I paid less than $400 for Aaruba. His breeder wanted quiet Arabians, and Aaruba wasn’t. No, Aaruba was the plain gray, high-headed, wide-eyed, last straw that sent his sire to the vet for gelding.

I first saw him on the kind of windy, muddy day that whipped his mind to wildness. Still a leggy four-year-old, he flashed about the makeshift corral as if the storm were inside him. He offered no buck but plenty of air, a whirl flat knees, good hooves, and that indefinable something that trumpets, “I’m the one!”

We made the deal.

Aaruba came home sweet but troubled, ravaged by a sea of emotions, in desperate need of a captain.

Together, we navigated the straits of training ~ he the ship and I the sail ~ to open waters and sunny days. 

Nearly three years later, I can sometimes offer a bit of the captaincy to him. Yesterday, fresh from two weeks of winter weather and little work, he seemed nevertheless in a mental state to chart our course. And so, I settled into my saddle and handed him the wheel.

He ran.

For most of sixteen miles, he ran, and a winter storm gave chase. A frozen landscape streamed past, pulled tears from my eyes and sweat from his neck. We cantered free as water, free as wind, our bodies long and loose as the reins between us.

I scarcely touched his face or sides but listened instead to his language pure as breathing. Our path looped wide, spun at last on a gust toward home. Winter nipped his flying heels. Naked tree limbs shuddered and the bellies of the clouds grew pregnant with snow.

And I?

I clung astride that plain gray, high-headed, wild-eyed, will-o-the-wisp whose size and strength far outstripped my own, a creature more emotion than logic, more motion than matter, more worth than gold, and we were not afraid.