Out of the Wild by Mark Rashid

Author:Mark Rashid
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Trafalgar Square Books

CHAPTER 22

Originally, Jessie planned on letting the colt be alone in the pen for a few days to let him settle into his new surroundings before she tried to work with him. What she quickly found, however, was a few days wasn’t enough. Not only was he not settled in a few days, the colt continued to move non-stop for nearly two weeks, pausing only briefly from time to time to eat, drink or take a short catnap before getting on the move again.

The colt was understandably disoriented and confused. Until the last several months, the only world the colt had known was the one he was born into. That of wandering a one-hundred-sixty-mile radius of open country with a small band of horses he’d known all his life. Since then, however, he’d come as close to death as any creature should and still come out alive; he’d become part of a band of horses so foreign to him there were times he wasn’t even sure they were horses. His freedom had been taken from him, and now, just as he had been getting used to the quiet routine of his new, smaller surroundings, even that had been taken from him. He had been forced into a metal box that transported him farther and faster in one day than he could have traveled on his own in a month, and then been placed in the middle of a whirlwind of activity with no way to get away from it. There were humans of different shapes, sizes and ages everywhere, and more horses than he’d seen in his lifetime. Not only that, but both horses and humans were coming and going so often he simply couldn’t keep up with all the commotion, and it caused him a great deal of anxiety.

But the thing that worried him the most was that a different human came to his pen each day to feed and water him, and then a completely different human would unexpectedly show up to clean the pen later in the day. It was the not knowing who to expect or when to expect them that kept the colt emotionally off-balance the most, and it was a huge struggle for him to keep up with it all. At the tender age of three years old, the colt simply had no life experience that could help him deal with what he was going through, and without being able to emotionally sort things out very well, he instinctively felt the need to keep himself moving. He didn’t know why, or for how long he would need to move, only that he felt better when he did.

Still, the time Jessie had given him to get used to the place had helped him. Even with all the commotion and the different people coming and going, after a while the colt was able to see it was all just that: commotion and people coming and going. Nobody appeared to want to harm him in any way, and in fact, two of the humans he had actually begun to feel relatively comfortable with, over time.

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