited to be curried out and saddled. A girl in brown braids ran barrels in a corral. George Strait wailed on a pickup’s radio. Then, for a while, nothing. Just flat desert pasture—trampled grass and full-seeded dandelion bulbs. In the far end of the field, invisible from the bumper cars and candied almond stands, a cluster of pens.

An occasional breeze, salty with wafts of fried dough, upset cheat grass and wildrye. The faint hollers of running children and chugging rollercoasters were barely audible. The horses had mellowed to the distant clatter, never whinnying or stirring at the strange song of fair-goers, those bells and sirens and whistles. Detached from the fair’s roar, the whole scene stagnant.

Four corrals clustered together. A pen for colts, for mares, for stallions, for burros. A few men paced around the animals, bending to check hooves, holding out hands to test dispositions. That forelock’s no good, that blaze means squirrely genes, don’t want socks neither, might mean weak hooves. A girl tugged her father’s sleeve, begging: “She’s only one hundred dollars.” She pointed to a mare. The animal was taller than the others, brushed down, combed shiny. Her father shook his head and lured her away with the promise of sno-cones.

I had imagined a rodeo corral full of stallions, a horseshoe of bleachers packed with potential buyers, but this crowd, sparse...