The authentic and timeless world of Ralph Lauren
November 2025
RL/Culture

Born Wild

Bringing up a mustang baby.
By Rae Del Bianco
It’s before dawn in the Mojave Desert. Picture a cabin, just a box—one of thousands of jackrabbit homesteads, remnants of the 1938 Small Tract Act, a long-dead government effort to jettison federal land deemed “useless” into the hands of willing Americans. Come to San Bernardino County, put up four walls (a minimum 192 square feet), and claim your acres. Many, if not most, lie empty or have returned in pieces to the sand, a few strips of iron and concrete left behind and housing rattlesnakes, pack rats, or a coyote den. But this one has a light on. I lean over a three-burner stove in a duvet coat and ruined sheepskin slippers, reheating foal formula. I’m in this unincorporated patch of desert, beyond all paved roads, because six years ago I saw my first western sunrise and swore I would see as much of that as a lifetime allowed. Two cliffs of decomposed granite to the south stand between the cabin and Joshua Tree National Park. They’re a blue cast now; the midday sun will turn them black. To the north is a vast cradle of empty sand, bordered by one of the country’s youngest volcanic fields. I’m anchored at this stove, bleary-eyed, warming myself, because, through a series of events after my spouse and I moved into this jackrabbit cabin, there is now an unexpected 6-day-old baby mustang outside whose mare isn’t making enough milk.
The mustang. A “living symbol of the historic and pioneer spirit of the West,” according to a law Congress passed in 1971 that granted them legal protection and preservation. As far as American icons go, we may as well be raising a bald eagle chick in a shoebox. The love of my life is asleep in the other room (the cabin has only two) after taking the night shift. You’re standing boot-deep in hundreds of years of history of the American West, and somehow, in spite of any other ideas you’d plotted for your life at this moment, whatever you’d wanted to write, or thought you’d build, it needs you to be at this stove right now in order for a little piece of it to survive. I walk through the walls of cactus and palo verde foresting the front porch, out to the corral. Claudine, as we’ve named her, is 40 pounds and all legs, a little tarantula with a horse face. I pour half the formula into a pan and leave half in the pot—she won’t drink once it gets cold.
“As far as American icons go, we may as well be raising a bald eagle chick in a shoebox.”
This is Marty Robbins country; “Saddle Tramp” and “Cool Water” play through our days. We’d planned just to ride, but life becomes Claudine. I call my paint mustang petit poisson after an old cowboy said, “You can’t crank down on this one, you have to reel him in like a fish.” The paint is 14 hands tall and can carry no more than 180 pounds including the saddle. There are scars down my shoulder from my first wreck off him; he’s the most beautiful thing I’ve ever seen. You can only smell the creosote when it rains, which has happened twice this year. The first rain, a scorpion the size of the palm of my hand crawled from beneath the house and drank the water running down a minute groove in the wooden siding. I felt I was registering a miracle. Claudine needs help, needs fingers to lower her muzzle towards the pan. She snorts in it and covers my coat again, sticky and smelling of formula, again. I cajole her like she’s a 2-year-old resisting vegetables. Eat up. Gain weight. Grow bigger than I’ll ever be. I won’t remember how many sleepless nights and days pass this way, and someday she’ll take to hay. When she runs, which she does from her second day of life, she bucks at the sky then looks to our faces for approval, which we give, with total joy. In the Mojave Desert, plants don’t marry a season; they bloom when it rains. A tortoise can go half a year without a drink. Creosote clone themselves, and as the inner ancients die off, rings are formed, as old as the West, as old as the mustang. Claudine’s bucking knocks trough water into the desert again and again, and each day, tiny native blooms crawl from the sand to mark her steps from days before. A person ought to feel like the smallest thing in this kind of country—where a 6-day-old horse can feel a thousand years old. None of us are experts, but some of us will become cowboys yet. There are cactus cuttings on the concrete floor that I have yet to set upright in pots to root. I live in my cowboy boots, but my partner goes barefoot, fearing nothing. This is home.
RAE DEL BIANCO, a former cattle farmer, is the author of the novel Rough Animals.
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