The gene pool runs, maybe, 15,000 years deep, cold and relentless in its demands for quick, evolutionarily aggressive adaptation. Some of them, Utah's Sulphur Spring herd for example, have been called "zoological treasures," linked directly to the primitive Iberian strain of the species. Look at them. Some with triple dorsal stripes. Some with zebra piano-key legs. Others with barred chests. Look again, and see perhaps the only domesticated animal on earth with the will and the wherewithal to revert to snot-blowing, dirt-pounding, blood-toothed, hard-hard-hooved wildness.

Left behind as the Spaniards completed their imagined conquest, as the Comanche dwindled off toward disappearance, as the distant silver mines played out, as the Buffalo Soldiers rode back to Leavenworth, they ran farther into the mountains, deeper into the deserts of the American West. A while later more than a million of them were drafted into combat duty in World War I. Tens of thousands more became chicken feed and dog treats. And in the choke and gasp of the Great Depression stories circulated in small Western towns of horses weighted with old tires to make pickings easier for the rendering trucks after hot rods had run the animals to exhaustion. For a long, desperate time these creatures seemed to be following the buffalo off a killer cliff of their own untamed choosing.

First released in the 17th century to roam the high meadows, to reproduce along the arroyos, these horses made their wild way across western North America for five centuries before the United States government decided to again get involved. The Wild Horse Annie Act of 1959 came first, and it must be said that this landmark legislation, as with the laws that followed, took hold in footing way more emotional than economic. As word of the wild horses' fight for survival spread across the nation, America's schoolchildren and their mothers put pen to paper. Deluged with outrage printed in pencil on Big Chief tablets in the largest letter-writing campaign on a non-war issue in U.S. history, Congress passed in a unanimous vote the Wild Free-Roaming Horse and Burro Act of 1971, asserting that "wild horses and burros are living symbols of the historic and pioneer spirit of the West; that they contribute to the diversity of life forms within the Nation and enrich the lives of the American people; and that these horses and burros are fast disappearing from the American scene."

Enter the Bureau of Land Management (BLM). Appointed to implement the wandering clauses of the 1971 Act, the BLM found itself immediately alone in the middle of inevitable conflict between the competing needs of a federally protected wild-animal population and of the all-too-human concerns of ranchers grazing cattle by permit on public lands. How best to let the wild horses run free in the context of Herefords chewing the cud, all toe-to-toe on land belonging for the most part to our grandchildren? How to-as the bureau's own name demands-"manage" the seemingly unmanageable?

The law is the law, and the legislation had established with no roaming room for argument wild horses' legal right to live on public lands, as the act suggested, "without harassment," although it must be said that anyone attempting to harass one of these chestnut mares a first time will most certainly not be bothering her again. Ask Ted Larcom of rural Cassoday, Kan.

A burly, soft-spoken man of carefully chosen words, Ted describes being "launched" by a goofy one who decided that a short ride in Ted's trailer was not really what he had in mind after all. With a dozen or so of his gelded brothers already safely aboard, this horse turned and kicked with NFL ferocity just as Ted was shutting the trailer's gate. Suddenly 20 feet south, Ted shook himself to run, jump, vault, roll... whatever... to escape the mayhem he just knew was headed his way. But, you know, that horse was already past, some speed and some movement learned from Nevada lightning at play in a cowboy's spinning nightmare. Ted Larcom wrangles on the 777 Ranch where, as of February 19 of this year, 4,487 wild horses roamed relatively free. Actually, the horses graze on two ranches, on the 777 and on the adjoining Shadow Valley, whose owner Sterling Varner partners with Bob Buford of the 777 in shepherding the grass of these Flint Hills to wild horses passing through under the provisions of four or five pieces of pertinent federal legislation.

Buford first decided to investigate the wild-horse business at the strong suggestion of John Hughes, his old college friend back at Oklahoma State. It was Hughes who operated the original "long-term holding facility" in America, on his ranch in northeastern Oklahoma, where in 1995 he took in about 2,000 of the animals, displaced from the White Sands Missile Range. With a drought raging in New Mexico and horses dying by the hundreds, a public outcry for rescue led an equine veterinarian named Don Hoglund to organize a massive round-up. Using helicopters, four-wheelers, and appropriate doses of trickery, Hoglund's group corralled the horses, ran them through the chutes for vaccinations, and loaded them on trailers for a 13-hour ride to Bartlesville.

As they prospered on Hughes' ranch, the Tadpole Cattle Company-the good, good grass of the Osage fattening the horses in a way the mesquite scrub on the missile range never could-the BLM went looking for other holding facilities capable of caring for large numbers of refugees. In the fall of 2001, Bob Buford and Sterling Varner won a contract for 4,000 head-half mares, half geldings-to graze on 30,000 some acres of their partnered ranches. The first horses came from Nevada, home to more than half of the nation's wild horse population, taken in winter gathers from public lands whose watersheds were threatened by wild horses and burros.

In those first groups to arrive in Cassoday, about 30 percent of the mares were in foal, a percentage that has held roughly constant. Among those first horses off the trailers back then too came 238 mistakes, overlooked stallions, testosteronely old boys who showed the wranglers of the Shadow 7 partnership that sometimes three, maybe four doses of horse tranquilizer can be insufficient to the task at hand. "We were wanting the horses to go down on their own, nice and easy," Ted's son Derek Larcom remembers, "and some of the big ones we had to run through the chute a half-dozen times. We'd miss a vein or, more often, there was just so much adrenaline running through them that we simply could not put them down."

On these first ranch-based inspections the mares will be checked closely, the animal's original tattoo verified for birthdate and then, if the horse is in good shape and between 2 and 6 years old, it will be given preventive shots for rabies, tetanus, and encephalomyelitis. Once epidemiologically and reproductively suited to their new home, the horses are moved to holding pens where they'll be fed and watered for ten days or so, monitored for any ill effects from their long ride to Kansas. Then two or three weeks out on some creekside brome, and finally to pasture, the geldings trailered north to the Shadow Valley, the mares helped along by some carefully designed fencing systems, some well-placed and quite large gates, to the bluestem of the 777.

"We calculated a stocking rate of 7.2 acres per head," Bob Buford says, "to ensure plenty of forage for the animals and to preserve the grass." Now embarked on a second five-year contract with the BLM, he likes the look of his pastures. "Obviously, horses' grazing patterns vary from cattle's, most especially in the horses' preference for the high country. As prey animals, they like to know what's going on around them." The cowboys on the 777 concur. "We try to use our haying to pull the horses to parts of pastures they haven't yet chosen to graze," says ranch foreman Tim Rogers. "It's not always easy. I remember one set of horses we worked with for over a year before they'd come to hay."

In the colder months, the BLM contract calls for feeding the horses roughly 15 pounds of hay three days a week, and this cool February morning Rogers and cowboy Craig Miller are feeding Sudangrass, bales that meet the contractual specs of "moisture not more than 15%, protein not less than 18%, and relative food value not less than 140%." They're counting the horses too, as they do at every winter feeding, and once a week in the warm months. This morning a bald eagle rises from behind a low hill ahead of the feed truck, and Craig Miller says just one word, "Trouble." America's emblem is a magnificent dive-bombing predator only as necessary. Scavenging asks for far fewer calories, as evidenced by this particular national symbol's lifting like a mercenary from the carcass of a recently deceased mare. Rogers and Miller dutifully note the number freeze-marked on the mare's neck: the 777 and the Shadow Valley do not bill the government for feeding dead animals. Still the count is short, 14 horses not up to the feed line yet, and Tim Rogers is off in high-speed pursuit of the strays. "Tim is like a coon dog," Miller says. "He'll find them sooner rather than later." And sure enough, down below a pond dam, back in the trees, 14 horses with "U.S." on their haunches graze in the Kansas sunshine .

The system works methodically, its broad outlines confirmed in the fine print of the contracts: mares and geldings in separate pastures obviously, only mares up to six years of age and foals from mares pregnant at arrival (typically about three in ten) available for adoption, no veterinary medicine for any horses other than those scheduled to find a lasting home somewhere else. Kindly put down the terminally ill, the badly injured.

A super-strange word is "gentle" as it might be used in the context of equine creatures 15 hands high, weighing maybe a thousand pounds and toughened by hard days and cold nights way out west, manes hanging like Spanish moss, a raunchy aversion to human contact bred half-a-millennium deep in some truly twisted DNA. And yet mustangs (from the Spanish mestengo or "stray beast") can be gentled. They can be trained, as proven every day at the Hutchison Correctional Facility, 70 miles west of Shadow Valley, where inmates participating in the prison's "Saving Horses-Changing Men" program find, maybe for the first time in their lives, a relationship built on honesty and trust. Thus far, about 1,500 mares have left the two ranches to be broken to halter, saddle, and horse-trailer by offenders ready for parole, men ready to learn how to play by some rules made 500 years ago in places far tougher than a Midwestern correctional facility. Since the program's inception, the BLM has placed well more than 200,000 wild horses and burros in adoptive settings where their strength, endurance, native intelligence, and sure-footedness have proven themselves time and again.

A quiet and common respect has been earned around here. Bob Buford and Sterling Varner speak in famous terms of the BLM's "professionalism," of the bureau's "willingness to adapt to the practicalities," of BLM staff's "proven concern for the well-being of the horses." In turn, Rod Coleman, the BLM's wild horse and burro specialist for Kansas and Oklahoma, talks about the Shadow 7's "commitment to animal welfare," to Varner's and Buford's "willingness to build and maintain the best possible handling facilities," to the cowboys' "conscientious care."

Please be assured that Ted Larcom did not fly in vain. These stoic, inventive men who care day in and day out for animals not especially prone to displays of appreciation have found a way to protect their own. Soon, soon after Ted was kicked off toward amnesia, the ShadowValley crew, Mr. Donny Schmidt at the drawing board, came back with three massive hydraulic cylinders mounted as a gate-closer of steroidal proportions. No longer was it necessary for a cowboy to reach in, to try to put a metal stop to the direct and furious path of animals on their way to, oh, anywhere they pleased.

And so the gatherings of mares set for adoption come easier now, predictable almost, in movements learned and then agreed upon between horse and man.

Sterling Varner tells the story of how, early in his career with what is now the largest privately held corporation in America, he was sent to the company's Montana ranch to find some water. "I drilled wells all over that ranch," Varner recalls. "And when my drillers proved to be drinking a bit too much, I went and found some Mormon fellas who worked hard and drank not at all. And, you know, we were finding water everywhere, but time was passing, and it was coming up on Thanksgiving. And so I called my boss, and I said, 'Mr. Koch, it's Sterling Varner. I work for you.' And he asked, 'How are you, Sterling?' And I said, 'I'm good, sir. And we no longer have a water problem up here on the ranch. But I was wondering about Thanksgiving.' And my boss said, 'Well, Sterling, you better come on home.'" Same deal just east of Cassoday, Kan.

Come on home, you helicoptered, starved-out, dry-mouthed, buckshot old nags. Ride on home, Sally.

It's Thanksgiving.