'Mustang' by Deanne Stillman

Mustang

The Saga of the Wild Horse in the American West

Deanne Stillman

Houghton Mifflin: 368 pp., $25

DEANNE STILLMAN loves the desert. It is, she writes, "my beat and my passion," a place where city life fades away, her thoughts vanish and she hears things: "The beating of wings. The scratching of lizard. The crack of tortoise egg. The whisper of stories that want to be told." Her 2001 book, "Twentynine Palms: A True Story of Murder, Marines, and the Mojave," told one of those stories, of the violent murder of two local girls who had been "sliced up" by a Marine in the desert. In the course of writing that book, a story of slaughter in the high country outside Reno grabbed her attention. It was December 1998; this time there were three murderers, two of them Marines (one stationed at Twentynine Palms), and the victims were wild mustangs, 34 dead in several killing sprees.

Shaken by the similarities between the killings, Stillman wondered why someone would kill the animals that had blazed our trails, fought our wars, served as our loyal partners? Was there something about the slaughter of wild horses that went straight to the heart of who we are as Americans? "With all due respect to our official icon, the eagle, . . . " she writes, "It is really the wild horse, the four-legged with the flying mane and tail, the beautiful, bighearted steed who loves freedom so much that when captured he dies of a broken heart, the ever-defiant mustang that is our true representative, coursing through our blood as he carries the eternal message of America." She began to wonder about the men who shot them: "Were they modern Ahabs? Or . . . just a bunch of drunks with guns? Or perhaps they were a strange new iteration of the American psycho, or maybe even some full-on combination platter of all of the above."

These questions led Stillman into an impressively thorough, painstakingly researched investigation of the history of the horse in North America. She began by hiking into a remote canyon in Death Valley, where the climatic conditions have preserved in stone the hoof prints of the modern horse's most distant ancestors. These small horses had flourished here millions of years ago, until the Ice Age, when horses disappeared from North America, "but not before they had headed north across the Bering land bridge and populated the rest of the world." Not until the early 1500s did horses return to the continent, when Hernando Cortés brought shiploads of them from Cuba, correctly assuming that they would give him the advantage he needed to conquer the Aztecs.