Dayton O. Hyde - Medicine Hattie

Dayton O. Hyde

As manager of the Black Hills Wild Horse Sanctuary in South Dakota, I play no favorites among the hundreds of wild horses that run wild and free on our eleven-thousand-acre spread. Why blame a foal that happens to be born swaybacked, pigeon-toed, knock-kneed, or just plain ordinary? To me all horses are beautiful.

But sometimes! Let me tell you about Medicine Hattie, who was born the kind of horse anyone might have risked their life to own.

Medicine Hattie as a foal, with her mother.

One cold March day, I happened to come around a big rock just as a rare Medicine Hat foal slid wet and steaming out of its mother. For a moment the little horse lay like a glistening pearl, blinking at the sudden light, then out of the pile of long legs came two front ones, and the foal raised itself to a sitting position, then pushed itself to its feet.

The baby was what we call a Medicine Hat. These are predominantly white horses with a dark hat atop their heads and a dark shield on their chests. American Indians believed that riding a Medicine Hat into battle made one impervious to bullets or arrows.

Never having seen such a beautiful foal, I stood there staring. The little animal saw its mother first and me second. Frightened by the mare, which had jumped up and was doing nervous war dances at my presence, it staggered over to me and began chewing on the buttons of my coat, looking for milk.

I kept shoving the little filly back toward its mother, but it followed me whenever I tried to escape. When the angry mare bared her yellow teeth and ran me up a tree, the baby finally sought out her mother.

What I could not know was that the damage had been done. Medicine Hattie was like a newly hatched duckling, following anything that moved. She had been imprinted by my sight and smell, and she would always be bonded to me.

In a week Hattie was able to outrace the wind, and could leave her mother huffing and puffing far behind. One morning as I was hunting for arrowheads on a high ridge overlooking the Cheyenne River, I felt something bump me from behind, and turned to see Medicine Hattie. She had scented me from afar and galloped away from her mother for a visit.

Go away, I growled, but she was already chewing a wet hole in the back of my sweater, hoping for milk. There was the sudden thunder of hooves on hard ground and a scream of rage as Hatties mother caught up and saw me near her foal. The mare ran at me as though I were a coyote attacking her baby. Her great broken teeth clicked on emptiness as I sprinted away and darted behind a scrubby juniper. The old mare went trotting off, baby in tow, but the foal kept stopping every few yards, nickering for me to follow.

August came and the foals on the sanctuary no longer seemed glued to their mothers sides, but wandered off to play with others of their age group.

Medicine Hattie and her mother had spent the summer high in the mountains and I had seen them only at a distance. But one day as I fixed some fence on the far side of the river, I heard a distant whinny and saw Medicine Hattie coming toward me at a gallop. Suddenly she had doubts. In the manner of wild horses everywhere, she became shy and circled with the wind until it brought my scent to her. She seemed then to feel at ease and trotted up. A few feet away she stopped and began to graze. I was aware that I had a friend whether I wanted one or not.

A horse like this comes along once in a lifetime.

She watched me carefully as I worked, following along as though trying to learn the process of splicing broken wires. That afternoon I drove off and left her, but within a week she had learned where I lived and was seen pacing up and down along the fence that surrounds the sanctuary headquarters. Two days later she learned that she could sail across fences like a deer, and I saw her one morning helping herself to fresh corn and raspberries in my garden. I was busy doctoring a sick calf, and before I could get to the garden and drive her out, she had eaten all the green apples she could reach off a tree and now lay on her side with a bellyache. She rolled her eyes at me as I approached, and she kicked her stomach as if to tell me where it hurt.

She must have blamed me for her discomfort, because just as I was about to give her a shot in the rump for colic, she jumped up, leaped the garden fence, and galloped over to join her friends.

Winter turned the brown hillsides to white. The wild horses pawed down through the snow to find the frozen brown grasses left from summer. One day I saw Hattie on a ridge across the river. She was with a band of mustangs. She turned to look at me, but chose to follow the others.

As she started up a steep hillside to join the band, she slipped on ice under the snow, fell on her side, and went tobogganing down the hillside, heading right toward a three-hundred-foot cliff. I screamed in anguish, grabbed a rope from my pickup, and rushed across the river on the ice, heading up the ridge toward where I had last seen her.

She lay on a patch of ice at the edge of the precipice, her blue eyes watching me calmly as I approached, as though not realizing that the slightest move on her part might send her to her death.

I stood where the wind would blow my scent to her and spoke to her quietly. Please, Hattie. Dont be afraid! Let me put this rope around you and tie you to this tree!

At the sound of my voice, the animal struggled and slipped a few inches closer to the edge. Her hind legs dangled into space.

I tied one end of the nylon rope to the pine tree and made a slip-knot of the other. I would have one shot at roping her by the neck. If I missed she would be gone.

Hattie seemed to freeze as the loop sailed out and settled over her head. I pulled in my slack and jerked the rope tight around the tree. For a moment I thought the roots would snap under the strain, but they held. Slowly I slid her body across the ice until I could touch her. I scratched her ears and rubbed her eyelids, talking softly to her as I worked. Gripping a branch with one hand, I lowered myself out over the ice until I could reach her tail with my boot and hook it toward my hand.

Suddenly she struggled and I almost lost my grip, but I held on and finally skidded her body off the ice and onto a patch of snow.

Medicine Hattie (left) and the other wild horses at the Black Hills Wild Horse Sanctuary in South Dakota are protected and free.

Sides heaving, she got to her feet, her rear to the edge as though she feared the heights. I slipped the loop from her neck and turned to clamber up the hillside, not daring to look back. Then suddenly I heard her hooves scraping toeholds in the snow, and she went lurching past me and beyond, seeking the safety of the pine forest. For a few moments she waited for me until I had made my way to safety, then she was off, galloping wild and free onto the upper prairies to join the others.