As horses go, the mustangs were a scruffy lot.
Mud was caked in their fuzzy winter coats, and they circled in the metal-ribbed corrals, keeping suspicious eyes on the people staring back from outside.
Above them, a bald eagle rode the air on outstretched wings.
"How American is that?" said Ashley Winch, sparing a quick glance from the wild horses. "Mustangs in the pen, eagle overhead. It doesn't get much more wild and free than that."
She paced up one side of the pens, down the other, then reversed course and did it again, looking for a horse with a string around its neck bearing a metal tag with the number 9596.
It was April 5, pickup day in Lorton, outside Washington, D.C., for trainers participating in the Extreme Mustang Makeover. They would have four months to take a wild horse home and gentle it enough to be handled by the average rider who might love the idea of owning a mustang, but be ill-prepared to deal with half a ton of kicking, bucking, balking horse right off the range.
At the end of the 120 days, trainer and mustang would compete in New Jersey for prize money and bragging rights. The main goal, however, would be to auction off the horses at the end of the show, Aug. 4, to get them into private hands and off the federal budget.
Some of the 39 mustangs in the pens had been captured on public lands in the West, where, the federal Bureau of Land Management says, too many wild horses roam. The roundups, by helicopter and other means, are highly controversial, and horse advocates say many animals are hurt or illegally sold for slaughter, which the BLM denies.
Others among the Lorton horses had been born in the holding facilities where rounded-up mustangs are kept at taxpayer expense - about $75 million in fiscal 2012. More wild mustangs and burros are in government holding facilities - about 49,050 - than roam free.
Three Hampton Roads residents had driven to Lorton that morning to pick up mustangs. Richard Garner, 51, owns the Fish Tail Bar G, a stable in southern Chesapeake. He had competed in two previous mustang makeovers. With him were Ashley, 24, of Hampton and Jennifer Long, 37, of Chesapeake.
Ashley had 20 years of riding experience on dressage and hunter/jumper horses; Jennifer was a barrel racer and farrier. Neither had trained an unbroken horse before. Under Rich's guidance, they would start with mustangs.
It was guaranteed to be a wild ride.
Rich had left his farm at 7 a.m., pulling an empty horse trailer behind his extended-cab Silverado.
"I come from a long line of cowboys and horsemen," he said. For 150 years, the Fish Tail Bar G brand has been in his family, first on a ranch in north-central California, then in Oregon, then back in California.
"My first memory of being on a horse is my dad at the neighbor's, branding calves," Rich said as he drove. "My mom handed me up into the saddle with him. I remember him holding me with one hand and riding the horse with the other, down the trail and across the river, 3 miles back to our house. I couldn't have been more than 2. I was completely enamored. All I wanted to be was a cowboy."
And he was, for a little while. Then he became a Navy SEAL, and is now a global security consultant - "The world's a messed-up place" - and manager of a nonprofit that provides mental-health care in Haiti. In 2010, he trained his first mustang-makeover horse.
He trailered it to Texas, where, minutes before competition started, he was bucked off into a concrete wall, crushing a rib and lacerating a lung. He drove the horse back home.
"Yours truly will not come back with a horse this year," Rich said. "The idea is you don't come back with one. I've told Jen and Ashley that they are not allowed to adopt their horses. But we'll see what happens with four months of daily contact, watching an animal going from wild to being your closest friend. It's really tough to see them go."
Rich picked up Ashley and her husband, Zach, in Hampton, where he is active duty in the Air Force. Jennifer, who was pulling her own trailer, was on the phone.
"Are you excited? Did you sleep last night?" Rich asked. Yes, and no.
"Ashley," he continued, "in about two and a half hours you will know what your horse looks like."
"I dreamed last night that it was all chestnut," she said.
"It's like Christmas morning," he told her. "You won't know till then what Santa put in your stocking."
Mustang makeovers, organized by the nonprofit Mustang Heritage Foundation in cooperation with the BLM, are held in various locations around the country. Sequestration this year led to the cancellation of makeovers in Oregon and Georgia. That left more wild horses in holding facilities, and fewer gentled mustangs available for adoption.
"We could debate the plight of the American mustang and is it right to take them off the range," Rich said. "Is it right or wrong? I don't know. Where I come into it is these animals have been captured, so the more we can get adopted, the better for them."
"I am so excited! I just can't wait," Ashley said. "This is the kind of stuff they write movies about, and it's real."
The truck and trailer hit Interstate 64, headed for Lorton.
Six miles out, Rich said: "Ashley, check your heart rate," and she stared eagerly looking out the window.
"Oh, my go-o-o-osh!" she squealed as the corrals came into sight. "This is better than Christmas! All right, look for the littlest, prettiest one, and that's going to be mine!"
The mustangs were clustered five or six to a pen, with two rows of pens and a chute between. Rich, Ashley and Jennifer picked up the paperwork, and started scanning the herd, looking for the numbered neck tags that would identify the horses that had been randomly assigned to them.
Ashley was looking for a 4-year-old bay mare that had come from South Steens, Ore.
She and Zach went to every pen, but didn't find No. 9596.
"Start over," Ashley said. "Oh, there's a bay! Do you have a 9? This is killing me!"
Zach rubbed her shoulder.
Rich joined her, scanning the description of his horse. "Sixteen hands," he said. "Red."
Cowboys separated the biggest horse from the herd and sent her galloping up and down the chute, finally penning her alone in a round corral at the end.
"Here's my pony. She's in isolation," Rich said, looking down at Ashley.
"That's a big horse!" she exclaimed. "That's a whole lot of wild!"
The red mare, measured in 4-inch "hands," stood 5-foot-4-inches tall at the shoulder. She galloped futilely around the pen, secured behind fences 6 feet tall.
"Good lord, Rich," Jennifer said. "Score!"
Ashley's horse, when singled out, had no numbered neck tag. She was a trim, good-looking mare, reddish brown with black legs, mane and tail.
"Ashley scored, too," Rich said. "You know, Zach, she's gonna want to keep that horse. I would, if it was my horse."
Jennifer's mustang turned out to be solid brown and short, sort of an awkward match for the 6-foot-tall farrier. The mustangs, directed down the chute by cowboys rattling plastic grocery bags, ran into the trailers and the doors slammed shut.
"Mine's just perfect in every way!" Ashley exclaimed. "Like Mary Poppins."
"You won't be able to afford her," Rich said. "She'll go for 15, maybe 18 hundred dollars."
Wild horses in tow, they hit the road for home.
Somewhere on Interstate 95 South, Rich named his big red mare Lucy, after another tall redhead, actress Lucille Ball. Lucy was almost certainly the dominant female in the herd, he said, because of her size. Cornered, she might fight.
"A horse is a flight animal," he said. "Their overriding concern is: Is this person going to eat me?"
Rich, as president of the Tidewater Horse Council, had invited people to his farm the next day to watch the mustang training begin, and to learn what is called natural horsemanship.
"All horses have a 'bubble,' " he explained. "When you get inside that bubble, it's going to move. When I go in the pen, I'm in its bubble. It will start to follow the fence. When it relaxes and starts watching me, I'll get it to turn to face me, and work it in figure 8's. I'll get it to move its hind end away from me. Once I establish control, its emotional angst goes away. All horses want is food and leadership. She'll look to me once she learns I'm the leader. Once I can touch her, it's game over."
They reached the Fish Tail Bar G at 2:59 p.m., one minute early on Rich's Navy-neat timetable. As he predicted, Ashley's and Jennifer's horses stepped off the trailer and walked down the lane between fences and into stalls, where they whinnied to each other. Lucy didn't.
Three times she trotted down the lane and three times she broke and ran back toward the trailer, seeking escape.
"Whoa, big horse," a farmhand/trainer called. "Here, big horse. You're all right."
Lucy faced him, started toward him, then turned away. "Yep, yep," the trainer said, and Lucy finally went into her stall and the gate closed.
For the next four months, the mustangs would be dependent on their trainers for food, water and attention.
"The goal is to get these horses broke enough in 51?2 weeks to take them on a trail ride," Rich said.
"Oh, man, wouldn't that be neat?" Ashley said.
"It can be done," he said. "Five weeks is a little soon to take a wild horse out in the open like that. If one of these wild ones escapes, it keeps on going."
The mustangs would communicate constantly with the trainers, he said: "It's just, are we sensitive enough to pick up what they're saying?"
With that in mind, Ashley's bay mare was sent scampering into the high-walled round pen for its first lesson.
Ashley Winch stands just over 5 feet tall and weighs about 100 pounds. Her parents used to own a boarding stable in Florida, where she grew up riding. But she'd never faced a wild horse until she entered the round pen and the bay mare started running, around and around the ring, and around Ashley.
"Don't push too hard," Rich coached from outside. "Hand up. Step back, step back."
The mare stopped and faced Ashley for a moment, then resumed running.
"See that ear keeps flipping back?" Rich said. "That means the horse is watching her. Not what I'd like."
Ashley couldn't get the mare to reverse directions, so Rich stepped into the pen to demonstrate. He moved toward one side, facing the horse, and she turned and ran away from him. He moved back to the center and let her go for a little while, then took a few steps sideways to turn her around again.
She stopped, facing the fence, and he slapped the ground with a training stick to get her moving again. "Every time she'll look at me with both eyes, I'm going to back away a little bit," he said.
This style of training depends on pressure and release. Pressure - stepping into the horse's comfort zone to make her move a certain direction - followed by release - backing off, when the horse was doing what he asked. Before long, he had her attention and when he held up a hand, she stopped and faced him.
He held out his hand.
"Don't touch her!" Ashley cried.
"I'd like her to take a sniff of my hand," he said.
"She's saving that for me."
Rich sent the horse around the pen again, slapping the ground when she tried to challenge him.
"She's trying to decide if she can come at me and get away with it. See her hind feet?"
The mustang stopped and faced him. Rich rubbed the side of the mare's neck with the stick, giving her a good scratching.
They worked patiently with the horse, rubbing her forehead and poll with the sticks, using small gestures to show her what to do: a slight lift of the hand to make her circle, a pointed finger to show which way, a flat palm to make her stop.
"Watch her," Rich warned. "Don't forget what you're dealing with here. Get her attention. Careful. She could wheel and nail you."
Ashley obeyed, trying to conquer her own fears. A rider since age 3, a riding instructor at 21, she had never been kicked by a horse.
"Put your hand up there by her nose. If you do touch her, touch her and take it away, touch her and take it away. Right on the side of the lips is usually a good place. Did you touch her?"
Ashley turned her head to look at him and Rich exclaimed: "Watch the horse!"
After an hour's work, Ashley left the pen - "I'm not dead, so that's good." - while Rich tossed a lasso around the mare's neck. In short order, he was leading her around the pen.
"This is unbelievably good," he said, but cautioned Ashley not to get overconfident.
"I sure wish you had a name I could call you," he said to the mustang.
"I'm working on it," Ashley said.
"OK, I'm Working On It."
"I'm thinking Sookie. Or Malibu. You can call her Sookie."
Rich grimaced, then said, "Good girl, Sucky."
"Sookie," Ashley corrected.
"I don't know if I can say that in my western vernacular," he said. "A suk is a market in Arabic. Great. You named her after a grocery store."
But Sookie, the name of a favorite book and TV heroine, stuck.
Rich walked hand over hand up the rope and rubbed a halter against Sookie's face. Three times she turned away. Four. Five. Then she allowed him to slip it over her nose.
"Wow," Jennifer whispered. "She's just standing there."
Rich trotted the horse in a circle, holding the lead rope attached to the halter. When he stopped the horse, she turned to face him, hindquarters to the fence. Perfect.
Sookie was returned to her stall, and Jennifer's brown mare herded into the round pen. The gate closed. The horse reared and tried to get her legs over the top.
"She's smart enough to know where she came in," Rich said. He slapped a rope on the ground to make her run. She got her front legs over the gate, struggled, got them back down and ran.
They went through the same process - circle and turn, face the center, scratch the neck, lasso. Jennifer touched her mustang and flashed a huge smile.
But the mustang refused to be haltered. She pawed the ground, tried to jump the fence. They ended the session with Jennifer scratching the horse's neck to calm her down.
"I can't wait to see what the red one does," Rich said.
The next day, he found out.
April 6 dawned cold and windy. Thirty people gathered around the pen to watch Rich work with Lucy.
"Can you imagine what that would be like, to be wild and caught and transported?" one woman said, adding, thoughtfully: "I thought mustangs were smaller."
Born in 2008, Lucy was captured in Coyote Lake, Ore., and kept in a holding facility in the Midwest. She was trucked with the other mustangs to Lorton, and now she ran her chin along the top rail of the round pen, because she was tall enough to do that. She reacted to every sound and movement.
"The goal today is to get her to stop being so reactive, and to respond to me," Rich told the crowd. "If this horse has bad habits in three months, it's my fault."
Lucy kicked the fence, and turned her back to him. Rich walked away. She followed him.
He got her trotting around the pen, and reversing direction. She ducked his first lasso, but he caught her on the second try and soon persuaded her to wear the halter. He tugged her head to the side and she took one step, crossing one leg in front of the other.
"Just like that," Rich said. "That's actually her first leading step. We'll string together a bunch of those and she'll be halter broke."
Lucy tossed her head and backed away, then slipped and almost fell.
"See her body language?" he said. "How she's kind of sulking? She's emotionally gone to a place where she's not really paying attention. Now she's coming back. Within the next week we'll be able to pick up her feet, rub her belly, do all sorts of stuff."
"How long have you had her here?" a spectator asked.
"We trucked her in last night."
"Oh, my gosh!"
Within 10 days, Rich said, he would ride her. When he took the halter off, Lucy followed him meekly back to her stall.
"Isn't she amazing?" he said.
Eleven days later, on April 21, Rich had two blue fingers and a bruised foot, reminders of a tangled rope and Lucy's insistence on being treated like a lady.
Two things scare horses, he had said - noise and movement - so the mustangs had to be desensitized to both. Lucy still didn't like rattling grocery bags, but she would let him lie across the saddle, putting all his weight on it, and jump up and down, rubbing his body against her sides.
He was pleased with her progress, and he had learned from her as well.
"Some horses have a temper, and she's got one," Rich said. "She's like 'How dare you?' "
Jennifer arrived and started brushing the little brown mare she called "Nona," short for a show name of Wynonna Sweetwater, a nod to the place in Wyoming where the mustang had been caught.
"What are you gonna do, Jen, when you sell her?" Rich asked.
"Everybody keeps asking me that," she said.
"Just sell her. Somebody else is going to love her just as much and, if you keep her, you run out of room to keep doing this."
"She has a great heart," Jennifer said.
"This horse won't fight you," Rich said, "Lucy, she'll fight you."
She wasn't the only one.
By late April, Rich and Ashley were behind schedule, and still hadn't ridden. Jobs, weather, chores, family obligations - life had interfered with training.
"This horse is not afraid," he said, as he led Lucy out of her stall. "She's big and strong and wants to be in charge. But there's a little guy who's in charge, until she hurts me and I have to go hang out in the hospital for a while."
She let him pick up her feet and lean on her back.
"She's a nice girl," he said. "I like her."
But when he put the saddle on her back, she half-reared and plunged, pulled loose the rope that tied her head to the wall, and bolted out the stable door.
Saddle and pad fell to the ground; Rich ran to close the gate to the farm road. Lucy allowed herself to be caught, and he put the saddle back on.
When he sent her trotting around the pen, she squealed - "She's offended that I'm making her work." She tried to lean on him. He pushed her away, and pointed out four broken boards on the 6-foot fence, snapped a few days earlier when Nona had acted up and fallen.
Nona had regressed in her training, he said, because Jennifer was hesitant to work the horse again for two days. He expected Lucy to backslide, too, during the four days he'd spend in Texas for his father's surgery.
Still, he was pleased with her progress. He'd started calling her by nicknames - Big Lu, or Lewis.
"You think you're gonna bid on her at the auction?" a spectator asked.
"No, I can't afford her," Rich said. "This will be a $3,000 horse."
Ashley led Sookie out and was greeted by the same question.
"I can't get her back," she said. "I'm not even going to toy with the idea."
She wore a hard helmet and a padded vest as she mounted. Her husband peered between the boards of the pen, camera in hand.
Sookie gave a little buck, and her rider came off.
"That looked like a relatively soft landing," Zach said.
"I grabbed the fence," Ashley said.
"Kudos. You got more man points than me."
"Now I'm a real cowgirl."
Rich flexed Sookie's neck to bring her nose near the stirrup. He put his weight on the stirrup, leaned across the saddle, tugged on the saddle horn.
"Take two?" Ashley asked.
Ashley mounted.
Sookie exploded into the air, arching her back and kicking both hind feet, over and over. Ashley toppled off backward, her sunglasses landing in the dirt several feet away. A hoof came down across her back. One of her riding boots flew across the pen; the other boot was flung into another corral.
Flat on her back, Ashley lay still in the dirt.
Diane Tennant, 757-446-2478, diane.tennant@pilotonline.com
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Coming Monday
Part 2 of 3: Falling for Lucy