Horse Heaven Read Free

him, and he isn’t mean with them, only bossy. It’s the people who are blind and stubborn. Epic Steam would like to see a person, just one, who can pay attention and meet his standard. Almost two now, he is frequently termed “a monster,” sixteen hands, with a great arching neck and ribs that spring away from his lungs and his oversized heart. His haunches are a county of their own; his tail streams like a black banner almost to the ground.
    Residual knows who she is, too. She is the one who is always walking around the pasture, stopping, lifting her head, having a look, walking on. She is the one with the meditative air. When they handle her, they’ve learned from her to wait just a second. The farrier asks her to lift her foot—there’s a momentary pause, and then it’s clear that she has decided, and she lifts her foot. They say that she is easy to get along with, and so she is. When she runs around with the other fillies, she doesn’t barge to the front, but instead hangs back for a second and waits for an opening, then flows into it. She is fifteen hands two inches, well developed and nicely built for two-year-old racing. She has big haunches, a graceful neck, and an attractive head that is short but beautifully molded. She has pretty, mobile ears. Her chestnut coat is richly colored, preternaturally fine. Her right knee turns out, like her sire’s. At the Saratoga sale, she brought a disappointing twenty-four thousand dollars.
    The bay colt knows who he is, too, and so does his breeder, who simply calls him “Wow.” The youngest of the four, he has not left home yet, so every day his handlers see that he has inherited from his grandsire, Independence, a gallop that is easier for him than standing still. His idea of relaxing is galloping around the pasture, speeding up, slowing down, turning, sweeping around a large curve. He works on his stride and pacing every day while others are sleeping, play-fighting each other, eating, except that it isn’t work, it is his natural activity, his default option. He gallops in response to every stimulus. He isn’t as big or as pretty as some other yearlings, and his conformation isn’t perfect, either. He has a long back, slightly swayed, and long hind legs. His neck is skinny. His head is a bit common, until you look at his eyes, soulful, long-lashed. He is pleasant to handle but distracted, half ignoring you, waiting, always, to go back outside. He was too young and undeveloped in the summer to go to a sale, and his owner is thinking of racing him.
    Froney’s Sis is the only one who isn’t sure who she is. Orphaned at a month old, when her dam colicked in the night and died, she was put in with a mini-horse for companionship, and fed milk from a bucket, because she was too oldto go to a nurse mare. The mini-horse was a patient fellow. He stood quietly near her, moved away from the feed bucket when she wanted to eat, grazed almost underneath her, even trotted around companionably while she romped and kicked up and galloped, but he wasn’t matter-of-fact about things, the way a mare would be. He didn’t nuzzle her much, and he wasn’t possessed of that throaty, loving nicker that is a specialty of mares. Most of all, his interest in her wasn’t the compelling element of his existence, as a mare’s interest in her foal would be. A mare would be pushy and interfering and attentive. A mare would call out and trot over; a mare’s body language would be telling the filly what to think and how to behave twenty-four hours a day. But the mini-horse didn’t have a mare’s body language. Already culture has interfered with nature in the case of Froney’s Sis—the twigs of her personality are like the shoots of an espaliered apricot tree; however nice she becomes, she may never know who she is.
    Her owner, Mr. Kyle Tompkins, seems to own everything else in central California, too. On a hot, sunny piece of land so vast and featureless that it offers no limits or