We parked near the empty stands. Dew still clung to the tough desert grass around the fences, and the state racing steward was working on his first beer of the day. “Fella from Wyoming,” I heard him say.

Rocky was running a stakes race with the biggest purse of the summer and she was the favorite, even against a black filly named Provincial Lady, who’d beaten her in Spokane. She looked good: healthy and watchful. She never sweated before a race, never got uptight. Her stall was dark, with the musky chemical smell of clean horses and their medicines, and she knocked her head against my hands. I slipped under the rope to stand near her, and she shivered in one rippling motion from her neck to her haunches, and swished her tail. She lifted one foot to step away from me, then stayed. I felt a sudden, aching rush of love for her, a tightness in my lungs. I ran my hand along her nose, told her she had wings.

“Here to watch your filly win?” a voice behind me said, and there was Connell, wearing an unfastened padded vest, come from exercising horses at dawn.

“Look at her,” he said. “That’s a horse who knows how fast she is.”

“She always looks like that,” I said.

“That’s true,” he said.

Beneath my arm on Rocky’s neck I felt her breathing. Her ears were turned toward Connell. “I don’t want her to win if she can’t win fairly,” I said.

Connell did his trick of gazing off to the horizon and he frowned, then turned on me a brilliant smile. “I feel good today,” he said. “I don’t think I can lose.”

The announcer read the lineup for the first race.

“See you in the winner’s circle,” Connell said, and he walked off toward the track.

The only last-minute way out of a race without a vet is if the horse goes over in a fit and hits the ground, and even then the paddock judge can claim not to see it. Rocky was calm and healthy; I couldn’t get her to throw a fit at the gate. The horses came back from exercises, drenched and snorting, heads checked, and I tried to think what to do.

The boy in the race office gave me a wary look. He was skinny, and wore a fat braided belt with a trophy buckle. “You’re pulling your horse? Is she sick?”

“No, I just want to pull her.”

“Programs are printed; you need a vet,” the boy said.

I studied his annotated program and decided to try lying. “I don’t think she’s in shape for seven furlongs,” I said. “What about the eighth?” He had a ballpoint mark across the eighth race, a claiming race; one of the four horses in it had scratched.

“Five furlongs,” he said. “But someone scratched so it won’t go off.”