Stories of My Horses

Beautiful and hilarious, tearful and rambunctious, very real, ironic and magic-filled, MartÍn Prechtel's new book The Mare and the Mouse is a series of lyrical sagas in tribute to each of the native New Mexican horses that carried him through his youth on the Reservation and then again during the difficult times following his return home after over a decade in the Mayan Highlands of Guatemala. First, in the Stories of My Horses Series, The Mare and the Mouse is meant to be read aloud to crowds around campfires, especially to people who are mistaken that only rich people or rednecks ride horses, Prechtel credits both his own physical and spiritual survival in "modernity's mad rush to nowhere" with the sanity of riding and living with his natural-born Southwestern horses. Not raised for show, performance, status, or money, these little horses allowed a way of living that took him flying over ravines into deep-mountain Holy places, backwards over streams, and in general keeping alive a sparkier, older spirit in an age, where horses have been grossly de-natured and sadly removed from our own everyday lives after three-millennia as the closest companions of our ancestors' dreams and mythologies.

In “The Mare and the Mouse”, Prechtel sets loose his mystical memoir of a few mixed-breed horses who transform into allies of mythic proportions by his one-of-a-kind style of maneuvering through the rugged beauty of New Mexico. Together, they out-canter disillusionment and bitter despair, coursing into a dawn of beauty and humor. This second book, “The Wild Rose”, continues the saga of re-finding the horses of Prechtel's reservation-youth, which were assumed extinct, along with all the wild vicissitudes, truly magical happenings, and unique pre-cowboy Southwestern horse knowledge. This is the account of his struggle to gather a herd of these old-time Barb horses, who in the process become counselors and co-conspirators in the cause. “The Wild Rose” chronicles what it takes for Indigenous beauty and wild vitality to live, disappear, reappear, revive, and thrive in the modernity's unsympathetic clatter, and seems to hint the self-spinning condition of today's mindset is a spiritual illness that can cease being the relentless oppressor of Nature, open land, and Naturalness in People, and re-find its own health and nobility of soul.

The Canyon Wren is the continuation and beautiful punchline of the full tale of Martí n Prechtel' s trilogy, The Story of My Horses, and picks up right where The Wild Rose leaves off. The Wild Rose ends with the dramatic Barn Fire Incident in which the author and his steady new young Barb stallion, Punk, pull a flame stunned mare out of a burning barn just seconds before the whole burning structure collapses, then together they both drive straight out of that book into a new life in the next book. This third book in the trilogy brings the story far away from all those troubled times, ins and outs, hardships and betrayals, involved in the author' s effort to gather up again those old style Indian Ponies of his youth, and heads us back out into the wild land and the beauty of ranchito New Mexico, where as an integral part of the lives of his new family, their family herd of rare Spanish/Native New Mexico horses play out a series of unexpected peculiarities and surprising horse antics that push the envelope of what mainstream culture has come to assume defines horses and the people that have them. If the first book, The Mare and the Mouse, is like finding a closed treasure chest, and the second book The Wild Rose is the retrieval of the lost keys to that chest, then The Canyon Wren is the treasure itself. This book will make you want to ride, talk to animals, eat well, and close the angry slack-jaw and shamelessly jump up and try to kiss the sky. Everyone wants life to be simple, but a simple life cannot be lived in a simple way: it takes a lot of simple skills. To see the humor and beauty in the world is one of those skills. The vision in this book of what life could be is simply beautiful.