She reminded him over and again of the wild horse. A strawberry roan, bunchy little mare, got from his brother-in-law the summer Abby was six. The Pete horse was grown old and Tommy too. And there was this mare who just needed gentling. So she came. Portia, she’d been called. And what he remembered now was not her fear of mankind, which he understood and shared; and not those fine moments when her fear grew so great he felt ensnared by it, almost a rapture, as if each treaded a circuit known only to the other; and also not when he finally made enough gain with her to know he’d make no more and determined, hard as it was to admit, he was not the horseman to calm her or, easier, she not the creature to have around two small girls. While all this happened, what he recalled in those weeks after Leah returned—and this he’d forgotten for years for it had been one bad afternoon and nothing more—was the time she tried to kill him. It was that simple. Now he saw how clever she’d been, the cleverness nothing more than an animal suddenly flaring or perhaps even choosing her moment. He’d hitched her to the single-row cultivator to run through the hilled potato drills and they’d gone up the hillside above the house and went down the first row and halfway up the second, the dark dirt folding up soft and flaking like flour under his feet, the thick-leafed potato plants to either side seeming to grow even darker as the soil turned up between them and he’d fallen into the steady walking mesmerism of the job when the mare bolted: her hindquarters hunkered as she sprang away, the cultivator handles jerked from his hands, the machine tipped sideways tearing through the drills as the mare sprinted for the open field, Norman chasing half-assed behind, the looped and knotted lines around his neck and they went on that way until they came into the tall grass of the field and the cultivator tines caught and the machine flipped and he stumbled against it, still drawn forward, and fell, the back of his neck snapping hard when the lines drew tight, smacking his head against the ground. Even as he struck one hand was up getting the lines off his neck. His eyes spangled. He fought to gain his feet. The mare then turned and came onto him, raising her forefeet off the ground just inches to lunge, her lips twisted away from her broad snapping teeth, her eyes rolling huge with whites surrounding them in the sockets, the whites blared with bursting veins. She was over him, one hoof grazing his shoulder and the other concussing the air beside his head as his hand bunched tight and shot forward and he punched her hard in the soft tip of her nose. He broke his middle two knuckles and felt the gristle between her nostrils crumble and spread under the blow. There was a long time, perhaps a second, when his fist was driving hard into her and he twisted it to do as large a damage as possible. Then he sat down. The mare retreated a dozen feet and stood blowing, watching him. He rubbed his hand and only then cried out with the pain, only then knew it was broken. When he cried the mare’s ears came forward, first one, then the other, then both flickering before centering forward. He cursed her. She was gone. Already gone. A canning horse. She had no way to know this. She watched him sitting in the grass, the harness askew on her, the cultivator upside down to one side. After a moment she bent her neck forward and blew again. Great gobs of excited snot feathered out onto the grass. Then she dipped her head and grazed through the timothy to the rich clover below.