A Fearless Lady Byrd Adventure
A passenger on board a fast-moving train glimpses a couple of brown horses in an unkempt field. She sees them again the next year, and the year after.
She wonders if they are neglected or loved for by their owner. That small field may be the horses' last protection against a one-way trip to the slaughterhouse...
A short but haunting true story by Michèle Laframboise, Canadian multi-award winner author. A list of horse rescue centers, with sketches by the author, completes the tale.
I have gotten used to the rhythmic beat of the joints, not the occasional screeching of metal wheels against the rail. I thought about our ancestors, their time of traveling counted in weeks and days rather than hours and minutes. They went on horseback, in cart, sleigh or snowshoes in winter.
I gradually built some benchmarks. After Guildwood, the track ran along the shore of Lake Ontario, offering to my window a vista of water flooded with sunlight or threatened with gray clouds. Near Mallorytown, a school bus without wheels was stationed forever in the middle of a sugar bush.
The pond with the beaver hut came a few minutes before slicing through the town of Tweed.
But there was a special place in my memory, an image that would haunt me in later years.
Two brown horses standing in a scrap yard.
END of extract
This is a very short book for those who learn English.