There’s an animal up ahead in the dark.
Millennia have separated my human senses from the deeper perceptions of smell and sight that would let our animal cousins detect with certainty what creature lurks out beyond the dim light available. Still, I can tell there’s something there—more divination than sensation. But something is moving on the trail ahead of me. Something large. Moon size eyes glow about level with my own. Massive footfalls hit the dirt. Breath comes in haughty gouts. There is more the one of them.
It’s nighttime. The lights of the city spread out below the neighborhood, which rises above the meadows on broad alluvial fans. It’s not cold yet, but the time has changed. It’s dark by 9:00 PM as I walk behind the last row of homes in the Virginia Foothills neighborhood. Though foothills is a misnomer in the Great Basin. Mountains have no feet here. They rise out of the valleys without much preamble—just a long, gentle grade before the abrupt escarpment.
The strange beasts moving ahead of me on the trail are horses. They are not my horses or anyone’s horses. At least not anymore. Some call them wild horses, but that belies the abandonment in their past and the persistent human intervention in their present.
Still, they wander this neighborhood day and night eating grass, drinking from gutters or storage totes filled with irrigation water, and shitting in the street. I regularly encounter them on my walks.
Me heading my way, them heading theirs. Sometimes up and out of the streets and grids of houses. Sometimes among them, foraging from one yard to another.
I reach up and switch on my headlamp. 300 lumens of fake LED light floods the trail. The horses look up, their eyes glowing red. They move single file onto the left side of the trail. I hunker over to the right, not wanting to slow my pace. We pass each other as any two strangers might pass on a trail. Keeping our distance with a close-lipped smile. Neither wanting to seem too aloof or too friendly. We all have places to be.
They are unshod. Their hooves are quiet like slippers. Their breath comes in snorty gusts. Heads bobbing. They smell strong of what? Horse smell? It’s not bad so much as a pungent smell of otherness, an unfamiliar person standing too close on a train.
And then they are gone. A small band. Just a few. 5 or 6 on the trail. Maybe more out of sight in the ditch. We go on our way, unimpressed by each other but unbothered all the same.
I tromp down the hill, unhook the wire gate meant to keep the wandering livestock out of the neighborhood, duck around, and loop the wire back over the post, turn and head down the hill with the lights of south town filling the valley below like a low water line. Receding from a drought, or filling from a deluge. Only time will tell.