Carrying on from The Mare and the Mouse, this series, The Stories of My Horses, is not just a compendium of imaginative romantic narratives written to casually entertain the horse loving public.

As romantically remembered as they might seem to be, they are actually straightforward historical accounts of what happens when a life-loving fool like me, a native of that beautiful, landlocked cultural island called Northern New Mexico, who in the latter half of the 20th century decided he must live his everyday life in direct defiance of the soul-shrinking threat of modernity’s earth-wrecking ugliness and mediocre existence, by keeping some modicum of the bright shine and outrageous living passion of our real souls alive by flying free and beautiful on the backs of flesh and blood horses over a live unpeopled, unmanicured land…

I’ll admit I’m a romantic and heroic. But to be honest, it’s not my fault: it’s the fault of all the horses I’ve ever known. For horses since forever—real horses, I mean—have always been romantic, noble and heroic by definition of their very existence, and to be with them, well, you too have to develop a soul that corresponds!

In my romantic struggle for beauty in an unromantic mechanical age, my horses, simply by how they were, and how we looked, and how we were together, although no more than a tiny broadside against the ghost ship of mediocrity of this crazy age, were some kind of victory just by the fact that we still existed. Horses inspire courage against hopeless odds just by their courage and beauty.