Martín Prechtel - The Wild Rose

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

Rescuing the Light

The Mare and the Mouse

Copyright 2022 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: 978-1-68201-124-9

North Star Press of St. Cloud

www.northstarpress.com

Printed in Canada.

Cover painting: Rewa Dreaming, by Martn Prechtel.

All text and interior line drawings by Martn Prechtel.

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.

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 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!

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.

This series, The Stories of My Horses, is not just a compendium of imaginative romantic narratives written to casually entertain the horse loving public.

As romantically remembered as they might seem to be, they are actually straightforward historical accounts of what happens when a life-loving fool like me, a native of that beautiful land-locked, cultural island called Northern New Mexico, who in the latter half of the 20th century, decides he must live his everyday life in direct defiance of the soul shrinking threat of modernitys earth-wrecking ugliness and mediocre existence, by keeping some modicum of the bright shine and outrageous living passion of our real souls alive by flying free and beautiful on the backs of flesh and blood horses over a live unpeopled, unmanicured land.

None of these horses or what happened with them were conjured out of my head, they just seeped into my life like water into a spring, for I knew every one of them personally and lived the life described herein. One of these horses, as of this writing, though very old, still graces our corrals, alongside his great-granddaughters and sons, by the Ojo Caliente creek.

They really did dance with bands in parades, one really had a mouse for a suitor, another bravely fought and killed a mailbox, all of them bucked, one was born in a snowdrift, another under ice, another sliced to the teeth with tin and was sutured up with his own tail hair, they really did save lives, they really lived, loved, died and did all those things written here in these three books, but never at a safe distance, never at arms length. I was always on top of them singing when they danced, there when we bucked, got rolled on, kicked, or run away with. I was the one who doctored their illnesses, wept for their deaths, made their saddles, and a billion other things we did together and was in turn infused with veritable life when their courage, speed, beauty, sense of humor, weird quirks, and liveliness forced me, through my love for them, to jettison all spiritual laziness, thereby understanding the Holiness in Nature by their natures, despite my young angry self.

No, I didnt want these stories to divert the readers mind away from life but to cause them to get away from the screen, out the door and into life.

I wanted these stories to inspire the same courage in you that these little powerful horses have always given me, so you could again find your little-kid smile and the bright eyes of the very young, as if seeing the natural, vital world for the first time, and thereby make the brilliance of your own more original soul find a way to shine out of the prison walls of modernitys shallow choices of inorganic self-designation, to shine out of the cynical myopia of the age where nothing is good enough. The Stories of My Horses are intended to bust you out of that complacent-citified-cybermaimed-settler-brain we were handed and tendered as reality; to ride again beautifully your own story-horses, not away from life but directly into life, where the freedom of being well right where you nobly stand, becomes the delicious motive for getting up in the morning.