By Kathryn Wilder
Last spring my beloved grulla mare, Savanna, gave birth to a little grulla filly, who died at three days old. My heart cracked like the dry earth around us, while like the skies I barely cried. Even watching Savanna drip milk tears onto the ground, I felt all dried up inside.
A dry summer followed the dry spring. The land thirsty, the critters thirsty, our spirits also thirsty in a drought that hung heavy under smokey skies. I shrank from the news and resisted the post office—the bills, the junk, the pleas for money—even the mail carried thirst. But after cowboying high in the mountains one day, I stopped in town on my way back to ranch headquarters, expecting a package from another writer.
As I clunked into the post office, I realized I had not removed my spurs—bad cowboy etiquette in my world, and a measure of tired.
I found two packages stuffed into the PO box along with that other “mail.” I took it all home to open. Removing boots and spurs at the door, and cow-shit-splattered Wranglers at the washer, I donned sweats, got water, and settled on the couch. In the first large envelope: Renata Golden’s Mountain Time: A Field Guide to Astonishment. I read the first line, paragraph, page, and turned to the second package, wanting to do the same with whatever mysterious book it contained. Soon I recognized the sunset-sky cover—it was mine! The first of the first printing.
I started reading. Not proofing, reading. Like, for pleasure. I read for half an hour as if it wasn’t my book. Then I remembered that it was my book and put it down to restart Renata’s, captivating from the first line.
Eventually a whole box of The Last Cows arrived, and I remembered the day when a carton of my previous book showed up. I had pulled out a copy to show my grandchildren, Lacey and Lucas, then eight and six, who live in another house on the ranch. The book had a mustang stallion on the cover.
“Look,” I said, holding it up for them to see. The horse drew them near. Lacey read the title out loud to Lucas.
“And?” I said, when she stopped. “What’s this?”
Grandma Kat is what they call me; as Lacey sounded out my other name, her eyes grew big. “Is that you?” she said, and they both looked up at me.
I turned the book over so they could see my photograph—proof. “TJ took these photos.” They knew TJ and her mustang pics. I opened the book: “I lead my grulla mare, Savanna, to water,” and their eyes got bigger still. “Savanna!” they said, glancing outside to where they might see Savanna in the corral.
Lacey took the book into her small hands and turned it over to see the horse cover again. Looking at me solemnly, she said, “Does this mean you are an author now?”
When I nodded, she handed me the book, grabbed Lucas, and headed for the door. “We have to go tell Daddy Grandma Kat is an author.”
Four years later, my new book in my hands, I flip through the pages to look at the photographs. A mustang photo of TJ’s stops me. It’s a mustang mare and her newborn filly. “Despite the harsh measurements of drought, we still find joys small and large in the dry, dry desert,” I had written. And it hits me that on the heels of sadness come the joys. Savanna’s filly died but this mustang filly lives, and she lives wild and free.
That night, instead of adding The Last Cows to the stack on my bed, I slept with it under my pillow. Not as comfy as a stuffed animal, but each time I awoke I found myself thinking, I really am a writer.
In October, rain finally came—too much rain in many parts of the Southwest, but we were lucky. We had gathered the cows off the mountain early in anticipation of weather changing, of the dirt roads turning to mud and becoming more difficult and dangerous to navigate with trailers and cattle in tow. Plus, the cattle market had risen like the rivers overflowing their banks. We sold a few older cows and an open cow, but not the last cows.
A version of this post previously appeared on the Bison Books blog at unpblog.com.
The Courage to Write What We Fear
Kathryn Wilder
9:15 AM – 10:15 AM Saturday Oct 17
2026 Annual Women Writing the West Conference registration portal
…author of The Last Cows: On Ranching, Wonder, and a Woman’s Heart and Desert Chrome: Water, a Woman, and Wild Horses in the West, is a 2026 WILLA Literary Award finalist, a Western Heritage Award recipient, Ellen Meloy Desert Writers Award recipient, and Colorado Book Award winner. With an MFA from the Institute of American Indian Arts, she lives among mustangs in southwestern Colorado.
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