“Again,” the woman repeated. “Step back again.” The man stepped back. This time, the colt lowered his head and took two confident steps in the man’s direction. “One more time,” the woman said. The man stepped back and the horse, almost as if on cue, walked right up to him and presented his left shoulder to the man, just as he had to the woman on the very first day she had gone in with him. The man slowly turned to the woman and shrugged his shoulder as if to say, Now what?

“Pet him on the shoulder, for crying out loud,” she laughed. The man reached up and touched the colt so gently that the young horse barely felt it. “You’re not going to break him,” the woman said. “Go ahead and pet him; he’ll be all right.”

The man reached up and began to quietly stroke the colt on the shoulder. He had watched the woman carefully the whole time she was with the colt, and to the best of his ability, he mimicked everything he saw her do with the young horse. He started very small, touching the horse on the shoulder, then his neck and withers and slowly branching out from there so that eventually he was touching, petting and stroking the colt all over his body.

The man’s touch felt different to the colt than the woman’s. Like the difference in their individual odors, which were the same, but not the same. In either case, the colt found it much easier to transfer the information he had been learning from the woman than he ever would have thought. The man’s actions were so similar to hers the colt quickly began to relax with him, just as he had with her. It was slowly becoming clear to him that neither of these humans seemed to want to harm him, as he had always thought they might.

Ever since the colt walked into the pen at the Essex place by following the herd of strange horses he had stumbled across out in the wild, he had been frightened by humans. Their smell, their movement and most everything about them kept him on edge. But all that seemed to be changing. Because of the time the woman with the long hair and big hat had spent with him, he was now starting to look at humans in a completely different light. He was slowly starting to understand that being around the humans offered him a certain level of comfort he had never expected, and much to his surprise, he actually liked it.

The man spent the better part of thirty minutes petting and rubbing the colt. Every once in a while he would stop long enough to take a short walk around the pen with the colt following him, just as he had with the woman. Finally, the man reached up and stroked the colt lightly on his forehead, then turned and left the pen. The colt followed him to the gate, and just as he had been doing with the woman, stopped there and watched him step out and latch the gate behind him.