Wild Horse Adventures
The Central Oregon Wild Horse Coalition is extremely pleased and honored to include a series in our magazine by beloved Naturalist and Wild Horse Advocate, Ginger Kathrens. Ginger is the founder and Executive Director of The Cloud Foundation. You may have watched her films about Cloud the Stallion on PBS, or read her books. We encourage you to explore The Cloud Foundation website: https://www.thecloudfoundation.org/. Thank you, Ginger!
Raven runs across the Pryor Mountain Wild Horse Range
I: Shock and Awe
When the phone rang in my Colorado Springs office, I picked up and heard the unmistakable Arkansas twang of Marty Stouffer on the other end. I’d been working on Marty’s popular Wild America series on PBS for 6 years as a writer, editor and researcher, but never as a cinematographer. Marty was calling to ask if I would SHOOT a program for him. I rocked back in my chair. Shoot?! In Marty’s world girls don’t function as cinematographers. He once told me I could get wet and cold, or even worse, I could get lost!
But, when Marty learned that I’d shot most of the natural history sequences in Spirits of the Rainforest, a two hour Discovery Channel special that won an Emmy for Best Documentary just a few months before, he had a change of heart. He also knew that I loved horses and had a horse as a kid growing up in Ohio. He continued. “I’ve always wanted to do a film about mustangs.” Oh, oh, I thought. “Would you shoot it for me?” My big chance and this was my assignment?!
I said yes, but was sure this was going to be tough. In 7th grade, my parents bought me an untrained 2 year-old palomino gelding. He was much loved, but he never did anything interesting. Wild America focused on animal behavior and horses are boring. How was I going to create a whole half hour program about animals that only stand around in a field and graze all day?
On a tip from a wild horse advocate, my sister Marian and I visited the Pryor Wild Horse Range on the Wyoming-Montana border. I learned there was a newborn foal on the range and got cryptic directions on how to navigate to the bottom of a four-wheel drive road called Tillett Ridge at the base of the range. Marian and I were up well before dawn, driving in the dark with our directions in hand---left at the fish hatchery sign, take the next left, the right, then left to a cattle guard, then right, and finally right at an old tractor. When we crested a hill our headlights hit the rusty tractor, I felt like we’d won the lottery.
The sun was lighting up the eastern horizon as we made that last turn onto a deep red road, the color of the spectacular buttes around us. I saw movement and stopped. A black horse at the base of an orange butte! I quickly and quietly set up my camera with a giant lens and began filming. Snow dripped out of the horse’s mouth as he took giant bites of wet snow. Wow, they eat snow, I thought. Then his head shot up. I turned in the direction he was staring. My sister had grown bored watching a horse eat snow and was walking back on the road we’d come in on just as the sun broke over the Bighorn Mountains, lighting up her white golf jacket like a beacon. The black horse pranced to within 50 feet of her. She stopped. So did he. He shook his elegant head, revealing a big star under a long forelock. Then he let out an explosive snort and pivoted, racing away. And in a cloud of red dust others joined him, sprinting from the shadows. And there was the newborn foal leaping over sage brush to keep up with his buckskin mother. All the horses disappeared into one of the many canyons of the Pryor Wild Horse Range.
I looked up from my camera. Little did I know that the grandest adventure of my life had begun. Later, I learned the black stallion had a name. Locals called him Raven. I knew I would be back. I had already fallen under his spell.