She had grown up caring for and following cattle, much as the seasons followed one another. She knew when a cow was ready to give birth, she knew when one of the calves was ill and she knew where to take them for grazing. She liked the cattle, their large brown eyes and their wet noses. She could inoculate them, ear tag them and doctor them but could not watch when they were shipped off for slaughter. Her father, Jed, made sure she knew they weren’t pets, but it didn’t stop her liking them any less.

It was the horses, though, that mystified her. As a child, she would question her father for hours about them, always beginning with, “Why?” until smiling in exasperation, he would throw up his hands, and tell her to go ask the horses themselves. When she was older, he showed her where to find the mustang herds that roamed the land bordering the farthest outreaches of their ranch. She would ride out on her chestnut gelding Rocky and together they would hunt for the wild ones, as she liked to call them. Those were her favorite days, although it gave her mother fits until she arrived back home in the fading light of the sun, as dusty as her horse and ready for supper.

All she ever knew about horses came from her father or watching the mustangs. It wasn’t that she didn’t know that other people treated their horses differently than she did, she had just never seen it, or sought it out. Shortly after her fourteenth birthday, her father took her with him to do business with another ranch nearby. After they had introduced themselves to their neighbor and walked around his place, she saw a large man atop a screaming, scrambling horse in a dusty pen with a blindfold on. The man was hollering, and digging his spurs into the mare’s sides that were already bloody. The horse, spent after long minutes of throwing herself into the air, staggered to a halt. Even after she stood, legs trembling, heaving for air and running with blood and sweat, the cowboy spurred her again. She put her head down and when the blindfold was ripped away, Jessie saw in her eyes that the horse that had been there had disappeared and all that was left was a bloody, sweaty imitation.

She cried all the way home. She was sobbing so hard her father took a hold of her shoulder and shook her.

“You can’t be this upset, Jessie. That is the way some horses are broken, it’s been going on for a long time and you can’t change it.”

Jessie, who had been starting colts under saddle since she was ten, gave him her sharpest blue-eyed gaze (the same gaze he often got from her mother), and said in a voice rough with crying, “I am not ever going to treat my horses like that. I don’t care who tells me different, and I don’t care how long it takes. They may as well have killed that mare for all the use she is going to be to them.”