The colt stayed primarily on the south side of the river and never ventured too far from where his herd left the banks during their journey to the top of the mesa. Often during the many long days he spent there he would stand in the shade of one of the cottonwood trees along the bank and stare in the direction of the mesa, as if waiting for the band’s return.

About a month after he had arrived in the valley with the river running through it, the colt was standing under one of those cottonwood trees. He had been staring in the direction of the mesa for nearly two hours when he let out a long sigh, glanced upstream to the east, then downstream to the west. He glanced briefly back up toward the mesa, lowered his head, turned and slowly began walking west, along the river’s bank. It wasn’t so much that something drew him in that direction as much as nothing drew him the other. He didn’t even know where he was going. All he knew was something was telling him he could no longer stay where he was.

The gray colt’s shoulder was still bothering him and his travel was slow. He kept to the bank of the river, stopping frequently to graze, drink and nap. He seemed to be napping a lot lately, more so than since he’d gone off the ledge of the mesa. While outwardly his cuts and bruises had nearly healed, it seemed to be the inward trauma that he was struggling with—the attack of the stallion, the fall from the ledge, the loss of his herd, and nearly dying in the dry riverbed. These were not things he would spend time agonizing over as individual events. In fact, he couldn’t really recall much detail of any of the experiences individually. To the colt, these were all things that just happened in life. They weren’t good or bad, necessarily, just things. Still, their cumulative effect seemed to be weighing him down like one massive weight sitting on his heart.

In the thirteen days since he left the cottonwood tree and headed west, the colt had traveled a little under seventy-five miles, never venturing too far from the river or the good grass that grew nearby. The landscape had gradually changed from flat, coarse ground surrounded by steep cliffs and few trees, to rolling hills dotted with sporadic stands of small and large evergreens, and of course, the occasional cottonwood growing by the river. It hadn’t rained much since the big storm and the hills on either side of the river were beginning to turn brown once again, although the grazing was still very good next to the river.

The colt’s cuts and gashes from the attack and subsequent fall were now nothing more than a number of black scars in his otherwise dark gray coat. There was a scar over his right eye, one on his flank and another on his hip. There were several on his legs, one on his neck and one on his chest. A couple of the bigger wounds, like the ones on his flank, hip and shoulder, still had a small strip of pink running down the middle of them where the skin hadn’t completely come together yet. None of the wounds were really a source of pain for him anymore, and with the exception of the limp he still had from the shoulder injury, his movement was beginning to develop more of a natural flow to it, rather than the stilted and labored way he had traveled while the wounds were healing.