This is the story of our gelding mustang, Inquisitor, who we called “Quiz.”

I’ve been dragging my feet on telling this story.

If you don’t like to read sad stories, please skip this one.

We adopted Quiz from the BLM.  He was a bright red chestnut, and he was on the smaller side for a mustang.  He was two when we adopted him.

We had a lot of mixed feelings about mustang adoption.  On the one hand, if someone didn’t adopt these horses, they would live their lives out in captivity in large herds of mustangs managed by government caretakers.  It was an act of kindness with good intentions in our hearts when we adopted them.  The other side of this is the brutality with which these horses are removed from their wildland homes, often only to benefit ranchers out West that want the government land to run their cattle on.  And then again, on the other side of that, there are often drought conditions that force the BLM to manage the horse populations to prevent inhumane conditions for these horses, so that they do not die in the wild from thirst and starvation.  It’s a very complicated situation.  I’m still somewhat of two minds about it all.

During the year before adopting the mustangs, Jen and I cared for a close family member who we moved into our household that had been diagnosed with Lewy Body dementia.  It’s a terrible disease.  It robs people of their brain function until they do not even feel thirst or hunger near the end.  It runs much faster than other types of dementia.  It also causes those afflicted with the disease to hallucinate and have selective memory loss, sometimes only temporarily.  During one of these bouts of memory loss, she could not remember the names of the members of her household and referred to us as The Inquisitor, The Outlaw, and The Inheritor.  I was “The Inquisitor.”  In honor of her memory, we named the three adopted mustangs these three names that she had chosen for the three of us since they seemed to fit the horses, and they all had a Wild West feel to them.

Quiz was the first of the three that we selected.

We selected Quiz from out of a group of them.  The entire time we were at the fence line looking the horses over, while the others were busy bustling around, he was separated out from the herd and was very curious about us.  He wanted to investigate unlike the others.  Quiz was a good name for him.

We adopted him, and within a week, I had hands all over him.  He was the easiest of the three to gentle.

Fast forward to a year and a half later, he was free roaming our fully fenced, nearly 60-acre property with our three Tennessee Walking Horses and our miniature mule.  They were a herd.

The boss of this herd is our Tennessee Walking Horse, Fleck.  Her lieutenants are Pete, the mini mule and Poison, our TWH gelding.  The three of them, under Fleck’s leadership, are a little bit cruel to Pearl, our third TWH, and the oldest horse on our property.

While Quiz ran with the herd, he was Pearl’s ever-present companion.  He was the best friend Pearl had ever had since she’d been on our property.

I fondly remember one time when the vet had visited, and I was chit-chatting with her about something over a lengthy conversation.  I kept feeling something pulling at my coat sleeve from behind me repeatedly, but we were deep into the conversation.  After we broke it off and I turned around, I figured out it was Quiz just wanting attention and demanding it by grabbing and chewing on my coat sleeve.  The vet didn’t even know he was once a wild horse until I told her.  He was as tame as our other horses.

He was one of my best buddies out there on our property.

One fateful Sunday morning as we were having coffee, we saw the horses up near the fenced-in area next to the house where our German Shepherds spend a lot of time outdoors.  The dogs were barking.  I glanced up and caught a glimpse of dark red on Quiz’s shoulder.

Quickly outside, I found that Quiz had gashed open the entire front muscular section of one of his shoulders.  It was an extremely deep wound.  He had bled all down his legs.  He was incapable of lifting that front leg and was dragging it along the ground.

When the vet arrived, she gave us the bad news.  He had cut himself open so deeply that he had completely severed his radial nerve in that leg.  We had to make the tough decision to give him the last act of mercy because he would never again walk on that leg and legs are life to horses.

It still hurts to think about it.  He hadn’t even made it to his fourth birthday.  It seemed very unfair for such a young horse that had just once again tasted a small bit of freedom in his life to have suffered a life-ending injury like that.  We never figured out what he had ran himself into to cause such an injury.

I now regret that I hadn’t taken more pictures of our mustangs while we had them.  They always seemed to be somewhat second-class citizens to our Gypsy Vanner Horses even though we loved them and cared for them no less than the others.

We have a memorial page on our farm website dedicated to Quiz.  I’m sure he’s running free somewhere over the rainbow bridge in green pastures.