The following is being funded by Uncle Thibodeaux's Calf's-Foot Jelly. "Boiling feet in the bayou since 1932."

Come one, come all and witness the magic of the word enchantress, Linda Hussa. The devil is in the details, and watch how this seductress weaves her story with specific details, providing descriptive images of the Black Rock Desert.

Following is an example of good horse journalism by writer Linda Hussa. The article, “185 Dead Horses,” first appeared in Quarter Horse News (www.quarterhorsenews.com) and also appeared at www.horsecity.com.

On a bright day in mid-August 2007, Ron and Ginger Hopkins went for a drive in Nevada’s high desert. Someone told them that if they turned north off the road to the Sulphur gold mine on the eastern edge of the Black Rock Desert, they could find sulphur crystals the size of hen’s eggs. As previous managers of cow outfits in the desert, they know livestock and they know the country in all its many faces from bitter to benevolent. But this outing was not about anything more than getting away from the phone and spending the night 50 miles from the nearest electric light. They were looking for peace. But they found tragedy instead.

On that summer afternoon, they drove north past mining shacks and crossed the railroad tracks. The road wound up a hill and soon the truck was pushing powdery dirt. The desert country around Sulphur, that expects no more than 4 or 6 inches of precipitation a year, knows how to live with less. In 2007, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration lists Nevada, the driest state in the Union, as having the second-warmest July on record, while through the winter of 2006-2007, it set a new record low for precipitation. The local people didn’t have to be told that. March looked like July, and by August, the brush on the flats appeared to have been hit with a blowtorch.

The Hopkinses were prepared to make a dry camp. Jugs of water were tied to the handles of the cold box in the back of their pickup and, with thoughts of finding saffron-colored crystals, they pushed on toward Trail Springs at the southeast edge of the Jackson Mountains. When they topped the hill, they were looking into a big open basin that ran north about three or four miles, and west into the stark emptiness of the Black Rock Desert. In the bottom of the basin, there was a round, metal trough, the kind that will hold about 2,500 gallons of water – if it’s full. Ron stopped the truck.

“I couldn’t believe what I was seeing,” he tells me later at my kitchen table. Normally, he is full of funny stories and gossip, but today, his jaw is set and he barks with impatience at my questions. He wants to be rid of the memory of dying horses.

“The basin was full of horses, up on the hills, coming down to the trough, hundreds of them. The trough was empty and there were horses standing in it! And all around it,” he said.

He spun the empty coffee cup rocking like a top, then grabbed it and set it down gently.

“Up in that basin, you could see stud bunches everywhere you looked, all coming in to water. I counted 170 head before they blew out of there to the west. It looked like an atom bomb went off.”

He shakes his head remembering how the dust washed up both sides of those hills swirling in a wave that closed together at the top in a huge apocalyptic cloud.

“That was on Aug. 12; the date was on the pictures we took,” he said.