When I was a child, I lived in a house partway up a hill. The section of town we lived in, a group of hills and meadows scattered irregularly with houses, lay in the midst of a ring of high mountains. I walked three long country blocks from our house to the school. Two of those blocks were empty of houses. These empty blocks grew swards of wildflowers and native bunchgrasses. One block had been fenced with a single strand of barbed wire, and contained a weathered, tumbledown shed the children in that part of town called "the barn."

I loved horses when I was seven, as do so many little girls. One night in May, the sun was setting in flaming clouds behind the Warm Springs ridge. An ice-edged breeze blew, as it often does in high country in spring. In the twilight, I was playing alone in the barn’s empty lot, running and hiding from imaginary bad guys in and behind great clumps of Great Basin wild rye.

I heard sounds from the dirt street above the barn, toward where the sun had disappeared into flames. A man was leading a horse, a saddleless horse, along the road.

In the deepening twilight, both man and horse were shadowy silhouettes. I had been taught about horses by my Gramps, who as a young man, had made his living by catching wild horses on the Snake River Plain and breaking them to sell. Though I was so young, I knew a good horse when I saw one, even in silhouette. This was a beauty, and judging from the arched crest of his neck, was a stallion.

Suddenly, the horse lifted his forelegs into the sky, rearing so high that his head and neck appeared black against the flaming sunset. I could see very clearly the straight profile, delicate muzzle, and proudly arched neck. As the wind whipped his mane, the stallion appeared to be outlined in living flame. It was an outrageous vision, extraordinary and possessed of a wild beauty I have never seen again.

Then the horse set his feet down on the road and walked out of my life. The vision remains to this day.

The next morning, ten bales of hay and a water tub appeared at the barn, and to my delight I found that someone had brought a black mare to live there. During the final weeks of school, I made friends with the mare, a gentle old thing, and begin to bring her treats (a carrot, a handful of Quaker oats, an apple) on my way to school. She soon learned to come to the fence when she saw me. The day after school let out for the summer, the black mare had a foal.

The new filly was as fire-orange as a horse can be, and I at once thought of my flame-stallion and somehow felt that he had to be the sire.

For about a week, a man came every day to fill the water tub for the mare and pull some hay for her from the barn. Then one day, no one came. Two days later, the water tub was empty and the hay outside the barn was gone. Every morning I fed the mare hay from the barn. I lugged bucket after bucket of water and filled her tub, carrying the water just over a block. I was small, and it was lucky for me that going to the tub was downhill. After a few days of this, my mother saw me with the heavy bucket and followed me. After that, we carried buckets of water to the mare in our car. We fed her the remaining hay in the barn, and she soon denuded her small pasture of grass. When the pasture was bare, I pulled roadside grass for her by the hour. I mowed lawns and fed her the clippings. Eventually my father bought the mare some hay, and began to search for her owner. No one kept a horse unstabled during the winter in our town; the mare and her daughter could well perish from the cold then, and Father was worried about their future. Finally, just before school began in the fall, some men came and took the mare and her flame filly away in a trailer.

Several years later, our family acquired a black mare. We didn’t know it at the time, but she was in foal. She produced a flame-red filly, as fire-orange as a horse can be. The mare was very old, and died that winter. There was no question that the foal would make it. My father gave her into my care. He said, "I know you will care for her."

The black mares and their fillies have long gone to dust. Yet I see them often, and the flame stallion that sired the dream of horses in my mind. There are threads of fire that run gleaming through each person’s life, and each such thread has a source. One of my firethreads has as its beginning a shadow-stallion of flame that greets me even as I write. Find the threads of fire in your own life, and in memoria tene.

by Uncialle, copyright 2002

Click the buttons below to go back to Tales of Uncialle, or to go Home.