A Way of Writing
after William Stafford

By Randy Koch

Each morning I swing my legs out of bed, stretch, stand, get dressed, and then push the drapes open a crack on the darkness outside the window. I walk through the house to the front porch. When the air is heavy yet with yesterday's heat as it was this morning, I tie a red bandanna around my head, take the hat from the hook on the wall, and put it on. Then, I push the door open, step outside, and let it bang shut behind me. A dog barks somewhere to the south, and dry, dark leaves from the poplar tree crunch under my boots. The black sky is pinpricked with starlight, and in the east a crescent moon rises through the silhouettes of palm trees. The gate in the fence creaks as I draw it open, and the latch falls to with a metallic clang when I pull it shut behind me. I lift the halter and lead rope from the fence post next to the gate where I left them last night and walk east through the mesquite and huisache, skirt the thick stand of nopales, and tramp into the darkness. Out there, somewhere, a horse roams, and I mean to catch him.
William suggested that I wait for the horse to come to me rather than going out and plodding aimlessly about the monte. I know why he wanted me to do it that way. By waiting quietly on the davenport, he had over the years drawn all kinds of horses to him: lame ponies, smooth-mouthed Belgians, heavy mares ready to foal, foundered Shetlands with cracked hooves, wild-eyed Arabians that nickered at the window, and muscular black stallions frothing at the mouth and glistening with sweat. He had waited quietly, and while it looked like he had done nothing, I know that he drew them there, that somehow he had called to them-silently and with a patient forcefulness-and they heard him and came to him. I've tried to do it his way, but more often than not all that shows itself is a gray, three-legged cat that bends under the board fence behind the house or a rat-tailed possum that waddles through the yard. I rarely draw horses; I have to go out and find them. I know they're out there, but most of the time I just don't know where.
Out in the full dark, I lose the bit of trail left from where I set out yesterday and the day before. Even the thorny brambles that I cut back Wednesday have shot out again and fill the path like fast-growing bamboo in a jungle. If I keep walking, the sun will eventually come up and I'll be able to see where I'm going, but I'm still in the dark and all I can do is feel my way and think of horses. I start when a covey of mourning doves flap and flutter out of the limbs of a sprawling tree, their wings and throats whistling in the black air. I stumble on something-a rock or stump sticking out of the ground. A sharp branch scrapes across my cheek, and it occurs to me that he's probably not down by the creek or in the hollows where the mosquitoes gather but on the high ground where he can catch a breeze. I see now, by the dim glow of dawn, the thick, dark bodies of brush and limbs, and I stop to get my bearings. I've never been here before, but somehow it's vaguely familiar and I feel like I know where I'm going.
I've learned in the past few years that if I want to catch a horse, I have to go out and find him. I have to move and think of mane and hooves and fetlocks and withers and tail. And though the color or build of the horse I'll find today-if, in fact, I manage to find one at all-is unclear, I have a sense of what I'm looking for. I hear rustling in the brush and want to believe it's him, but the low, quick movements and the grunting tell me that it's a javalina. I've become accustomed to false signs like these, like that dark, round mass of nopales I mistook yesterday for the horse's rump or the cow's hoof prints in the dirt that I foolishly thought were a horse's. I don't pursue them as I once did or let them frustrate me; I don't turn for the house when I realize I'm wrong. I keep walking and see that gradually the land opens up and the stars overhead grow dimmer with the spreading dawn. Today I'm moving in the right direction, which means nothing more than that I'm moving, and the horse will cross my path. It's up to me to see him.
To the inexperienced it may appear that I'm hunting or lost or both. The main difference between hunting and what I'm doing is that hunting requires stealth and aggression. The hunter tries to sneak up on his quarry and then, before it has time to react, kill or capture it. I, however, have no intentions of sneaking up on the horse; if I come with a right mind and a clear vision, he'll allow me to catch him. He may even appear so suddenly and clearly that he startles me. I also mean him no harm. I only want to catch him, learn what kind of horse he is, see where he takes me, and after we've arrived, let him go. Some might also think I'm lost, which to most people is something to be avoided, something that creates problems, but I've discovered that if I'm sincere about finding a horse, particularly one that's never been ridden before, it's essential that I get lost. If I don't, the only things to cross my path-if anything does-will be the cat or the opossum. Finding them gets me nowhere. Besides, I can find them just by staying home and lying on the couch.
In this early light the trees, cactus, and brush are mostly shades of gray like upright shadows, but their outlines are sharper than they were a few minutes ago and clearer than those behind me. Something moves up ahead, maybe as far off as a quarter mile. If I freeze, if I stop walking, it's sure to disappear, so I bend under the low-hanging branches of a willow and with my eyes ahead, keep walking. I move slowly, deliberately around a thick stand of sagebrush and concentrate on how its shape and movements fit into the landscape and where his and my path will cross, and then, as if the sun suddenly breaks through a bank of clouds and its light falls full upon him, I know it's him. I continue to walk. The cacti are gone, and the mesquite and huisache seem transparent in the morning light, and the land opens up, and I move toward him across a rolling plain of knee-high grass bent by a soft wind.
If I run, I'll spook him or the ground between us will fall out from under me. If I look away, he might be gone when I turn back to him. I try to remember that the horse, like me, is part of the landscape and that hurrying or being inattentive to either of them or the relationship between them will cause me to lose the horse, his body shimmering and then disappearing like a mirage, his tracks washing away in a downpour out of the blue sky. I hold him with my eyes and keep moving, and while the land ahead of me appears to slope away, I feel like I'm climbing a steep grade and I wonder if I'll reach him before he moves on. He stands on the crest of a small hill, and even though he faces the south wind and I approach from the west, he knows I'm coming. His hide is midnight blue with fluid patches of black shifting over his shoulders, ribs, back and rump like the shadows of clouds sliding over rolling plains. I'm anxious to approach him, and though I try to be patient, I feel myself hurrying and begin to imagine what will happen after I catch him. My left boot hooks on something. I stumble and fall in the tall grass, my face inches from the halter and rope and my hands flat on the earth where I catch myself. I sit up, surrounded by the heavy heads of wild oats above me, and reach down to pull the tangle of morning glory vines from my boot. When I stand and look back to the small hill, it's gone and so is he. My eyes race over the land, which suddenly seems different from what it was before I fell, and a niggling panic creeps in. A thick deck of dark clouds obscures the sun, the wind swirls, bending and lifting the grass, and I don't know which direction I came from. I keep scanning the land, unable to recall the image of the horse or the hill on which he stood, and I'm filled with dread and the emptiness of an amnesiac.
But suddenly I realize that I'm not surrounded by trees and cactus but that I still stand on the open plain. I calm down, gather myself, and try to think back to the point prior to falling. I look at the ground near the morning glories and then get on my hands and knees and push the grass around them out of the way. I search for signs of the direction from which I came before I tripped-broken stems, matted grass, a curved heel print in the sod. I work my way around the vines in gradually widening circles, a few inches at a time. Then, in the brown earth I find it: an indentation of the point of one boot. I pick up the halter, stand, walk behind the print, and set my boot in it.
The sky breaks open, and the hill where the horse stood is before me. I look for the blue and black horse, the shifting colors, but he's gone. I open my mind and think-mane, hooves, fetlocks, withers, tail-and stand in the boot print facing east. There-the ears and forelock rise from behind the crest of that hill, one nearer than where he'd been, now the dark eyes, the stark blaze on the black face, the broad nostrils, the flexing muscles in his chest as he climbs out of the bottom and over the hill. I walk toward him with a hand out, palm up. As he approaches, he changes-chestnut, then roan, then-and this startles me-transparent so the hills beyond him shimmer like heat waves through his body, now black with white socks, then dappled but the spots swim over him from nose to neck to back and gather on his rump like an Appaloosa before sliding down his tail and dripping into the grass, and now that he's nearly before me-just three or four strides beyond my outstretched hand-he's buckskin with white anklets on his back legs. I stop with my hand out, and when I speak softly to him, he stops, too. "I've been lookin' for you all morning, bud." I take a slow step toward him and offer my open hand. "I knew you'd find me." He stands quietly looking at me and then drops his head and grazes on the grass. I slowly move to him and hook my right arm around his neck. When he lifts his head-spears of grass sticking out of the sides of his mouth-I pull the halter over his nose, loop the strap behind his ears, and buckle it on the side of his neck.

Early in the afternoon I arrive back at the house. I slip off his bare back to the ground, drop the lead rope, and stride through the gate.
William, a short man with a shock of white hair on the top of his head and his hands in the front pockets of his creased, loose slacks, steps out of the front door.
"I'm back," I say to him and smile as I turn to the buckskin grazing outside the gate.
"He would have come to you," William says, "if you had waited. All you had to do was wait. It's like fishing; there's always a nibble," he says and turns to the house. He pulls the door open, goes inside, and lets it bang shut behind him.
Through the window in the door I watch him go. I blink hard. In the drab light of the house a rainbow trout-its body iridescent, its gills pulsing-glides through the air behind him. I go back out of the gate, pick up the lead rope, throw myself across the buckskin's back, and wait to see where he'll take me.