RUNAWAY
By Daniel McCool

When you are a new gringo in a small ranch village in Mexico, you probably want to keep a low profile until you get the lay of the land more or less. If everyone else is snapping pictures at the blessing of the animals and joining in the religious procession, you just might want to keep back a bit. Give them their space. Show respect. And if you intend to be there a while, you may want to build up a reputation of discretion and privacy.
Of course, you have to admit that you are there with a purpose in mind. You do, after all, have a life. In my case I had been offered this amazing chance to move to an old gold mining village in the mountains high over Puerto Vallarta. I was to be the bilingual on-site horseback tour guide for a small-time outfitting operation. Knowing nothing about horses supposedly wasn’t to be any problem. I was the guide while Pedro from the village was to be the handler.

So there I found myself, daily sitting on the porch of the casita, nervously eyeing the six horses a few short meters away from me in their corral. And the horses never went out. Until one day Pedro came for them from his house. There was a Mexican family from Vallarta that wanted to go on a ride, but theydidn´t need a guide. Pedro took five horses and left the sixth.

I returned to my post on the porch. Pedro had only been gone a couple of minutes when Liston, the remaining horse, began to get agitated.

First he started neighing. Ominously this was the first time I’d heard one of the horses neigh. He began galloping from one end of the corral to the other, back and forth. Finally he started charging the flimsy gate. After a couple of crashes, he pushed it down and he was off!

I quickly chased him back in, closed the gate and ran to the porch to get some wire to close the gate better.
While I was in the shed next to the porch I heard him knock down the gate again. I flung myself after him, but he got to the other gate by the road and was through it and chasing after his compañeros before I could do anything to stop him. Being a city guy with almost no notion of horse psychology, I was convinced that he was about to go and throw himself off of the nearest cliff, and I would be at fault.

I grabbed a rope and took off running.

Of course, they would all have to be headed into town. All of my hours and days of practicing patience, composure, polite deference, and now- running like a madman down the main street with a rope in my hand, and no idea what I would do if I had to use it.

I called out to people if they had seen him, and they just stared blankly, pointing towards the town square.
After being misdirected in the square I was put on the right track again and started heading out the other end of town when a pickup truck with four intoxicated guys came along. I explained my predicament and they told me to jump in. They then sped away at about 10 miles an hour to the closest store where they stopped for six more beers. They thoughtfully offered me one, and I accepted. We headed out of town to a place where the road curves and drops sharply. There was Liston!

The driver nearly slammed right into the horse, who promptly turned around and headed back into town. The driver had never really understood my situation, so I had to ask him to let me out of the truck so I could continue on after the runaway horse.

After running back a ways into town, I saw the horse ahead of me. A livestock truck came along about then and I climbed onto the back, precariously perched high in the air. We rounded a bend and I saw a guy with a horse that he was leading by a rope. My horse!

The truck driver didn’t understand that I wanted to get off the truck and kept going, so I finally jumped as it was still moving.

I ran up to the guy that was leading the horse on a rope but he just kept on walking. I told him in as polite a way as I could that I thought he had my horse. Considering the implication of my accusation he was quite pleasant. He pointed out that his horse was taller, and that mine had run back towards the main square. I was only half convinced, but also had to admit that I would not really be able to pick my horse out of a police line-up.

When I eventually returned to the plaza, there was one of the guys outside of the cantina with a rope around the horse’s neck. He was very cheerful giving him back to me. I was three shades of red as I walked Liston back to the corral, smacking him a few good ones on the hindquarters for all of the embarrassment he had caused me.

It was a couple of days later that I learned that apart from stray dogs and feral cats, the village was also home to a couple of street cows and renegade horses. My panic must have seemed really hysterical to villagers who were used to hardly taking any notice of a stray 800 lb. horse that goes on the lam for a couple of weeks at a time.