excerpt from..."A Horse Named Trouble"
by Sandy Jensen

Lost with Trouble: Day One

Am I Lost?

Am I lost?
                I don’t think so.
Do I know where I am?
                I’m not sure.
Have I ever been happier in my life?
                Never.
Am I lost?
                I am lost.
Do I know where I am?
                I am lost.
Have I ever been more joyful in my life?
                I am lost.
--Mary Oliver, from Red Bird

           You ask me how I came to be full body mud-caked, crouched at the watering hole, arms spread in supplication or in grief or in penance—even now, I couldn’t say: That blue mud is my mother country now—when I came there on the horse named Trouble, the turquoise cliffs were 23 million year old science, nothing more.
           Mid-summer, riding the fossil range, looking for specimens of oreodonts or saber-tooths, I swung off the black horse to sort ivory teeth and bits of bone on a cliff edge, sweat sticking my T-shirt to me like one-celled blue-green algae.
           The afternoon sun shone hot enough to blister a dog’s paws. Miles of tan desert and red and orange and amber striped rock gave up every ounce of moisture to the sun. Once stable combinations of slope and angle lost a minute degree of support, so when the sound waves from a single gun shot ricocheted from cliff to cliff, one stone fell and then another. When the black horse stepped six inches off the narrow trail at the top of the bluff, the landslide was already in motion with the inevitability of a physics governed by gravity.
           I tried to keep my bareback position on Trouble’s back, but he fought to keep his hooves under him with a tangle of motion I couldn’t ride. Blue dust rose in a choking cloud around us. I fell sideways onto the moving mass of dry, crumbling clay, at first riding on my back. I grabbed for scrawny bits of bushes, branches, anything to slow the headlong rush, but this was a mountainside in motion. I saw the forward wave of Trouble’s snaky mane as he tucked his head into a forward tumble and me at first in front of him rolling, bruised, tossed, the wind sun-deviling a blue-green avalanche twister over our heads.
           Trouble collided with a turquoise boulder and went by me with all four hooves in the air. I stood on the moving mass like a surfer for about ten seconds, then my heels were pulled out and I fell head first downhill. My trajectory put me right above Trouble for a moment, but a side current rushed in from the left, covering him, moving him in a fast down slope current out of my sight.
           I rode the landslide like a bobsled, belly down, head first, blue dust and rock spraying up, coating and cutting and scraping my face. Scree from above caught me in the legs, tried to tear the backpack loose, but one strap held, twisting my shoulder hard. I arrived at the final cliff—the one I couldn’t see from above when this entire hidden canyon had looked like a short bluff to me—I dropped over in a thick, fast hail of rock, clay and popcorn scree with my adrenal glands squirting adrenaline to every known organ and my soul still at the top of the cliff with its mouth hanging open.
           I hit the base of the cliff with the backpack under me long enough to save my life, then I was on my feet running out from under the continuous rain of the landslide. It wasn’t a run but more of a propelled stumble across the arroyo of hardpan blue clay. I crossed out of the fall zone and stood trembling like a terrified horse in the blue desert, almost calling for Trouble. But I hadn’t forgotten the gunshot and swallowed my voice before it could fly out like a search hound on a leash.
           I stepped one step backward out of the open sun into the indigo shade of the bluff that created the center hogback of the arroyo. The last few pebbles dribbled from the top of the cliff onto the new cinder cone on the arroyo floor that would last only until the next gully washer. The dust lifted slightly on its own breeze that revealed the uphill flow of the air. The blue cloud strung out horizontally, then drifted off up the arroyo and dissipated into the heat waves. I stood and bled red streaks through blue mud and looked for Trouble.
           The blue badlands are occupied by an indigenous silence, which returned now and took up occupancy. I stood utterly still and utterly alone.
           The heat exists in the many-colored land like a hot horse with her own name. She beat down on my head and arms with her flame-shod hooves, her breath of dry heat blew forcibly into my mouth, filled my lungs with air one hundred and three degrees and smelling of horse.
           And smelling of horse. I could smell Trouble on that faint, snorted breath of air moving up the canyon as it showed its wild horse shape in the blue dust motes. In the silence, I waited for the Trouble I could smell to become the Trouble I could see, but the dust settled, the air cleared again, and the cascading complexity of a canyon wren’s song explained away his absence.
           I refused to believe what the landslide said, that it had eaten Trouble, joined his bones to the fourteen genera of equine fossils already stratified in the vast country called the John Day Fossil Beds.
           A flicker of movement caught my eye. A violet-green swallow with a daub of mud in her beak showed me where the spring seeped out at the base of the butte.
           Stepping carefully, knees ashake, soul ashake and aquiver, I crossed the arroyo and squatted over the seep, knees akimbo. I leaned over and drank from the clearest bit, spitting out the grit. I felt like a whale sluicing plankton through my baleen. I ran my fingers through the coolish water and splashed my dust-covered face, arms and legs until I became a blue manikin baking in the shade, a shaman’s doll waiting for pins, a supplicant to the Sun Horse. There could be no greater grief than mine, yet I had no tears to join my blood, only that pervasive, questioning silence.
           Blue dust sprang into the air. The great mass of the bluff moved again. Clay blocks the size of coyotes pushed loose from below. Crumbling blue popcorn clay broke away and ran fast rivulets. A violent local earthquake shook the hardpan beneath my feet and water in the spring jumped as if it were boiling. A blue horse struggled to throw off the mountain and be reborn. He purchased ground with his front hooves like a gopher coming out of its hole. Then he bicycled his back legs with a kind of furious intensity, making the scree fly.
           I was jumping up and down by now, chanting encouragement, “C’mon boy, you can do it!” Trouble heaved his powerful body from side to side. Free, he stumbled and slid to the bottom of the arroyo. He gave a mighty horse shake and disappeared into the whirlwind. When I could see him again, he was muzzle down in the tiny spring. He drank from pooled water in a blue sandstone bowl. The black horse was now blue. I crawled up beside him, splashing water over my face, head, shaking my blue body and spreading my blue arms wide to the blue-white sky. Trouble turned his head toward me, and I saw that his chocolate brown eyes had turned to pale blue irises floating in a universe of milky white. I understood then that we had crossed over into the other world.

Lost with Trouble: Day Three

 Three days lost in the blue mud called Turtle Cove, Trouble and I worked our way up dead-end corridors between castles and colonnades of wind-blasted stone. Wind flailed our legs with popcorn-textured gravel and ground bits of bones. We were 23 million years deep in the canyonlands and couldn’t find our way out. We had water enough—barely—from seeps at the foot of bluffs and tiny oases where one or two twigs grew by the tiniest bubble of a spring. At dawn, the sun rose to throw deep blue shadows in the cold canyon depths; at midday it cartwheeled slowly overhead, paling all our blue world to the color of the veins under my skin; sunset vermillion greened the cliffs to turquoise. Neither a woman nor a horse starves to death in three days, but they are very, very hungry.
          In the late afternoon of the third day, we wandered up a deep canyon that held more promise of escape than the barren spires and dead end drainages we’d already explored. I stood on a popcorn promontory and scanned ahead. This canyon disappeared into geologic complexity. Shadowy depths seemed to me to say caves, and the smell on the light breeze said water.
          Trouble must’ve smelled something that said grass because he began to trot out before me. His black hide was caked with blue mud, streaked and cracked with sweat. My dad had warned me about black horses and their weakness withstanding heat, but neither of us had known Trouble would be smart enough to keep himself protected with mud. Me, too. At every damp spring we came to, I slathered another layer of blue clay on my head and arms, torso and legs. All day I baked in the hundred-degree sun, itchy in the contracting but protective shell.
          I followed Trouble deep into the beckoning canyon. It twisted and turned around dry waterfalls, and we went directly along the creek bed. Then we came to damp sand where water was seeping underground. Further, and we started to follow a bright, running stream.
         Under the first cottonwood I’d seen growing in this blue stone wilderness, Trouble paused. He reared, trying to giraffe down the lowest leaves, but they flew too high. He fell back on all fours and stood in the shade, head down, suddenly asleep.
         I stretched out in the shade prone on my back, hands relaxed and unturned by my sides, feeling an all-over weakness from hunger. But after five minutes, I could no longer stand the itch of my clay suit. I got up and a hundred yards upstream I found a pool big enough for full immersion.
         I scrubbed my body, my hair, between my toes, and watched as the cloud of blue dirt flowed away downstream. I took my jean and tee shirt off, washed them and spread them on rocks to dry. Stark naked and deliciously clean, I pulled the sweatshirt out of my pack, spread it, and lay down on my back again, relishing the faint flow of air over my skin. This time I fell asleep instantly, entering into deep REMs.
         I woke slowly to the uneasy feeling I was being watched. Then I felt a warm weight on the inside of my thigh, a live weight. This weight moved up onto my body, and its gather, release, gather, release movement could only mean one thing: snake.
         I don’t know it my life flashed before my eyes, but my options certainly did: The oldest, most primitive part of my mind yelled, “Run screaming from this place!”
         My terrified but more rational frontal lobe said, “Hold very still and maybe it will go away.” Both brains put one fiery electrode to each adrenal and the other straight to the heart, which went zero to sixty in three seconds flat.
         I couldn’t see the snake, but it casually inched its way across the open flesh of my sun-warmed belly. Its weight increased, so it wasn’t small. I felt dizzy, breathless. This interested the snake, which moved in a double loop move up between my breasts, where it paused and listened to the hot mammal prey species hammering of my heart.
         I didn’t dare move a muscle, but I rolled my eyes down just as the diamond back rattler lifted its wedge-shaped head up. I saw the yellow pattern around its nostrils and looked into the flat, emotionless black eyes. Its tongue flickered, listening to the silent screaming of my body. The fangs were hidden in the thick pockets on either side of the head, with spare pairs behind the active set. The rattlesnake swayed its head high up on the thick, patterned muscle of neck for endless seconds.
         Then he dropped his head and crawled into the space between my shoulder and ear, moving on out into the dappled shade beyond Trouble. The thick length of its body followed, exerting pressure and release on my thigh, belly, chest, and neck as it coiled along after itself. Last by were the rattles, held erect as the tail passed by. I compulsively counted them; six rattles meant a full-grown six or seven year old snake.
         I didn’t know how long to lay there waiting for the snake to move a safe distance away, but while I tried to unfreeze myself from held-in terror, the rattlesnake apparently crawled between Trouble’s legs as he slept, head down. Something woke him, and it was his high-pitched scream that got me to my feet, whipped around in time to see Trouble rear and bring both front hooves down on the snake’s body, but missing the deadly head.
         The snake tried to coil, but Trouble had broken its intricate spine in two places. It hauled back into one coil and struck. I saw the venom fly from the fangs glittering in the late sunlight. But Trouble was in the air again and screamed again as he nailed the snake’s head to the ground with those flying black hooves. He would have thrashed that snake to a bloody pulp if I hadn’t intervened.
          “Stop, Trouble!”
          I grabbed a cottonwood stick and maneuvered the four feet of snake away from the big horse, whose rage turned to curiosity. He sniffed the body as I dragged it through the dust onto a rock. I used my knife to sever the head. I flipped the head into the current of the stream, so it could be carried away from both of us. I’d heard weird stories about the potency of rattlesnake venom even post-mortem. I gutted it. Trouble sniffed the guts with his long nose, then stuck his tongue out and mouthed them. Then he calmly began to eat them as peacefully as if they’d been a bucket of oats. I’d heard that Indian horses had survived harsh winters eating bloody buffalo meat, so I cut the snake in half. When I looked up from building a fire, Trouble stood silhouetted against the sunset with a length of rattlesnake hanging out either side of his mouth.
          I threaded skinned lengths on a stick because I wasn’t so close to starving that I’d eat rattlesnake raw. There was no doubt in my mind that I could get there, and maybe that day hadn’t been too far off, but I managed to wait until the meat was cooked on the outside and hot and red in the middle, and if anyone wants to know, yes, it tastes just like chicken.
         And if Trouble and I could do the rattlesnake trick again, I also knew we could survive.

The End.

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