Red Earth Becomes Stardust: Miskwaki, April 26, 2001 — September 10, 2022.

Photo copyright Wings, 2022; all rights reserved.

This is how I prefer to remember Miskwaki: newly healthy, trusting, happy. Wings shot that photo at day's end on Christmas Eve, 2013 . . . moments before Ice would cross over to this side of the fence in hopes of finding a herd, too. [He did.]

And I held him today up until the medication went in and he had to lie down. Then I held his face and told him I loved him while his eyes searched for me until they finally saw something beyond me, and he went to join Ice and Cree and Shade, racing across the stars.

It's been so fast, and we've had no time to see it coming, never mind prepare ourselves, and yesterday we really thought we might have managed to save him, but no. He colicked three days, something Miskwaki never did, and by the time we knew that there was something wrong, I suspect it was already too late. There is a cancer cluster here, for horses and dogs, and also for humans, and the other three all died not of colic (Ice and Shade) or founder (Cree) but of tumors that suddenly made themselves after apparently growing undetected for years, and suddenly did the kind of internal damage that is always fatal. And I think that Miskwa probably did not have a real impaction, at least not the kind tht would have been fatal on its own, but rather, a tumor that made the impaction itself essentially irrelevant to the whole process. We learned this year that there is radon in the soil here, not just here but all over this land, and I suspect that his abandonment to starvation, like Ice's, Induced him to try eating the soil just to stay alive. Add to that the stripped topsoil that blows into every available space with the winds that our twelve-hundred-year drought and colonialism-driven climate collapse has produced, and I'm sure every animal in the county has more than enough exposure to effect such a result.

But Miskwaki came to us by accident (on our parts; not on his), and it was one that would save his life nine and a half years ago. The person responsible for him then, angry at him, left him abandoned in a nearby field, no food, no water, to die of starvation and thirst and consumption by the thousands of ticks that infested his body inside and out. It was April 18th, still bitterly cold that year, and he was nothing but literal bones, forehooves many inches too long and broken, coat faded, so dehydrated he couldn't even hold his head up. And on that day, after a week or two of starvation, he found openings in a couple of fences, and made his way to us.

We fed him , watered him, isolated him from our own horses until we could be sure it was safe, paid the horse vet and the farrier to take care of him. We ransomed him from his previous situation, and integrated him with our own small herd. He loved being the only male among four mares, and Harmony (a co-owner situation that ended badly) and he fell in love with each other. He was her protector, but he was protector to all of them. He knew intuitively that Cree should not lie down when colicky, and even when it was simply rest from her foundered hooves, he would annoy her ceaselessly by nipping at her withers to get her on her feet. He took care of everyone, and that included us.

And he managed it all despite his own terrible history of trauma, his own post-traumatic stress disorder, which is as real for animals as for people. he trned out to be a registered American Quarter Horse, papers and all; the breeder named him Jet's Painted War Cheif, with that misspelling to follow him forever. In between there and here, he had been called Jack, a name we soon discovered that he hated because of the associations, just as he would sometimes panic if he saw me with my long dark hair up and dark sunglasses on my face. So I learned to work with him without the glasses, and we named him Miskwaki, Red Earth in my language, and he took to it on first use. 

Of course, he was also the clown horse, endlessly sunny and also endlessly mischievous, and endlessly "hungry," a fear driven by his experience with starvation and hobbling and abandonment and physical abuse. So he got called, affectionately always, Greedbucket, Butthead, Big Ol' Chicken (a reference to his penchant for sneaking to the chicken coop, crouching down beneath the wire, and squeezing his 1,200-pound self throught he gate to vacuum up the crumble and cracked corn and scratch. We gave him some of today, along with the hay and the apples and carrot and other items, for his journey.

He was my Big Guy and my big baby, too; he was, as we now know, an outsized presence in the table. The mares have always sucked up so much time and attention: Cree with her founder, Shade with her health issues, Miika now with her own traumatic history beffore coming to us, and the founder that ensued. But they were the bit players; Miskwaki was the star, the one who took up all the space without seeming to take up any at all, the giant personality who was, in the end, sun and fire like his red paint horse coat, and always, always, pure love.

And there is a new horse-sized hole in my heart that will never be repaired, because all the space around it is in splinters and sherds, and I miss him so terribly, knowing that for now, I can only see him in the stars. We are both in mourning for our beautiful boy, and it's not a loss that will be mended. But we will find him in the sun and the stars and the autumn light, and in the red earth of this place for which he was truly named. And we will see him again someday. 

We love you, Miskwaki. You will always be the light in our hearts. 

All content, including photos and text, are copyright Wings and Aji, 2022; all rights reserved. Nothing herein may used or reproduced in any form without the express written permission of the owner.