Martín Prechtel - The Mare and the Mouse: Stories of My Horses Volume I

Also by Martn Prechtel:

Secrets of the Talking Jaguar

Long Life, Honey in the Heart

Stealing Benefacios Roses

The Disobedience of the Daughter of the Sun

The Unlikely Peace at Cuchumaquic

The Smell of Rain on Dust: Grief and Praise

Copyright 2021 by Martn Prechtel. All rights reserved. No portion of this book, including all illustrations, may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any meanselectronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwisewithout the written permission of the Author. For more information contact North Star Press.

Library of Congress CIP data available upon request.

First Edition

ISBN: 978-1-68201-117-1

Printed in the United States of America.

Cover painting: Mother of Horses Bringing Home the Infant Sun and Moon, by Martn Prechtel.

All text and interior line drawings by Martn Prechtel.

Japanese calligraphy by Reed Larsen.

Cover design and interior layout by Liz Dwyer of North Star Press.

Type set in Times New Roman, headings set in Brioso, and Brioso Semibold Italic.

Library of Congress Control Number: 2021931042

All three volumes of the Stories of My Horses are meant as an overdue love letter and tribute to all the horses of my life and my beloved New Mexico for the spiritual nourishment and down-to-earth vitality that like a beautiful warm blanket has kept me warm and hopeful through the cold cynical blizzard of modernitys compromised sense of wonder.

While every adventure, misadventure, and episode found in these books took place precisely where and how they are described, I have taken the liberty of assigning alternative names for most but not all of the humans in my eternal faith that even mean people can change for the better, but also to protect the sweeter kind from any retribution from those that wont change and to respect the privacy of the shy. None of the horses names have been changed so they can be remembered again by those who knew them.

Neither the Publisher nor the Author accepts any liability for any mishaps, accidents, or any damages to people, property, or animals occurring from anyone who after reading the Stories of My Horses is erroneously led to act on any of the opinions expressed herein as advice of any type or who foolishly decides that they should try to re-enact any of the episodes described in these books in their own lives!

A Horse Song:

(everyone sing)

For the never-ending wild land.

For the never-ending wild land.

For the never-ending wild land.

For the never-ending wild land.

For the wide-open ride.

For the wide-open ride.

For the wide-open ride.

For the wide-open ride.

For our horses never-ending wild epic hearts, ridden by a truly wide-open mind.

For our horses never-ending wild epic hearts, ridden by a truly wide-open mind.

For our horses never-ending wild epic hearts, ridden by a truly wide-open mind.

For our horses never-ending wild epic hearts, ridden by a truly wide-open mind.

Into every hoof print that we leave, may seeds of rich spiritual substance fall.

Into every hoof print that we leave, may seeds of rich spiritual substance fall.

Into every hoof print that we leave, may seeds of rich spiritual substance fall.

Into every hoof print that we leave, may seeds of rich spiritual substance fall.

To sprout a time of hope beyond our own.

To sprout a time of hope beyond our own.

To sprout a time of hope beyond our own.

To sprout a time of hope beyond our own.

Let the world jump back to life.

Let the world jump back to life.

Let the world jump back to life.

Let the world jump back to life.

(Please repeatsinging)

A Dedication

Because the undeniable presence of Pueblo peoples early expertise with the old magnificent breed of horse on which their European oppressors arrived has been consciously and unfairly diminished, dismissed, or completely written out of the record of horse history by Euro-American academics, all three books of this series Stories of My Horses, are dedicated to the Tewa, Tiwa, Towa, Ashiwi, and especially the Keres speaking villages of the area now called New Mexico. These Pueblo people were indisputably the very first North American First Nation tribes to ever ride, drive, own, and raise horses. Despite four and a half centuries of colonial oppression, it was the original Native Pueblo peoples continued proficiency with, reverence for, and adoption of the old Spanish Mesta-raised horses into the heart of their spiritual lives that actually converted these unique horses right out from under their own would-be religious converters, turning the colonialists animals into the very different and fine Native horses they became. Either directly or indirectly it was from these Pueblo herds that all the great Native horse culturesof the Plains, Prairies, and Northwest, of the entire American and Canadian westreceived their first indigified horses upon whose backs their renowned mobility sky rocketed into the prominence their memory still maintains in the history of the North American Native West.

Though horses are beautiful and it doesnt take much to see why so many people love horses as much as they do, there is a deeper and grief-ridden reason for the strong obsession people have for horses.

Maybe some of this has to do with how much power and potential for freedom resides in every horse. Horses just breathe ions of freedom into us stirring some strong ancestral memory of our mutual history when anciently we ranged together as free beings, when only the grass, the wind, the wolves, and swans called the shots, where the air was clean, the stream water drinkable, the land fat with wild animals. Stored in some special forgotten chamber of our hearts we must have the old memory of how horses saved our own ancestors from the generations of captive slavery and stationary servitude at the hands of settled empires. Horses gave them the liberty of tribal mobility and a nobility on the unfarmed, uncitified Eurasian steppe, where with only the Holy sky as their container, away from the chains, whips, and plows, somewhere inside us, we know that horses saved us. At least for a millennia.

And all of that is true.

But along with all of that there is something else that all horse people know. Something even more significant than liberty that the presence of horses keeps alive in that part of us that is capable of hope.