They herded us along the gully, dry after the summer’s heat, the river shrunk to pools of water full of frogs. At last we came to a blind canyon with cliffs on three sides, and rocks tumbled to the ground. And horses, a sea of horses, crammed between the cliffs.
I had never seen so many horses; they had almost no room to move at all.
We stumbled in among them—slowly, for we were tired. But I had the strength to call out, to see if any of the other stallions might challenge me.
No one did. It seemed I was still the King. But King of what? Could a horse held by humans be a king?
White Foot and I kept the other horses away as one by one our mob drank from the pools. There was no grass left. The other horses must have been here for days. The ground was thick with droppings.
I looked and smelt and searched for some way out. The cliffs were too steep, and the men had put up another barrier between them, bushes tied together with that long white stuff so that we couldn’t pass.
And so we waited, there in the canyon, to see what the men would do next.