Wyatt pulls the skiff alongside a small pier that juts out from an empty lot covered with grass-speckled sand and shrubby pines. The trip across the bay was fast, windy, and too loud to talk, but here it’s quiet, except for the birds singing in the trees. He leads the girls across the property to a topless black Jeep. “My parents own this land. Eventually they’re going to build a summer rental here, but for now . . .”

“It’s beautiful.” Willa climbs into the back of the Jeep and sits on an upturned five-gallon bucket so Taylor can have the front-seat legroom.

Wyatt grins at Willa in the rearview mirror. “It gets better.”

He backs off the lot and heads down an unpaved sand road, past an elevated rental house with multiple wraparound decks. An SUV is parked under the stilts, and a bunch of kids are splashing around in a pool behind the house. “So right now we are just north of Corolla in Carova, which is basically the end of civilization on the Outer Banks,” Wyatt explains. “We don’t have any shops or restaurants or even roads up here. Just miles of beach and our herd of wild horses.”

At the corner, he turns north. The houses to their right are closest to the beach, separated from the ocean by dunes. Every now and then, Willa catches a glimpse of blue water between the hills of sand.

“The first appearance of the wild colonial Spanish mustangs dates back about five hundred years,” Wyatt says. “One theory is that they were abandoned by Spanish explorers who tried to settle the area but were chased out by the local natives. Another is that they swam ashore during a shipwreck of an English cargo ship on its way to the colonies from the Caribbean.”

He pulls into a sand “driveway” toward a three-level house sided with brown wooden shingles. It’s not as huge as some of the beachfront houses they passed, but it has the same wraparound decks on every level.

“Either way, most of the horses on the Outer Banks are descendants of those mustangs,” Wyatt continues. “But the Corolla herd has reproduced almost exclusively within the herd for nearly five centuries, so they’re genetically closest to the originals.”

They climb a flight of wooden steps to the elevated front porch, and Wyatt pushes open the door.

“This is my house,” he says, dropping his car keys on a table beside the door. The open living room is painted sunshine yellow, except for one wall filled with windows overlooking the ocean. “And today it’s the perfect place to see the horses for two reasons. First, the wind is blowing in the right direction to bring them to the beach. And second . . .”