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Pam Houston
May 13, 2019

Saying Goodbye to a Beloved Horse

The end was coming for Roany, a strong and beautiful horse who’d been at the center of Pam Houston’s life for 25 years. What she wanted for him was simple: a peaceful exit, lifted by the touch of human hands.

Last summer, I put my old Roan horse in the ground.

But there’s way more to the story than that. Thirty-nine years on the planet, 25 of those with me. I bought Roany the same year I moved to a ranch in Creede, Colorado, because Deseo, my alarmist Paso Fino, who had lived outside Fresno, California, most of his young life, was deciding that Colorado was the scariest place he’d ever been. First off, there was snow—a whole damn lot of it. The predator-to-livestock ratio was not to his liking, and the pasture was surrounded by hundred-foot spruce trees that often sang in the wind.

The first thing I noticed about Roany was that he had a kind eye; the second was his size—just under 17 hands at the shoulder. The Santa Fe cowboy who sold him didn’t tell me much apart from his age, which likely had a year or two shaved off, and that he went better away from the barn if you wore spurs. Within days, I came to understand Roany’s intensely good nature. Each morning when I went out to feed him, he greeted me with a just-happy-to-be-here chortle.

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May 2019
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Inside the First Afghan Women's Ascent of Mount Noshaq

The Best Vacations in North America

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