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My mare whinnies, a high-pitched sound. She’s calling to her herd. I hear nothing in return, but she lunges forward suddenly, breaking into an all-out gallop. I am along for the ride again, doing my best to match her motion and not get in her way.
She’s going somewhere. I can feel the purpose in her movement beneath me. Riding this mare is very different than the stallion I wanted. He was massive and powerful, given to proud prancing and aggressive movement. She is narrower through her withers, faster, maybe even stronger in her own way.
We round a bend carved by the river and splash through the shallows. That’s when she starts calling. Over and over. Crying out over this barren world where not so much as a rabbit runs. I’d like to see some tumbleweed right now. This girl just wants to see her herd.
A thin cry in the distance returns hers. Her speed increases to a full gallop. We are racing toward destinations unknown, a family she knows and has missed.
The cry comes again, closer this time, but high pitch. And that’s when I see it, a leggy little creature coming over the rise as fast as we are galloping toward it.
It’s a foal. It’s her foal.
Old enough to be weaned, maybe six or seven months, but not so old the mare wants to leave her to the world.
“Is that your baby? What a pretty baby,” I coo.
The little bay filly trots up to us, a smaller carbon copy of her mother. She has a naturally high leg action and carries her head proudly too. They’re a beautiful pair, even if they don’t have any fancy coloring.
It’s so incredibly sweet to see them touch noses and breathe softly at one another. Some mares forget their babies quickly once separated from them. Others keep them close for a lifetime, though only if they’re girls. Colts will eventually be driven off to a bachelor band that roams to find new mates.
This is so sweet I almost forget what is at stake. My freedom, and theirs too, no doubt.
The irony that I came here to catch a stallion is not lost on me, but I had the intention of taming it down and helping it live a happy life in captivity, not being preyed on by the wild dogs which must surely roam these plains. Horses are prey, and where there is prey, there must be predators.
My predators are a band of the king’s warriors. They have given chase, and they have made up time when we were pausing and drinking and reuniting with the baby.
Our reunion has to be a swift one. All three of us can all hear the thundering hooves of the chase behind us. And we all know the danger they represent, the imminent prospect of recapture.
My mare’s head goes up and she whinnies to her foal. We are off like the wind, up through the hills which have become eroded over time and in many places are nothing but dust and rocks on the steeper inclines.
“Looks like we’re in goat country,” I murmur to myself. I don’t see any, but there’s little round pellets, spoor which suggests some kind of ruminant that thrives in these conditions. My guess, they probably contain more earth-related DNA left over from the stock of distant settlers.
I see the mark of humanity’s voyages everywhere. In the mare beneath me, and in the foal trotting along beside us. We have spread far, and we have taken our beasts of burden, predators, and prey alike with us. I remember reading in school how humanity is considered by some alien species to be an infection, because of the way we spread so easily, contaminating pure ecosystems with our DNA. One of the guys in the class said that was because we’d fuck anything. We all laughed. He got sent to the principal’s office. Good times.
He was right, too. Epona Prime is twelve light-years away from Earth. The first humans to reach this place had to do it on an intergenerational ship. It took six generations of humans almost three hundred and sixty years to reach this world. It took me sixteen weeks, and a lot of that was travel time waiting in various space stations for connecting flights. This is not on any major routes, and the shuttles that do come out here for resupply and trade are slower than most. They can take me, though, and they would have been able to take the stallion I damn near caught.
We start to go down the other side of the hillocks, and in the distance, I see mountains. They weren’t visible at first because of the thick cloud which surrounds them. For the first time since we started moving, I feel hope. If I can get to those mountains, or even to the base of them, I might be able to lose the stallion king and his herd in the cloud.
