“If ‘in hand’ means what I think it means,” I whispered fiercely to Dawnette, “old Sailor can jerk himself off.”

“It means,” she said haughtily, “you got to control old Sailor with this here breeding halter and this here lead shank.”

“You can’t be serious,” I said.

But she was. Gingerly I took the lead line, about six feet long, which was linked to fourteen inches of chain attached to the halter, and led Sailor toward the mare on the inboard side of the fence.

He sauntered across the paddock, as benign and gentle as a teddy bear. Everything was going well, and with much more restraint than my extravagant fears had predicted. It was a piece of cake, and I was inwardly exalted. I could, it seemed, control this towering monadnock with the flick of a wrist. An immaculate triumph, all the sweeter for having been spared the odium of priming his pump.

Then he saw Fritillary. He stood for a second or two drinking her in, transported by her presence, his big head cocked stupidly. And then, as if she were the executrix of some crowning accomplishment, Fritillary spread her gaskins in an indelicate approximation of a squat and peed again. Buckets, and Sailor went apeshit. He neighed shrilly, a high piercing shriek, like a hysterical, sex-starved locomotive, but there was in it a primordial echo of Eocene quagmires and flinty mesas and that untamed tenacity which in the higher species has been known to confound desire with mayhem as a means of satisfying it.