IN THE MIDDLE OF THE STREAM

The Salt River is a source of water for metropolitan Phoenix, and it's a source of recreation on the Tonto National Forest. It's also a watering hole for a band of about 100 horses that live in limbo. They don't belong to anyone, and, unlike other wild horses in our country, they're not protected by the Wild Free-Roaming Horses and Burros Act of 1971. Their future is uncertain, but they're not without advocates.

Awhite stallion stands knee deep in the shallows of the Salt River, plunging his muzzle into the algae-scented water. In a few seconds, he pulls out a mouthful of dripping river grass. The stallion chews contentedly. Not 12 feet away, two kayaks bob in the ripples. In the first kayak, a slender woman dressed in a cowboy hat, a striped T-shirt, a short floral skirt and boat shoes paddles by. She's got the looks of a runway model (which, she says, she once was) with long, straight blond hair, blue-gray eyes, and an exquisitely proportioned face. Her name is Simone Netherlands. She's 41 years old, a horse trainer, and an impassioned advocate for the Salt River horses.

Born in Amsterdam, she eventually settled in the United States and began importing and training horses. She became a horse advocate seven years ago, when she looked for a horse at an auction, couldn't find it and was told by a buyer that the horse was probably on its way to a slaughterhouse. Now she campaigns against irresponsible "puppy mill" horse breeders who produce too many horses, against federal officials who round up wild horses from public lands, against horse slaughter, and for the safety and protection of all horses, including the Salt River horses, which she and other horse advocates fear may be rounded up and sent into uncertain futures.

This explains why, for months, she's driven her black Chevy Silverado pickup from her Yavapai County home to the banks of the Salt River near Mesa, where she unloads her kayak, hops in and paddles along the river to check on the well-being of about 100 horses divided into several bands.

The horses on the Salt River are accustomed to admiring, camera-clicking tourists floating past them, so they're easy to observe when they stand in the river to cool off on warm afternoons. "This is an ideal life for a horse," Netherlands says. She's making a documentary about the horses, and she knows them well. She notices the white stallion - she calls him White Lightning - is blind in one eye. Today he's got a companion a sorrel mare belonging to an established band dominated by a more powerful, older stallion she calls Floyd. White Lightning has trailed Floyd and his herd for months, Netherlands tells me, perhaps hoping to lure away a mare and start his own band.

I'm perched in a two-seat inflatable kayak. Scribbling notes, I'm happy that Sebastian Pisa, a 39-year-old commercial airline pilot from Argentina who loves to photograph the Salt River horses, has volunteered to paddle me down the river. Just hours ago, Pisa had met another kayaking Argentine who had come to photograph the horses. The two men grew up in the same Buenos Aires neighbor-hood. They'd never met before, but their admiration of the Salt River horses put them at the same place - a boat launch on the river just a few miles north of Mesa, in the Tonto National Forest at exactly the same time.

The Salt River is a water source for the Phoenix metro area. It's also the national forest's biggest tourist draw. The Salt River horses play a key role in river tourism - thanks to word of mouth, Face-book and YouTube, tens of thousands of people all over the world are Salt River horse fans. Many visit the river to see them.

Pisa happened upon the horses by chance. Like so many kayakers, tubers, fishermen, campers and hikers who are mesmerized by the horses, he's returned to the river again and again to observe the animals and take photographs. On one trip, he met Netherlands' son, who explained his mother's efforts to protect the horses. After that, Pisa began kayaking with Netherlands herself, absorbing her knowledge of the bands.

"They should put horses on postage stamps," Netherlands tells Pisa as he pilots our kayak.

We hear a whinny.

It's Floyd, the older stallion from the established band, ordering the sorrel mare to return. He's offshore, camouflaged by lush cottonwoods. The mare ambles back in his direction. Abandoned, White Lightning paws the river, spraying silver water in the air. Pisa takes his picture.

The river carries us past two mallards resting in a shaded back-water, past a granite boulder blanketed with blue graffiti, past a pebbled sandbar thick with reeds.

The white stallion vanishes from our sight.

Today, the Salt River horses roam freely between the Tonto National Forest, the Fort McDowell Yavapai Nation and the Salt River Pima-Maricopa Indian Community. But neither the Indian communities, which are sovereign nations, nor the U.S. Forest Service claim the horses.

They are nobody's horses, and they're vulnerable.

Their plight forces us to ask serious questions about ourselves, and about the management of public lands in the American West. Are the Salt River horses an expensive nuisance to be disposed of? Or are they a moneymaking tourism draw that could help public land managers? Are they feral pests? Or are they a living link to the Wild West, a heritage to treasure and pass on to future generations?

As a nation, we first tackled this question, more broadly, in 1971, when Congress passed the Wild Free-Roaming Horses and Bur-ros Act to protect "all unbranded and unclaimed burros on public lands in the United States." At the time, hundreds of thousands of America's beloved wild mustangs descendants of animals ridden by Spanish conquistadors and padres, by Indian warriors and cavalry soldiers, by miners and outlaws and cowboys were rounded up on public lands and slaughtered for profit and pet food.

The 1971 federal law declared that wild horses and burros on public lands were worthy of protection because they were "living symbols of the historic and pioneer spirit of the West" that "enriched the lives of the American people."

That same year, 1971, the Tonto National Forest conducted a survey and claimed there were no free-roaming wild horses on the forest, says Gary Hanna, the district ranger for the Mesa District of the forest. Today, the current Salt River horses are not protected because their ancestors were not tallied in the 1971 survey. Selena Espinoza, a member of the Salt River Pima-Maricopa Indian Community, says community elders who were around in