Wildlife Artist Dawn Senior-Trask of Moonhorse Art Studio
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Convergence of Horse-Crazy Women

By Dawn Senior-Trask
Essay published in the anthology Crazy Woman Creek, Houghton-Mifflin, 2004

“My mother says, ‘What do you need all those friends for, anyway?’” Diane’s spurs jingled as she stretched her long legs sheathed in fringed leather chinks. She glanced at her palomino, Tequila, to make sure he still stood hitched to a crooked pine next to Candy, my old sorrel mare. Then she continued. “I said, ‘Mom, don’t you know how good all that love feels?’”

Her legs folded like an elk’s, and she sat next to me on the lee side of a boulder out of the fierce mountain wind. We’d ridden up the foothills where big black-bellied birds had burst from the brush, spooking our horses. Diane had squinted at them. “Pheasants?”

I shook my head. “Sage grouse.”

Our horses’ hooves had clattered on the rocks as we heaved up steep winding deer trails, past budding serviceberry and bitterbrush, where horned larks skimmed just above the ground with their thin, plaintive peeping. Now, we’d reached the edge of the timber where four-foot snowdrifts blocked our passage and we could ride no farther.

Diane unwrapped the smushed peanut butter sandwich she’d fetched from her saddlebags, while my cold-stiffened fingers peeled a boiled egg so clumsily that big chunks of egg white came off with the bits of brown shell.

Her eyes scanned the great timbered ravine below us on the mountain’s southwest flank. It plunged with its meltwater creek into the foothills and the broad valley that stretched to other mountain ranges in all directions -- the snowy Sierra Madre divide, the gentle Greens, and the Ferris whose arched cliffs humped like a herd of fin-backed dinosaurs across the northwest horizon a hundred miles away.

She licked peanut butter off her finger and said, “I have this strong feeling that it’s about more, even, than the love. I feel like this convergence of women has some sort of deeper meaning, as if my whole life has been leading up to this. Think about it -- we’re all in our forties or early fifties, all married, or soon to be…” (she winked at me); “some of us to men in their sixties. Most of us are childless, some of us artists, all horse-lovers -- and we all wind up here in the middle of nowhere, Wyoming!”

“Except for me,” I objected. “I didn’t ‘wind up here’.”

“Yeah, you’re the native. But, it seems to me there has to be some reason behind it.”

I nodded. “Maybe so.”

Diane cocked her head with a faraway look. “Don’t know what it is, exactly.”

I said, “Maybe we’ll find out.”

As Diane unwrapped a granola bar and I munched on a carrot, I thought about all of us horsy pals and how it all started the previous spring with the first meeting of the Spurs of the Moment club. Since then, between five and eight of us, sometimes with husbands and boyfriends, sometimes just us gaggle of women, had explored more country on horseback than I’d seen in my life. We’d wended silently through aspen forests, where sunlight set aglow the porcupines sleeping among quaking leaves, where the hermit thrush echoed his own haunting song, and grasses grew thick among undergrowth hemlock, wild rose, kinnikinnik. I’d ride lost in a tranquil trance. Sometimes we jumped deadfall across creekside trails, or loped through summer meadows where larkspur, lupine, paintbrush, prairie-smoke all vied for sulphur butterflies, checkerspots, blues, and bumblebees.

The times we’d had! Horses bucked, reared, kicked, rolled in snowdrifts; we plunged cinch-deep in bogs, got chased by swarms of deer flies and angry half-wild stallions protecting their mares. We lost countless horseshoes, quirts, canteens, and assorted gear all over the county. But we found each other.

Now, atop the spring mountain, Diane and I stuffed plastic sacks of leftovers, napkins and wrappers into our saddlebags, checked our cinches, and remounted Tequila and Candy. As we angled down the steep, rocky slope, the wind swept away any hope of conversation. I thought about what my life had been before this convergence of women had changed it forever. I’d been richly happy, with friends and family nearby, my horses and beloved land with all its creatures. Though I’d lived alone in the log cabin where I was raised, I’d seldom felt lonely, immersed as I was in the seasons of the sagebrush hills, where the coyote pair raised their pups along the trail of my morning walks, bluebirds and owls perched on the cabin to hunt insects and mice, two antelope does hid their fawns on the ridge outside the window. A wild ermine followed me everywhere through the snow, and chickadees ate seeds from my hand. Yet, sometimes a shadow of fear would swoop to touch me ever so lightly, like the wingtips of the prairie falcon that once mistook my head for a rabbit. Would loneliness haunt my future?

In those days I never dreamed how much happier I could be. Now, riding down the mountain, Diane’s spurs and our horses’ bridles jingling, a fleece jacket wrapping me, and the earth spread in painted layers below us, I became conscious of my joy. I felt safe, warm, secure in the future. I felt that whatever might happen in the lives of any of us horse-crazy women, we could count on each other. Whatever hardships, triumphs or griefs any of us might go through, we’d never face a lonely old age.

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