The Wild Rose

Winner of the Benjamin Franklin IBPA Silver Award!

Stories of My Horses, vol. II: The Wild Rose

The award-winning second volume in the Stories of My Horses trilogy, The Wild Rose continues where vol. 1 The Mare and the Mouse left off: with 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. 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.

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.

But, Prechtel says, he wrote this book “specially for people to be inspired to live magically and in depth with animals, and to give people to understand that it’s never too late to start living in a more tangible, dusty way—maybe even flying over the ground on the back of a big furry animal—in a way that inspires life. If you want to have good memory, you have to do things that are worth remembering. Time to get busy!”

“All along the edges of the lives we led inside the mountains of our exile, the modern world of course prevailed. Though we could just barely hear the rumble of its never satisfied, half-awake, mad rush to everywhere and nowhere coming in on the breeze from the interstate a mile off, we paid it little mind.” — excerpt from The Wild Rose