MOUNTAIN HOME — The horse is a 4-year-old mustang named Prince, and he’s 1, 000 miles from home in the desert. He comes from a wild history of thundering hooves. Today’s not-so-wild West had no place for him, but Arkansas horse trainer Arvell Bass did.
Bass rides the bay easily — through the muddy splash of a creek, up a grassy hill, through the wildflowers.
“He’s smart and willing,” Bass says. Runs like a mustang. Stops the way that brings the horse’s hindquarters up and under with a sheen of light on the reddishbrown flanks, black mane tossed forward, “as pretty as a horse can stop.
“ I certainly like him.” The ground is still damp, and the slope is uncommonly green thanks to a 7-inch rain. Prince never saw such a downpour in the dry country north of Las Vegas where the federal Bureau of Land Management’s wranglers caught him a year ago.
About 33, 000 mustangs run wild in the West, the bureau reports — too many for the land to support. The government rounds up and pens mustangs to keep them off the range.
Bass, 44, volunteered to train the horse for a national competition, Extreme Mustang Makeover, sponsored by the Bureau of Land Management and nonprofit Mustang Heritage Foundation. The challenge is to prove how well a trainer can tame and teach a wild horse in just 100 days.
The sandy-haired cowboy had worked with other mustangs that people brought to him as half-trained problems to fix. But Prince was the trainer’s first time to saddle a completely wild horse. He braced for whoknows-what.
And, sure. They had their share of dust-ups. Prince never threw him, though, Bass is quick to say. “From day one, he never bucked at all.” Another horse dealt Bass the ache he has been nursing, a bad bruise to the midsection. Prince had different problems.
“It was like training a deer,” Bass says.
A wild horse isn’t wild like a man who acts crazy on a motorcycle, he says, but like a bornfree survivor in a hard land. A wild horse is keen to danger, ready to run. Instinct tells him to protect his feet. A wild horse grazes on tough grass.
Prince had to learn to munch the nutritionally-balanced grain that Bass feeds him. He had to accept the rap of the farrier’s hammer, all part of the scheme to give the horse a new life.
Bass will show Prince for sale in this month’s competition for Extreme Mustang Makeover trainers and horses in Fort Worth.
The trainer will demonstrate exactly what Prince can do — gallop, canter, circle, back up, change leads — in front of an audience of thousands, and somebody will want to buy him. Last year’s horse auction raised $ 233, 100 to help save the mustangs. But there’s a snag in the rope. “I rate him way up there as a partner,” Bass says. You don’t sell your partner.
HORSE SENSE The horse’s hooves stir bees out of the yellow flowers. A few buzz at the rider’s boots in the stirrups, as if to wonder why he bothers with spurs at all. The rowels don’t have points for jabbing; they have bumps to give a nudge. Bass holds the reins loosely in one freckled hand. People go wrong with horses a couple of ways, he says from the saddle. “One way is, they’re not soft enough.” The other, he tells with a grin from under his straw hat: “Not firm enough.” The trainer introduced himself with patience and eye contact. “You can train a wild horse from 100 feet away,” he says. Just to get the mustang to trust him “was a pretty awesome experience.
“ Everything he’d eat or drink came right from my hand.” The mustang is an untamed legend. Then again, there’s the old cowboy saying: “Ridin’ a bronc is like dancing with a girl. The trick is to match your partner’s rhythm.” Bass soon found in Prince an easygoing match to his own personality. “Horses love a calm, quiet energy,” he says. The cowboy sees a home for Prince on the Bass spread, Stone-Creek Ranch Resort near Mountain Home, where Prince could live another 20 years or more. He’d have the company of other horses, and a stable fit for, well — a Prince.
The better the horse performs in the competition, chances are, the higher the bidding. The Bureau of Land Management ordinarily charges $ 125 to adopt a mustang, but last year’s bidding on trained horses went into the thousands.
The only way for Bass to keep Prince will be for him to outbid the competition that he has drummed up against himself. He agrees the situation makes no business sense.
It makes horse sense.
Prince turns to explore the woods that are part of StoneCreek Ranch in far north-central Arkansas. The rustling of high grass and the creak of saddle leather sing the way they have to cowboys since way back. The horse is doing just what Bass wants, so the trainer takes his own advice for times like this: he goes along.
HORSE NETTLES The West has about 6, 000 more wild horses and burros than all the open land in 10 states can support in good health, according to the Bureau of Land Management. “As a result, the agency must remove thousands of animals from Western public range lands each year.” But with 30, 000 wild horses and burros already in pens and pastures, costs up, adoptions down, laws to keep, better prospects lacking, the bureau “is looking at all options.” “ Feds mull killing wild horses, ” was the headline in the Casper, Wyo., Star-Tribune earlier this year. The story prompted dozens of reader responses. Some were aghast (“ These horses are a living symbol of the American West” ), and some in favor: “This is just an animal... a feral pest.” The bureau hopes to raise interest in adoptions by showing how trainable a mustang can be. Some of the riders in last year’s Extreme Mustang Makeover fired six-shooters from the saddle to prove they could hold their horses.
“We selected 100 trainers and horses last year,” says Randi Blasienz of the co-sponsoring Mustang Heritage Foundation in Bertram, Texas. All the horses sold — including $ 50, 000 for the horse that the town of Norco, Calif., adopted as a mascot.
This year’s event ups the ante to 130 horses and higher cash prizes, she says: $ 12, 500 for first place in the “Legends” division for professional trainers — the level Bass entered.
Bass and his wife, Karry, found Prince in a holding pen in Ewing, Ill.
“He was a wild horse in a big pen without a blade of grass,” Bass says.
They had learned how to enter the Extreme Mustang Makeover challenge from a show on RFD-TV, satellite television in the country. (Another source is the foundation’s Web site at www. mustangheritagefoundation. org. The foundation reports that Amy Maitzen of Shirley, and Wesley Poole of Piggott also entered this year’s contest. )
“Why isn’t Arvell doing this ?” Karry asked herself. It was New Year’s Eve, the petite blonde remembers — a night for resolutions — and Arvell had the same thought.
It fit the pattern of his life to give a lost horse a second chance.
HARD RIDE The Louisiana farm boy grew up loving horses, but he worked on oil rigs for a living — 30 days on the job in Alaska and South America, 30 days home on the ranch in Arkansas. In 2002 he was in charge of a drilling operation in Colombia, South America, when a guerrilla force attacked the rig, Bass says. Armor-piercing bullets cut the sand bags he had for protection. The guerrillas were so close, Bass says, he could hear them whisper. He survived thanks to a nick-of-time rescue. The Colombian military routed the attackers with machine-gun fire from a helicopter.
Bass came home with feelings of anger and panic he couldn’t shake. The troubling emotions forced him to find treatment, and the diagnosis came back: Post Traumatic Stress Disorder.
“I just couldn’t function,” he says. “Being a man, and the sole provider for a wife and two daughters [Kasey, 19, and Courtney, 16 ]...” A beat of silence describes the time he’d rather forget.
“... that’s a lot of fear.” Working “like mad” around the ranch, Bass discovered the one thing he could do the same as ever — the one job he still felt fine doing — was training horses.
Once-aloof and difficult horses seemed to come to him on their own, he says, and he began to shape a new understanding of the “soft” approach that he maintains horses need.
“I wouldn’t want to go through it again,” Bass says, “but it changed my life in a positive way.” Karry tells of the turn that changed everything: “He said, ‘I’m not going back. ’” They had talked before about him quitting the oil rigs, she says, but “we couldn’t give up the pay.” “I said, ‘ What are you going to do ?’ And he said, ‘ What I’ve always wanted. ’” They added rooms and apartments to the barn, and cabins in the woods, and the ranch became a getaway for guests who want to learn better horsemanship.
But Karry still hasn’t ridden Prince. She wears sandals to the stable as a way of saying no.
“I’m just going to wait,” she says, having seen how quickly Arvell attached to the horse he might lose at auction.
TALL IN THE SADDLE Last year’s top winner was cutting-horse trainer Guy Woods of Pilot Point, Texas, on the mustang he named Max. “It was a tough competition,” Woods, 47, says, expecting this year’s will be harder. He will be among the judges charged with evaluating each performance based on specified maneuvers, much like judges in the Olympics. The judging might sound hardnosed, and Woods knows better than to be sentimental about horses. “Being a horse trainer, you learn not to get too attached to every one of them,” he says.
All the same, he spent half his winnings on last year’s auction to buy Max.
“Max was a real wild guy,” Woods says. “He’s still sort of spooky and snorty, but I let him keep that because I like that in his personality.” And now, “he’s just pretty much my ranch horse.
“ When I go anywhere,” Woods says, “he’s the guy.” FROM THE HORSE’S MOUTH The Extreme Mustang Makeover Competition was Sept. 18-21 in Fort Worth. The results are posted at www. extrememustangmake over. com The big ticket was Saturday’s freestyle finals among professional trainers to single out the best mustang trainer. The top winner was Mark Lyon from Omaha, Neb., on the horse he trained, Christian.
“We didn’t win,” Bass says, back from the event, “but we made the finals [eighth out of 10 ]. A lot of talented riders didn’t make the finals. I feel blessed.” The crowd cheered when Prince came at his call, Bass says, and “grown men hugged me” the next day.
Horsemanship is an art, he says, and “good art can make you cry.” Riding, he had to stay calm. “A horse can feel your heart,” Bass says. “If he feels like I’m nervous, I’m done.” But the last day, Sunday, was when the horses sold at auction, and hearts beat like a stampede.
Finished with honors but out of the money, Bass hoped it would be enough to let the other bidders know he wanted Prince. It wasn’t. The bidding went over $ 3, 000, and the auctioneer gave Bass a chance at the microphone.
“I said, ‘ He bucks three and a half hours every morning, ’” Bass says, but nobody believed it.
The bidding stood at $ 3, 800 against him. He looked to family and friends, and everybody signaled him to go for it.
Four ! Thousand ! — “To make a long story short,” Bass says, “he’s home with me.”
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