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Amy Raye took the familiar road on her right off Highway 93. She rolled down the windows of her truck, let the wind blow her hair, smelled the pastures and pines, the sun warm on her skin. The road veered to the left, and she followed the hard-packed gravel up to Saddleback Farm, where newly adopted mustangs and rescue horses were boarded and trained. She parked her truck to the right of the barn, took a swig of water from the bottle in her cup holder, and then climbed out.
Several weeks after Amy Raye’s cast had been removed, after she’d set herself up in a small rental in the town of Golden, joined an addiction support group and continued to work with a therapist, and she and Farrell had agreed on a visitation schedule for her and the children, she completed a mustang adoption application through the Bureau of Land Management’s Royal Gorge field office. Within a couple of weeks, her application was approved.
It was the second Friday in March that Amy Raye had visited the Ca?on City Correction Facility, the BLM’s largest wild horse and burro holding area, and one of only five facilities in the country with a Wild Horse Inmate Program. Each month, seven to ten horses from the western rangelands would be available for adoption. It was on that Friday that Amy Raye met Storm, a five-year-old roan gelding, gathered from the Salt Wells Creek herd management area in Wyoming. He stood at fifteen hands, had been in halter training for a couple of months and led around with a saddle and panniers, but had not been ridden. Amy Raye fell in love with Storm from the moment she saw him in the pen, when the trainer led him to her, and Storm let Amy Raye hold her hand to his muzzle as if it were the most natural thing in the world.
“He’s friendly,” she said.
“He still lunges from us in the field sometimes, but in the pen he’ll walk right up to us,” the trainer said.
Amy Raye kept the horse, and kept his name. She paid three hundred dollars, and the horse was delivered through an arrangement with the facility to the stables at Saddleback Farm.
When Amy Raye wasn’t with the children or at work, she would be at the stables. Farrell didn’t know anything about horses, but sometimes he would visit the stables with her. Easy talk would pass between them. And then they’d be standing beside each other, leaning against the fence, their shirtsleeves pressed together, forearms on top of the fence railing, the sides of their hips touching, too. They’d be watching Storm in the pasture, healthy and halterless. They’d be smoothing out a past, trying to leave its scraps behind, and each stone in their hand, each clear moment, was another stone to lay down.