Photo by Mary-Austin Klein, 2008

About a week ago, Echo Park painter Mary-Austin Klein (a friend of mine) took this picture of a lone paint mustang -- probably a young male -- in Monitor Valley, north of Belmont, Nevada. This pretty horse is part of a herd that Scott Fajack, Mary's husband, estimates at about 30.

Scott wrote: "Surprisingly, even though we were in Nevada for over two weeks and in more remote places, we saw less wild horses then in 2005. This was the beauty of the herd, off grazing by itself just uphill from the rest."

Here's to the hope that the "others" (the herds Scott and Mary didn't see) haven't been rounded up. As you may know, Bush's Bureau of Land Management proposes to kill many of the mustangs it has penned because it says food for the horses is too expensive. As if guns for Iraq wasn't.