Fire and Ice, continued...

“Gitano, quit,” I said. He had never done that before. He must be angry with me, I thought, for the fence that kept them from outrunning the storm.

He lunged again and gripped my shoulder between his jaws. He could cripple me for life, I thought, if he chose to use the full force of his massive jaws.

“Gitano. No.”

For a long moment he held my shoulder, then let me go.

I walked back to the house past dying birds barely moving as they lay on top of windrows of ice. I stopped by the pond, and saw goldfish and koi lying belly up in a bed of ice. I discovered that the rain gauge had shattered. The garden looked like a salad bar. Water and ice filled the wheelbarrow to overflowing. Heaven only knows how much ice and water had fallen on us.

Dr. Bobbit had to park out on the road and then waded through the flood to our home. He gave injections to the horses to keep breakdown products of their bruises from destroying their kidneys.

They all lived. Gitano forgave me.

But all the rest of that summer, I never saw another hummingbird.

The only trees to hang on to a few leaves were the Navajo globe willows. Under them, many a starving horse had found salvation. Now that the drought had broken, there would be no more hunger, I thought. Not for a long while.

On Labor Day, the apple trees at Mikki's home burst into bloom. The hail had tricked them into thinking winter had come and gone.

That winter it really snowed. Four blizzards, to be exact. The National Guard airlifted hay to starving cattle and horses as they huddled on hilltops where wind had thinned the snow. Despite this, thousands of livestock died, mostly sheep who got buried and lost under the drifts.

For two weeks in January, many people were snowed in.

A twenty-foot snowdrift crushed the roof over Arlene’s porch. The county sent front-end loaders to clear the road because the snowdrifts were like cement, impossible for mere snowplows to move.

My horses and I were lucky. Jan. 2, 1997, just one day before the first blizzard hit, Mike and I got married. I had just moved the horses into our new home, which sheltered in a Sandia mountains canyon. We got four feet of snow that time, but it didn't drift and that made all the difference.

Spring came and by the beginning of April even the worst drifts had melted. Just one more blizzard hit that month. It mostly just killed the sheep that had just been sheared, and it melted fast.

Grass grew horse belly high. Flowers carpeted our valley in yellow and purple. I brought my horses back out to my old home and they enjoyed what must have been the best pastures of their lives. Mike and I rode Flair and Gitano many miles across the valley, marveling at its beauty.

Despite all the terror and beauty of those twelve months from April 1996 through April 1997, the old timers of the Estancia valley insist that year wasn't all that weird. Oh, the stories they tell of smothering dust storms, tornadoes, firestorms, floods, and blizzards followed by weeks on end of arctic cold.

This is the real New Mexico, and darn it, we love our land.

# # #