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"My Client and Galloping Wild Horses", June 2022My client Etsuko S. photographing a herd of galloping wild mustangs during our sunset session on day 1 of my Wild Horse Photography Workshop. My welcoming blog story photoMy story is about how I found an abandoned wild foal in the desert and how I attempted to return him to his mustang herd.

My Wild Horse Photography Workshops

4-day trips

May/June

Booking: https://rockcreekpackstation.com/mustangs.shtml

Story: Running with wild horses

While riding by myself across the high plains, me and my horse found this abandoned, starving and thirsty, wild-horse foal in the desert. 
 
First, it rather bewildered me, and it spooked my horse. So I jumped down from my snorting side-stepping stallion, kneeled in the sand, and a little unsure of what to do, just waited.
 
My horse calmed down somewhat, and I saw that his curiousity won. They both started inching their way closer, until we all sniffed each other and touched noses. That's when the thought came that I could try to bring him back to his herd. 
 
I mounted back up, and spent rest of the day slowly tracking the faint hoof-prints of the long-gone herd in the sand-dunes, while the baby-mustang trailed behind me. Then almost at sunset I found them: about 30 wild horses in a distance. When I am on horseback sometimes they are more shy, and this time they took off at a mad dash.
 
I knew I had to get very close for the delivery of the little horsey (he was strongly attached to my horse by now). So I stretched my horse to a lope after them, the foal miraculously keeping up. And we ran and ran, under the darkening sky, little by little closing our distance. Eventually I was gallopping alongside the herd, almost touching them, smelling their sweat, hearing their hoofs pounding, even though I could barely see through the clouds of dust.
 
Until they noticed the foal. They turned in a semi-circle towards me and stopped. The lead stallion pranced over to me, rearing and pawing as an introduction to my horse, until he stretched his flaring nostrils to my face, then he shook his mane and bent to the baby. He quietly neighed to him, and then took off with the colt behind him. He took him straight to one of his grey mares, who let the baby feed immediately...