Since the fall the colt had also lost nearly one hundred pounds. With all the good grazing in the last few weeks, the colt had gained nearly all of it back, along with some of the muscle mass he’d lost due to the inefficient way his injuries had forced him to move.

Even though his body was healing and he wasn’t in as much pain, he still found the need for taking several naps during the day. It was during one of these afternoon naps under the branches of a large Douglas fir tree near a bend in the river, that he awoke to a familiar scent floating on the breeze. The scent was faint and in an attempt at discerning what it was, he curled his top lip back toward his nostrils, raised his head and inhaled. Doing this helped expose the vomeronasal organ at the base of his nasal passages and drew the scent molecules back toward it. The scent was suddenly amplified in his brain and gave him an explosion of information.

He had picked up the fading odor of a band of horses. As far as he could tell there were the scents of at least ten different horses in the little herd, with three, maybe four of the animals being mares, and one of them smelled to be at the end of her heat cycle. He laboriously trotted toward the river, stopped, and repeated the behavior, which allowed him to gain more information about them. They had passed by no more than three days before, crossed the river somewhere near here and headed for the tall rolling hills off in the distance.

He curled his lip and inhaled one last time, picking up on something else that was immediately confusing to him. The mares were relatively easy to single out; they smelled more or less like any other female horse he had ever come in contact with. But there was something different about the males. There was no question in his mind that they were males, but even at that, they didn’t smell like any male he had ever come in contact with. There was something about the intensity of the odor—that part of the odor that made a male a male—that seemed to be missing, somehow, and that was what puzzled him.

The colt called out loudly, then raised his head and held his breath to make sure he would be able to clearly hear any return call. He waited for several seconds, then snorted loudly and called out again. Nothing came back. It wasn’t surprising to him. After all, the band had a three-day head start on him and even if they were only moving at a slow walk, they were almost certainly out of earshot of even his loudest calls.

The colt crossed the river and with renewed energy coming out the other side, broke into a trot in the direction he estimated the band had traveled. Moving on mostly adrenaline, the colt trotted for the better part of an hour before the muscles in his right shoulder finally gave out. He slowed to a walk but kept moving for the rest of the afternoon and late into the night. He rested for only a few hours before starting out after the band once again just before dawn. He forced himself into a painful trot, stopping only occasionally to check the air or ground for evidence of the band and to make sure he hadn’t lost their trail. By mid morning, he had come across an area where the band had stopped to graze and bed down. There were plenty of manure and urine spots in the grass, and more than once he made the effort to smell the urine spots of the males to try to figure out why they were so different. But even with smelling their urine, it gave him no more information than he already had.