5:15 A.M. The car doors closed quietly, so as not to wake the house. Sean, Tina, and Aaron settled in, and we pulled out onto Gholson Road in the dark, eventually joining the mad rush of I-35 north toward Oklahoma. We needed to reach Paul’s Valley by 9:00 to meet Uncle Zain at the Mustang headquarters, where we were considering adopting a three-year-old mare for Sean to train, and a jenny donkey for Aaron to gentle.
To say spirits were high would be a vast understatement. The boys were positively ecstatic, even at that hour.
Uncle Zain had been telling them since December that they might have a chance to participate in a program where youth 10 and up can train one of the wild mustangs being pulled from the great herds across the American West. It’s an important project. When the herds grow too large, disease spreads, grasslands are depleted, and catastrophe can wipe out entire populations of wild horses still roving the open country of Nevada, Arizona, Wyoming, West Texas, and beyond. For decades, the Bureau of Land Management has worked to reduce herd pressure through careful management—trying to get people to adopt these horses, integrate them into working life, and spare them from being culled or simply swallowed by the hard arithmetic of an overstrained range.
Under the Heritage Mustangs program that Zain leads, scores of these horses have been gentled, trained, and woven back into rural American life. It is, at its heart, a story of redemption—and an extraordinary education, especially for the young men involved.
So when Zain said Aaron could work to gentle a donkey through October, and Sean could compete to train a mare for the same event, it seemed like an opportunity we couldn’t pass up. Not only for the discipline, the patience, and the character that this kind of intentional stewardship demands—but for the chance to learn it alongside men who had made something real of it, including their own uncle.
After some harrowing near-misses in the churn of Fort Worth traffic, and a GPS that couldn’t decide how late we’d be based on the wrecks and slowdowns along the way, we arrived 25 minutes early.
It was a beautiful drive, especially toward the end—the landscape opening south of Paul’s Valley into undulating hills, scattered rock outcroppings, and a topography that felt like it was reaching for something. Our spirits seemed to rise with it.
We pulled in behind a growing line of trucks and trailers parked unceremoniously along the road, out near a set of working pens in the middle of nowhere. Uncle Zain and his partner in the program, Joel Beckworth, were already there with their kids. Other boys had come with their dads and uncles.
When Aaron and Sean climbed out of the car, they remarked to each other that they couldn’t understand why they were shivering—it was warm outside. They concluded it was excitement, not cold.
I couldn’t help smiling.
I watched the three of them—Sean, Tina, and Aaron—race toward their uncle and cousins and those five pens full of horses and donkeys that represented so many dreams for young hearts. And I marveled, as I always do, at that mysterious blend in the young: the thirst to see and honor wild things, and the deeper yearning to earn their trust. To feed them. To care for them. To hold them. To prove, somehow, that we don’t have to be afraid of each other.
I thought back to my own childhood. Trying to gentle a cardinal caught in chicken-wire. Getting bitten hard on the finger for the effort. The rabbits we caught, the squirrels that lasted a little while in our domestic schemes, the raccoons. I even remember catching some wild coyote pups with my brothers—one of us holding one by the scruff in the back of the truck, deciding it had finally calmed down enough to pet normally. The moment he let go, that thing turned into a wild banshee—snarling, snapping, biting every leg and hand in reach—until it bit its way clean out of the truck, leaped over the side, and hit the ground running without breaking stride, headed back to the wild where it belonged.
But horses were different. Even these wild mustangs, never raised on a farm or fed by hand, some of them from lineages stretching back to the horses the Spaniards brought to the New World five hundred years ago—even still, something lived in them. As we stood at the fence and went quiet, the occasional horse would peel away from the group, curiosity overcoming fear, and edge toward us. Sometimes close enough to almost let you touch its nose.
It moved me more than I expected. There was a latent genetic memory in them—a promise, ancient and unbroken, of partnership between our two kinds. They felt almost ready for a new life.
Sean and I began working through the pens, writing down numbers. 2212. 1357. Before long, we had a list of ten, which we narrowed to four, then two. These would be our horses to bid on, the opening price a mere $25.
Immediately, Sean wanted to know what Uncle Zain thought. What did Joel think?
“I’m not going to make this decision for you,” Zain said. “You tell me first which ones get your attention and why. Then we’ll talk.”
There it was. The chance to step out. To articulate what you feel. To think critically, to trust instinct alongside a trained eye, to say what you see and have someone wiser tell you whether you’re looking at the right things. I watched something begin to form in my 14-year-old boy, and I liked what I saw.
We looked at hooves—whether a horse stood balanced or too straight over a clubbed foot. We examined the hindquarters, looking for rounded flesh rather than sunken hollows. We checked chest width, body length—avoiding what the horsemen call the “limousine look,” favoring something tighter and more compact. We wanted small heads and alert eyes. We watched their movement, noted every scar, confirmed no wound. We talked through every detail.
Sean beamed when Uncle Zain revealed that the horse his nephew had ranked first was also the one he himself had quietly flagged as the best option.
Then it came down to two. “Daddy, which one do you think?”
The tension mounted pleasantly. As we worked through the paperwork—the questionnaires, the promises to the government about fencing heights and feed and care—the program director explained that turnout today was light, so there likely wouldn’t be much competitive bidding.
Almost before we knew it, the director was calling out:
“Does anybody want anything from pen one?”
I looked at Sean and nodded.
“Yes sir,” he said. “We want 1228.”
“Does anybody else want to bid on that horse?”
Silence.
“Sold. Twenty-five dollars.”
Sean was beaming so hard it was hard to look at him without your own face doing something.
By the time we reached the last pen, Aaron was the one holding the bidding card.
“I do,” he said, “4696.”
The attendant wrote it down. Aaron held up the green card. And just like that, we had adopted two animals.
But we had adopted so much more. We had adopted a surge of excitement threaded with challenge and mystery and promise that was going to vibrate in the car all the way home—and in the house, when we told and retold the story to Mom and then Grandmama, and then Uncle Rory, and pretty much anyone who walked through the door.
When we got back in the car, Aaron had already named his donkey.
Bridie.
Leafing through the paperwork to find out which wild herd she’d come from, we discovered she was from Black Mountain, Arizona—the same place the famous Bridie had come from, the donkey who’d been attacked by a mountain lion, later nursed back to health by Uncle Jim. A wild herd of burros had lived on Black Mountain for generations.
Aaron was elated.
We pulled out of the long driveway and onto the rural road, spirits flying, the boys echoing each other across the back seat, “Daddy, thank you for bringing us. Thank you for letting us do this.”
Sean looked over at me. “I don’t know how to say thanks,” he said.
“Yes, you do,” I told him. And then I added, “I know you want to win the prize in October. I know you’re going to work hard for it. But that’s not the prize for me. You care for that animal every day. You put the time into the training. You do exactly what Uncle Zain teaches you, and you show me you’re responsible with this—and come October, that will be more than a thank-you. It’ll be everything this was supposed to be.”
He nodded, his hat bobbing over blonde bangs, and the eyes that looked back at me were something more than a kid’s eyes. A young boy becoming a man.
“I won’t disappoint you,” he said.
“I know,” I answered.
We bumped down the rural road toward the Boomerang Café, where we talked horse names and plans with Uncle Zain and Joel and Misgana and the cousins over chicken-fried steak and eggs and hash browns and gravy.
We made it home before Uncle Zain and the big trailer, but the boys were already down at the working pens when the animals were unloaded.
At supper, everyone was trying to talk over everyone else. Ella told me with great solemnity that she had touched the horse’s nose and it had not bitten her or kicked her. Sean was explaining what Uncle Zain had shown him in the first training session—how to teach the horse that it was safe.
Later, Zain sent me some video from that first day. I watched my oldest son kneel down with a pail of water and extend it toward the wild horse—eyes wide, flinching—as she inched forward and drank from the bucket in his hands.
“Uncle Zain is teaching me,” he said to the camera, “how to help her understand that I am a provider and not a predator.”
I felt a catch in my throat.
I watched Sean reach up and barely graze the horse’s muzzle with his fingertips. She backed away. He lowered his hand and just held the bucket. She came again.
“You’re doing really well, Sean,” I told him later. “Don’t hurry it. Let her set the pace. Your objective every day isn’t to do something to the horse—it’s to finish having increased her trust in you. If that’s happening, you’re winning. If it stops, you’re losing.”
Aaron, meanwhile, had already begun brushing his donkey with a curry comb, her coat catching the light, her ears twitching but still.
There was almost more excitement at the supper table than we could hold.
And I sat there, heart full, turning it over slowly: God would allow my boys and girls to learn how to care for something that fears them and is stronger than them. To approach with grace. To bring food. To bring water.
“You see,” Sean had explained earlier, relaying what Zain told him, “this horse had to travel over a mile every day just to reach water in the wild. So water is almost more valuable to her than food. Just getting water from me—that’s what’s teaching her I’m not the enemy.”
I thought about that for a long time.
Isn’t that exactly what we’re all supposed to be learning? To use our strength and our gifts to carry water. To prove, by showing up every day with something life-giving, that we are a provider and not a predator.
After all, our Maker came in a form we could understand and knelt down to offer us the same thing: “If any man thirst, let him come to Me and drink.” He has unfolded His grace to us slowly, at a pace we could bear, gently working to undo the fears and defense mechanisms we learned out in the wild. Teaching us, day by day, that we can lay aside the biting and kicking and running and fearing—and come into something better. A relationship of trust. A cooperation shaped by His design. A grace and provision we never could have found in the privations of the open range.
Life can teach you more in 48 hours of real living—with real challenges and real dreams and real promises on the line—than all the academies in the world can teach in years of so-called education.
I’m grateful for a real life.
And for the real progress these real kids are making.
What do you suggest Sean should name this beautiful mare? Leave your ideas in the comments below.