Horse Tales: Tom Reed’s “Give Me Mountains for My Horses”

New West Book Review

By Jenny Shank, 10-15-07

Give Me Mountains for My Horses: Journeys of a Backcountry Horseman
By Tom Reed
Riverbend Publishing
118 pages, $9.95

Bozeman-based writer and outdoorsman Tom Reed grew up in Golden, Colorado, longing for a horse, and in his essay collection, “Give Me Mountains for My Horses,” he writes in spare and imagistic prose about how he finally realized that dream and then some, ending up with a pasture full of horses. Reed brings the individual horses he’s loved to life for the reader, from the sure-footed and patient Jade, whom he calls “Mountain Lady,” to Ace, his surprisingly gentle stud, to the palomino filly with a “sun-bleached surfer girl’s mane” that he can’t resist buying toward the end of the book.

“I never did get that horse I wanted as a boy,” Reed writes, “and eventually the dream faded and flickered barely alive. It would be fed occasionally by a glimpse of a horse in a pasture somewhere, or a horse and rider on some far ridge.”

When Reed was a recent college graduate working at as the editor of a small newspaper, he received a call from a man who said, “I like the way you editorialize,” and invited him on a ride.

Although Reed commits several blunders on that first ride--he can’t easily mount the horse he’s given to ride, and he forgets to pack a lunch and hat--he’s instantly hooked on horses, and they become a major focus. Although he doesn’t state this explicitly, he seems to have sacrificed several other aspects of his life so he can spend more time and money on his horses.

This pattern in Reed’s life is clear from his first journey with his wife to Delta, Colorado, to buy horses to bring back to Wyoming. In the essay “Dead Broke,” Reed writes, “We are about to live horse poor, and because it is my dream and not hers, there is tension in the cab, enough that you can almost hear it over the radio and the wind.”

Reed and his wife eventually divorce, but he doesn’t write much about this except to note that, “In the end I’ll keep a pickup truck and a horse or two.” The horses help Reed through his darker moments. “It has been said that the outside of a horse is good for the inside of a man,” he writes.

Most of the essays are simple yet lovely accounts of how Reed acquired various horses and how the animals have served him on notable occasions, such when Jade packed the meat from a huge bull moose out of the mountains, despite being overloaded, and when she picked out a mountain trail obscured by snow when her rider did not know the way.

Reed’s prose conveys his passion for the outdoors and for the horses that bring him into the wilderness without ever becoming maudlin, relying mostly on nouns and verbs and only a few simple adjectives to tell his tales: “I ride to the tap of horse hooves on frozen mud and then we break out into a big meadow and there’s a bull moose standing in the willows, steaming in the cold air, looming above the yellow forest of leaves.”

Reed makes the contemplative joys of backcountry horse riding clear even to readers who have never experienced it. “You haven’t seen another human in days but there’s a jet contrail reminding you that yes, this is the modern world.”

Reed serves on the Board of Directors for Backcountry Hunters and Anglers and is active on wilderness issues, and part of his affection for horses seems to derive from the fact that they are a conveyance that can carry him deep into the wilderness without disrupting the wilderness experience. Instead, they enhance the experience, and as Reed writes in his concluding essay, “…there is a mountain to climb and a wild place to hunt. And you think how fortunate you are to live in an age where you can still feel the true wild, the last of it.”

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