Nobody Could Touch the Wild Mustang I Adopted From a Government Roundup. Then a Flash Flood Hit the Canyon

I named him Trueno. Thunder.

For the first month, I didn’t touch him. I didn’t try. I sat in a chair in the corner of his round pen every morning with my coffee and read the newspaper out loud.

He hated me. He’d charge the fence. He’d rear and strike at the air. He’d stand in the far corner and watch me like I was a mountain lion.

I kept reading.

By the second month, he stopped charging. By the third, he’d come halfway across the pen to see what I was doing. In the fourth month, on a cold morning in July, he walked all the way across and put his nose on my shoulder while I read the sports section.

I didn’t move. I didn’t breathe.

He stood there for almost a minute, then walked away like it was his idea.

People in town heard about it. A rancher drove out from Wells to watch. A young woman from a Reno television station wanted to do a story on “the man who tamed the mustang nobody could touch.”

I told her he wasn’t tamed. He was just deciding whether to trust me.

By October, I could ride him. Bareback, with just a rope around his neck, because he wouldn’t tolerate a bridle.

That was how we were riding the afternoon we went down into the canyon.

The sky to the south was gray, but it wasn’t raining where we were. In the desert, that doesn’t mean anything.

We were halfway through the narrowest part of the canyon when Trueno stopped dead.

His ears went straight forward. His whole body started shaking.

Then I heard it.

A roar, coming from upstream. Like a freight train.