Eventually, everyone from the ranch showed up. Tom and Terri, Tug, Ben, Matt and several humans the colt had never seen before. They all came into the pen, shook their heads, then left. As the sun rose higher in the sky, the stream of people coming to see the old horse’s body stopped and all was eerily quiet. The colt, now more nervous than he’d been since the first day he’d arrived, stood as far away from the body as he could get, clear in the far back corner of his pen. He couldn’t even bring himself to go and eat from the fresh pile of hay Ben had tossed to him just after seeing the old horse’s body for the first time that morning. He stood in that corner for a long time, until the sun was at its highest point in the sky, when down the alley came the sound of a large machine—a yellow tractor with a big hydraulic bucket on the front, and a back hoe at the rear. It belched heavy black smoke out of the stack that jutted upward from just in front of the cab, in which a sat a man working the machine’s controls—a very unnerving sight for the colt. He had never seen such a machine, and he wasn’t sure if what he was seeing was a different, gigantic, angular, and loud form of human, or if what he was seeing was actually two separate beings, one inside the other. The machine grunted and belched its way down the alley, then swung into the old gelding’s pen and stopped a short distance from where he lay.

Ben climbed out of the cab and grabbing a heavy chain from inside the bucket, looped one end around Zip’s hind legs, and the other into a heavy hook welded securely onto the bucket. He climbed back into the cab, and then cautiously and respectfully lifted the old horse off the ground. Once the gelding was completely off the ground, Ben backed the machine out of the pen, and slowly drove off down the alley, the old horse’s body swinging gently with each movement of the bucket.

Not only did the gray colt suddenly feel very alone, but he also began to see humans in a completely different light. After watching what they were able to do with the old horse’s body, he was beginning to understand humans had much more power over horses than he could ever imagine, and it worried him. If they could pick a horse right up off the ground, there was no telling what they could do to him, should they choose.

That afternoon, the colt began nervously pacing his pen along the fence opposite the pen where the old gelding had lived. The colt took eleven steps, turned toward the fence, took eleven steps back, turned again, and repeated the pattern for hours on end, stopping only briefly to get a mouthful of hay or a drink of water. Tug had Cat bring one of the saddle horses over from the barn and put him in the pen the old gelding had lived in to see if that would help settle the colt. It did seem to help some, but not much.