Love and Death at the Ranch

[WARNING: This story is upsetting and raw. If you are not up for that, skip this one for now.]

I killed a horse today. Held a 45 to her skull and shot her through the head. She fell so fast I hardly computed that she was dead - but there was the hole in her head as proof, pulsing out blood like a broken pipe, thick and red and pulsing. She was dead before she had time to notice the gun. The hole was simple and neat and clean. There was no splash, no mess, not even any dust on my shirt. I just reached up and pulled the trigger, heard a pop, and she was down. 

I had expected the killing part to be harder than it was. That somehow the gun would be heavy, the trigger would take strength to pull. I thought I’d have to hold her head and struggle to keep her still. But I didn’t. The gun was light in my hand. It rested exactly where it was suppose to go. The trigger was easy to pull. I squeezed and it was done. She pitched sideways as her legs collapsed and hit the ground while I was still standing there, expecting to have something more to do. 

I had ear protection - good, professional grade shooting headphones that cancel the sound so well it is hard to hear the voice of a person standing two feet away. They dull the sound of a gunshot (even a 45) from a thundering explosion to a remote pop. I had known that the sound - the percussion of the explosion - would make the killing all the more abrasive, painful, lasting. Would exacerbate the violence of the act. So I thought ahead and brought my headphones. My good ones. And the sound, even standing right there, less than a foot away, was nothing. Remote. 

I talked to her before loading her into the trailer, and after unloading her, and before walking her into the woods. She struggled to walk those first few steps, hobbling on legs that shook and stuck in place with pain. I stood for a minute, my face resting against her forehand and called her, dear child, in a quiet, gentle voice. I told her it was almost over. She had only a little way to go. I just need you to walk a few more steps and then I’ll take care of everything. That’s all you need to do.

Come baby-doll. Come my dear one. A few more steps. That’s all.

She followed me, trusting, into the woods, no longer hesitating despite the pain in her legs. She walked willingly through the trees, over the downed branches and the undergrowth and down the overgrown remnants of a trail. When we reached the place that I had chosen, I stood for a minute and thanked her again, told her she was done, told her I was going to take care of things and the pain would be over soon. It was like she’d been in a trance, these last few hours, her big eyes fixed on me, calm and trusting. Trusting me to do what she needed to have done. 

I floundered for a moment, looking for the right words, the right ritual to send her on her way. And I sensed right away her trance begin to slip. Her eyes left my face and she began to look around. She shifted uneasily and lifted her heard. In a second of clarity it was clear to me that the ritual, the something more, was something I needed. She didn’t need it. She needed me to act quickly and decisively and do what had to be done. She needed me to continue with confidence while she still rested in her trust in me, before my hesitation and emotions brought her back to fear.

I stopped talking and lifted the gun. I placed the barrel against her skull, against the perfect white star in the center of her forehead. And I pulled the trigger, just like that. No stopping to reposition, no rehearsing the lifting of the gun. No careful evaluating of the angle or position of my arm. Before she could register what I was doing, I pulled the trigger just like that. And she was down.

I had thought out the method, picked out the place, been talking to Stormy for weeks, asking her to tell me when it was time for her to go. I had known for most of a year that her time was coming soon. I knew that I wanted her body to give back to the world - feed the wild animals, fertilize the ground. I thought this would feel beautiful to me, that the killing itself would be hard but once her spirit was gone I would be at peace to let her body take its place in the circle of life. But the killing was too easy and I stood over her body, and she did not look at peace in the wilderness, she did not look like a natural part of the beauty of the land. She looked like a beautiful body that I had loved, brushed, smelled, laying twisted on a hill. 

She had fallen almost on her back, her leg splayed over her face. I moved her leg aside to look into her eyes. I needed to be sure she was truly dead and gone. The glossy, empty eyes felt of peace and death, but when I looked away from them again, at her body, awkward and tangled, it did not feel of peace at all. It felt like one I had loved, dead violently in a pile at my feet. 

I found myself wanting to lay her out so that her legs rested gently on the ground and her head lay peacefully, as though asleep. I was quite sure that this did not matter one bit to her. But it mattered to me, and I wished that the last picture of her with which I was left was of a peaceful, sleeping death - not this mangled, strangled, picture of violence and stress.

Her coat still shown a glossy black and her muscles still gleamed, and I wanted to run my hands over her hips and legs and back. But her lips were pulled back and her tung lulled out and her legs stuck up at an awkward angle and she didn’t look like part of the wilderness at all. No hiker, stumbling into our thicket in the woods, would find her a peaceful sight and be comforted by the beauty of her body’s journey as it returned to the earth. She looked dead and there was a hole in her head and blood pooled beneath her face and gushed out of the hole as though it would never stop. And soon the bear would come and the coyotes and the wolves, maybe a mountain lion or two, and the flies and the worms, and none of this would be the graceful, gentle merging with nature that I imagined it to be.

The fact is, there is nothing graceful about a bullet in the head.

Nobody taught me how to do this kind of thing. Killing, in the city world from which I come, is a cruel thing, evil, to be shunned at all costs. Nobody told me that sometimes killing is is a kindness, or that even so, the killing itself is never kind. 

Who, in my city world, prepared me for dealing out death? Who told me that being responsible for the lives in my care would eventually mean arranging for their deaths? Who warned me that a gun, bought for protection, would be used to kill a thing I loved because it was my job to see that she could die?

Stormy was in pain. She had rallied and recovered many times. It was clear to me that she would not recover again. My horse, the dear, quiet girl with the long face and sleek black body, who never refused a person’s request but ruled the other horses without a second thought, was at the end of the life she was meant to live. For years she graced my pastures, raised my weanling foals, and ate the food that I provided. Now she couldn’t walk without pain. She had stopped leaving the barn to find food. She wouldn’t graze, she was hardly willing to walk twenty feet to drink water anymore. In the wild she would have been left behind long ago, taken down by an animal that was younger, stronger, at the beginning of its time to live. But this old girl was not in the wild. She was in my care.  She had long ago made the deal with my kind that she would obey and serve, in return, would provide for her that which she needed but could not provide for herself. And today the thing she needed but could not provide for herself was death.

She stared at me when I came into her stall, big eyes calm and deep, looked right into me, and waited for me to do for her what she couldn’t do for herself. And so I did the thing that was mine to do. I slipped the halter over her head and whispered to her quietly while I stroked her neck and scratched her ears. Then I led her to a trailer and drove her to the woods and I shot her in the head. I left her body for the wolves and bears to eat and I went home and cleaned my gun.