Cloud: A Wild Stallion’s True Story
Part One
By Ginger Kathrens For: The Trail Less Traveled Magazine
Brittle grass crunched under the hooves of my wild horse, Trace, as we crossed a wide meadow atop Montana’s Arrowhead Mountains. This was once the sacred heart of Crow Indian country where native boys sought their visions and prayed for guidance. It is Cloud’s home and it used to be Trace’s. I pressed my legs ever so lightly against his sides, and Trace shifted with ease into a trot. I looked over my shoulder to see the puffs of dust raised by his hooves. Such an unusually dry season, I thought.
This was the first time Trace and I had been back to the Arrowheads since his capture in 1997 as a yearling, a roundup in which Cloud too was captured. Unlike Trace, the two year old bachelor stallion was released. Cloud was the only captured bachelor to be given back his freedom, and for only one reason: his unusual pale color. Trace is a blue roan, one of the more common colors on the horse range, along with primitive looking duns and grullas, bays, blacks and other shades of roan. And so Trace was expendable. He came to live on my ranch in Colorado, while Cloud, who was unique in color, was released . . . alone.
I watched Cloud race away, disappearing into the salmon colored hills of the low desert. Though I hunted for him everywhere for the next two months, I never caught so much as a glimpse of a nearly white horse. I hoped he might join up with his brother, Diamond, who had evaded the roundup helicopter. But when I found Diamond and four other bachelors on a crisp fall afternoon on Tillet Ridge where Cloud grew up, he wasn’t with them. He wasn’t anywhere. When the snow began to fly, sealing the mountaintop off until spring, I continued to look in the low elevations. Far back in Big Coulee, the canyon separating the two giant ridges of Sykes and Tillet, I found the tracks of a lone horse but had no idea if it was Cloud.
Horses don’t like to be alone. And in the wild they are much more vulnerable when by themselves. Mountains lions prowl the rugged canyons and forests, waiting in the shadows for a likely target, usually a deer but often a horse foal or even an older animal. The terrain itself is treacherous and accidents are not uncommon. Humans who have ranches bordering the range in the desert are rumored to have lured horses into their pastures. Any number of things could happen to an adolescent horse like Cloud. I began to worry that he had died or had been stolen. It was not the first time I’d fretted over him and it would not be the last.
From the first moment I saw him, I was drawn to this pale colt, not realizing how much his life would influence my own. That was on May 29, 1995, the day of his birth.
The White Colt
Raven, the black stallion, looked out over the windswept ridges of an isolated corner of the Rocky Mountains, a flat topped range called the Arrowheads. His yearling son, Diamond, and two of his mares grazed nearby as their filly foals slept on the sunny hillside. But Raven was restless, and missing his youngest mare. I had watched the three year old palomino, heavy with foal, disappear into a stand of dense firs. The next morning, I caught a flash of light color as she walked calmly from the forest. Behind her was a spindly colt who took my breath away. He was blindingly white! The little foal tottered after his mother on long, rickety legs.
The band headed up the mountain to find water and I wondered how far the fragile youngster could travel. He was terribly thin, but seemed determined to keep up. To fall behind was unthinkable for the colt, and he kept his body against his mother’s as they climbed. Finally they arrived at a snowbank under dense Douglas firs, pawed the drifts and ate huge bites of snow. Exhausted, the white colt slumped near a tree and fell asleep. The sun dipped behind a huge thunderhead, and I looked up. In that instant, the wispy, trailing edges of the thunderhead gave me his name. Cloud. I would call him Cloud. And then, I prayed he would live.
Two weeks later, twenty wild horse families worked their way to the mountaintop, and so did I. My four-wheeler lurched and groaned, climbing the two-track road leading, I hoped, to Cloud. Horses on a distant knoll caught my eye—it was Raven’s band and Cloud was with them.
Other horse bands at a beautiful snow-fed waterhole moved off when Raven and his family headed down to drink. Cloud followed his mother, danced into a trot, and then broke into a run, with a little buck of excitement. Raven plunged in and pawed the water, churning it into muddy waves. Little Cloud held back, watching the mares drink and paw. He finally dipped his pink-snipped nose into the pond but jerked back, surprised by the cool wetness. He had tasted only his mother’s milk and an occasional bite of slushy snow.
That evening in the meadows, I found the band grazing in the setting sun and waved as I approached. A wave gave them the opportunity to size me up. Cloud and his dark sisters, Smokey and Mahogany, ran and bucked, then put on the brakes, only to burst off again, racing around a grove of firs. His sisters soon tired of running and nibbled each other’s backs in a feel-good rub down called mutual grooming. Not Cloud! He ran around and around at top speed, then suddenly quit and nickered for his mother. She nickered back. He nursed for a few minutes and dropped to the ground. Within a few seconds he was asleep.
I watched Cloud grow into a precocious colt who liked nothing better than pestering his sisters, pulling on their manes and pawing them while they tried to nap. He was different from the other colts—daring and outgoing and keenly observant. One evening, as I sat near the band, a full moon edged over the Bighorn Mountains, a chorus of coyote voices echoed across the mountaintop. I glanced over at Cloud to see if he was listening. Together we turned in the direction of the calls.
The Bachelors
It was nearly two years before I walked those trails again in hopes of finding Cloud. My work filming wildlife had taken me around the world. But, no matter where I traveled, I never forgot Cloud.
At the end of May, I returned and found Raven and his mares above the waterhole. The black stallion looked magnificent, and the three mares were sleek and healthy. Each had a foal. To avoid any threat of inbreeding, Raven had kicked Diamond and Cloud out of the band when the mares came in heat. Cloud had probably been a bachelor for only a few months, Diamond for a year or more. Raven’s sons had likely found companionship with other young males who ran in rowdy gangs like rebellious teenagers. They can be very hard to find.
So, I began the tedious job of scanning each ridge and valley. Through my spotting scope, I finally saw horses. When the sun broke from the cloud cover, one horse shone white in the brilliant light. It was Cloud. He was alive!
After a five-hour drive over horrible roads, I hiked out on a ridge and found Cloud and the bachelors. What a beauty—tall and sturdy, and nearly pure-white. The bachelors played, biting one another’s necks and legs, practicing for the day when play would turn serious. I thought how important friends and family are to humans and horses.
A few days later, I saw another group of bachelors, including Diamond, on a distant hilltop. Cloud and his friends joined Diamond’s group. They greeted—touching noses, then jerking their heads back with piercing screams. One after another would defecate on a stud pile. I laughed as Cloud missed the pile by a foot or more. Each stallion smelled the droppings of the last, spinning and kicking and screaming again. Once formalities were over, Cloud scratched Diamond’s neck and back with his teeth while Diamond did the same to Cloud. Mutual grooming is reserved for good friends and sometimes half-brothers. The bachelors grazed and played their summer days away. In the fall, their world would change with the roundup that gave me Trace.
Trace
His full name is Absarokee Trace—Absarokee, for the proud Crow Indians who once claimed all the Arrowheads as their sacred land. The white man had named the tall, handsome native people Crows. But they called themselves the Children of the Big Beaked Bird (Absarokke) and the bird was likely a raven. I shortened the colt’s name to Trace.
His name has many meanings appropriate for this likely descendent of Indian horses. A trace can be a path or trail like the Natchez Trace, or it can mean the evidence of something in the past. He will always hold a special place in my heart, and I am proud to say he is mine. But, another part of me will always wish he had been allowed to live free on the Arrowheads. With his confident, commanding personality I believe he would have become a band stallion.
I began the process of gentling Trace with patience. Wild and distrustful at first, he came to understand that I was not to be feared. He also learned he couldn’t intimidate me as he had the yearlings in the wild.
In time, we developed a great friendship. I made him a promise. “Someday,” I said, “we’ll go home to the Arrowheads, you and me. Just for a visit. Would you like that big guy?” I rubbed his face at a favorite little spot just below his eyes. His lids closed halfway, and I thought I heard him sigh.
Searching for Cloud
The spring following the roundup I returned to the Arrowheads, not knowing what I might find. Surely, if Cloud were alive, he would be following the green grass to top of the mountain. I watched the handsome blue roan stallion Plenty Coups run down to the waterhole. He was named in honor of the last chief of the Crow Indians. So great and revered a leader was Chief Plenty Coups that the Crow decided never to have another. The chief’s stallion namesake and his family were in high spirits on this cool day.
Further away, a big group of bachelors broke over the hill. In the middle of the band was Cloud! He stood out like a bright light in a sea of darker horses. He was alive, safe, and running to the waterhole. What a sight for sore eyes—Cloud!
A hefty black band stallion, Two Boots, came to the water while his family waited on the hill. He first nudged Diamond out of the way then took on Cloud. The big stallion pursued Cloud, biting his neck. That’s when Cloud came to life, rearing up, squealing and pushing the bigger horse. Two Boots pushed back, but Cloud had the higher ground and shoved the stallion down the dusty hill. Cloud calmly walked away. It was the first time I’d seen Cloud in a confrontation with a mature stallion, and he was impressive.
I believed Cloud was destined to become a great band stallion like his father, Raven. “Just maybe,” I said to myself, “a Cloud colt will prance across these mountains, as precocious and proud as his remarkable father.” And, I hoped the colt would remain forever free.