Wild by Cheryl Strayed

It took the death of a beloved horse to make me cry and then to make me understand how nature can help us understand our own lives. Lady, a registered American Saddlebred, was not my horse. She belonged to Cheryl Strayed, the author of Wild, the account of Strayed's hike more than a decade ago along the Pacific Coast Trail and the events that prompted her journey.

Strayed is not a particularly sympathetic narrator, despite the abandonment by her father, the death of her mother from cancer and her own recent divorce. Neither is she an especially credible narrator unless the reader is to believe that a woman who is smart enough to write two books didn't realize that her backpack-luggage was too heavy to carry hundreds of miles on rugged, sometimes dangerous terrain even though she could barely lift it without first sitting down. Nor did she think to pack a hiking stick, though she brought along a stash of condoms -- just in case.

Even so, the links between nature and humanity became obvious to me when Strayed wrote of putting down Lady, her ailing, 31-year-old horse. Because she couldn't afford a veterinarian, Strayed decided to summon her brother Leif to help her shoot the horse. She'd been told that death by gunfire would be instant, painless for Lady. So, Strayed brought Lady out, tied her to a tree and stood by Leif as he followed her instructions and shot the horse "Right between her eyes."

Yet Lady's death was neither sudden nor painless. "She bolted so hard her leather halter snapped into pieces and fell away from her face, and then she stood unmoving, looking at us with a stunned expression," Strayed writes.

So, Leif shot again, firing three more bullets into Lady's head. "She stumbled and jerked, but she didn't fall and she didn't run, though she was no longer tied to the tree. Her eyes were wild upon us, shocked by what we'd done, her face a constellation of bloodless holes."

The pain, the suffering, the sense of betrayal linger until Lady finally dies. But only after Strayed told how Lady looked at Strayed and her brother "with a stunned expression" did I grasp the link between a horse and a person, maybe even myself. Strayed's gentle horse was stunned, not only because of the bullet, but more importantly because the people she had trusted made it happen. To Lady, they had betrayed her.

How many times have we also been hurt, betrayed -- whether physically or mentally -- by people we thought loved us or at least cared for us? Maybe they did love us at least once upon a time; maybe not. If we survive the hurt to deal with those people -- whether friends, colleagues, spouses, others -- then we have our own decisions to make. Do we trust them again? Do we watch our backs as we continue the relationship? Do we act by doing nothing? Or do we take chances, make compromises with our own lives because rarely is anything -- even death, divorce, abandonment -- as simple, clean or clear-cut as we once thought it was, back in the days before betrayal, before we woke up, before it happened. Before. Before. ...

Rarely, are solutions to difficult problems, to betrayals, a clean shoot; a clean, painless, instant end. And maybe non-fiction is that way, too. Maybe the truth just doesn't always add up. Maybe the truth doesn't even always seem credible, even when it is. So, perhaps Strayed is far more credible than I gave her credit for at the start of this review. Maybe just as she was clearly unprepared for some of the rugged terrain of life -- marriage, drugs and death among them -- perhaps that explains why she also was unprepared for nature's challenges on the Pacific Coast Trail.