FREMONT COUNTY, Colo. — The sunlight had barely broken above the horizon of the small park when Carol Stires started calling for the wild horse she’d befriended.

“River! Pretty boy!” she yelled into the otherwise quiet morning.

For a few minutes, nothing happened. A breeze lifted through the cottonwoods, and a few geese called. Then, a black horse strode between the trees, beelining for Stires. She spoke softly to River as he approached.

“Pretty boy, you’ve been rolling in the mud,” she said on the late August morning.

For two years, Stires, 64, has been caring for the abandoned wild horse that’s living on a sliver of public land on the Arkansas River, between Florence and Penrose. At the beginning, she couldn’t get near him. Now, after nearly two years of spending time with River, the mustang comes when called by the name she gave him. He follows her around the park and contentedly grazes a few feet from her.

But the park isn’t a suitable place for the horse. At a little more than 100 acres, there is no fence between the land and the busy highway that forms its western border. Unleashed dogs chase River, horseback riders spook him and gunshots send him running when hunting season starts in the fall.

The federal agency that manages the park agrees — River shouldn’t be in the park.

Stires has made it her mission to help capture the abandoned horse — to make sure he gets to a sanctuary where he’d have room to roam. If she can’t catch him, she worries the Bureau of Land Management will dart him with a tranquilizer, which could be dangerous.

“He’s nervous, he’s afraid,” Stires said. “He’s a herd animal and he’s out here by himself. It just breaks my heart.”

So she has become part of his herd. She talks to him — about the Super Bowl, the news, her life. Now retired after years of working in hotels and other jobs, she lives alone and has “a lot of talking pent up,” she said.

Every once in a while, River will lie down in the grass and sleep while she’s there. He feels safe with her guarding him.

“I never expected to make friends with a wild horse,” she said.

‘He ran from one hell to another’

The Bureau of Land Management rounded up the horse from the wild in 2020 in Wyoming and adopted him out, BLM paperwork shows. The person who adopted River, then 20, used him as a rodeo bucking horse before he escaped to the park, Stires said. The owners have not captured him.

The BLM owns the land and agrees that it’s not a suitable place for a horse, wild or domestic, spokesman Steven Hall said. The elderly horse has been at the park since at least 2022, and the owner could face fines or charges for abandoning him.

“When you have livestock, it is not an acceptable solution to turn them loose on public land,” Hall said. “And there are consequences for that.”

The task of capturing River has largely fallen on Stires.

A woman from a local group that helps locate lost dogs emailed her in October 2023 and asked if she knew about the wild horse at the property, which is known locally as Blue Heron Park. Stires, originally from Connecticut, had no horse experience besides a few trail rides as a child.

When Stires went to check it out, she saw River running terrified as hunters fired their guns. His plight grabbed her heart.

“He’s been traumatized since the day he was taken off the range,” she said. “He hasn’t had any peace in five years. He ran from one hell to another.”

Coaxing River into a pen

Since that day in October 2023, she’s come out nearly every day to feed him, unless the roads are too bad for her two-wheel-drive truck. She uses her limited budget as a retiree to buy alfalfa — sometimes with help from outsiders and, once, a grant from the equine nonprofit Fleet of Angels.

“I never thought I’d still be here two years later,” she said.

It’s become her job to help River get used to a pen and then walk inside so that he can be contained. If she can catch him, a wild horse sanctuary near Craig has agreed to take him. But if they can’t coax him into the pen, the BLM will tranquilize him as a last resort — though there is no deadline to do so, Hall said.

Stires fears that outcome and feels like time is running out before the agency makes that move.

She worries that if River is shot with a dart of tranquilizer, he will try to run across the Arkansas River — where he flees when he’s scared. If the tranquilizer sets in while he’s crossing the river, she worries, he could fall unconscious and drop midstream.

So each morning, just as dawn breaks, she drives from her house in Cañon City and hangs out with River in the quiet of the early morning before other people arrive at the park. Every day, Stires leads River toward the pen and spreads alfalfa inside — hoping that he’ll become less nervous about the pen and learn to walk inside.

A month ago, he walked into the pen. But when she stood to try and close the gate, he whirled around and charged through the opening, nearly flattening her.

‘If things go wrong, at least I tried’

On the late August morning, River nickered at Stires and then followed her from 10 feet behind while she walked to the pen.

She sat inside and talked to him calmly.

He paused a few feet from the pen’s entrance. He wouldn’t come in, but he took a look.

Sometimes, Stires feels bad that she has not already caught him. Sometimes, she’s angry that neither the BLM nor local wild horse organizations have done more to help him. Outspoken and direct, she’s maintained a sometimes-turbulent relationship with the BLM and the employee they’ve designated to help catch River.

Sometimes, she worries that, if she does catch River, he’ll hurt himself in the pen. They’re both living between a rock and a hard place, she said.

“It’s just where my life took me — I had to try,” she said. “If things go wrong, at least I tried.”

After her husband died in 2006, Stires moved to the area from Golden to manage the Super 8 motel in Florence. But a bout of COVID-19 left her with debilitating vertigo for a while, and she stopped working.

River has given her a reason to get out of the house, she said, and has become a friend.

After 30 minutes, Stires walked out of the pen and sat near some cottonwoods a short distance away. This is Stires and River’s special spot, where they just spend time together. He got some more alfalfa and grazed a few feet from her stool.

Trying to bring some good into the world

She’s spent countless hours on this stool in this spot.

She’s sat while snow fell and stayed motionless, while mosquitoes bit her, so that he could get used to her. Before she bought a cart, she would put River’s alfalfa on a tarp, tie it to her waist and drag it through the fields. At 64, it all takes a toll.

But it’s her way to bring good into a world that, too often, feels violent and cruel.

That August morning before she visited River, she watched a video of a sheriff’s deputy throwing a bunny against a truck. While she was sitting in River’s pen that day, someone in Minnesota shot and killed two children and injured 18 other people during a Catholic school’s first Mass of the school year.

“I know that I’ve done something good in my life, if he gets to the sanctuary,” she said, her voice breaking. “If I see a video of him running out on the sanctuary and die of a heart attack, I’ll die happy.”

By 8:30 a.m., River had stopped eating and was dozing near the cottonwoods. It was time to go, before it got too hot — Stires’ truck struggles in the heat.

Before she left, Stires gathered the remaining alfalfa into a neat pile. When she arrived home, she would sit in front of the television and shred alfalfa for tomorrow’s visit.

“Love you, stay safe, and I’ll see you tomorrow,” she told River.

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