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more than a few months old. He still needed to be at his mother’s side. I just felt like he was pleading for my help. He could survive these wounds if he was given a chance. That’s all he needed … just a chance.”
    “That’s when I thought of you … and felt that if he could survive the two-day trip home, smashed in with dozens of others who were twice his size, he was meant to be yours.” As she looked at me, I could see that her heart had been greatly moved by this tiny colt.
    “At every sale there is a veterinarian present to inspect eachanimal that will cross the border into the U.S. They are instructed to pull all horses that exhibit any lumps, bumps, obvious swelling, or open wounds. We had three foals pulled from our herd because of random swellings. I had hardly finished telling the hosts that I would gladly pay to have this pitiful little colt vetted until he was cleared for travel, when suddenly the attending vet just waved him on through as ‘fit to continue.’
    “We loaded up the ‘kids’ and drove six hours to the U.S. line, and then had to unload everyone for their final border inspection. For the second time in a day, an inspector looked right at him and gave the order to load him back into the trailer!
    “I never thought that I would be happy to have a truckload of muddy babies … but I realize now that I sure am grateful for all the muck on the littlest one! Who knew that a little well-placed mud on a wound could open palace doors?”
    Bathed in the beautiful light of early evening, Virginia and I continued our search through the herd for this special little babe who had already survived so much. The enclosure for the young horses was very large and supplied with a half dozen or more giant bales of hay for the youngsters to free-choice graze from. Even in their exhaustion, the horses were still wary of human approach. The entire corral moved like a lazy river of shifting, eating, and napping infants. “You won’t believe it when you see him … he is such a cutie patutie!”
    I laughed out loud at her trademark nickname of adoration.
    “Look for the smallest baby in the herd; he is a beautiful buckskin. Did I mention that he has a wide blaze and three high white socks?”
    I glanced at Virginia. She amazed me. Her brain was a virtual horse-sorting computer. In all her years of dealing with horses,
thousands of horses
, she never forgot a single detail, nota snipe, a blaze, a sock, or a stripe. She remembered them all, each for their very best attributes, each with much affection.
    “There he is!” she said, and pointed to a small herd of about a dozen youngsters who were moving away from us.
    I looked but saw no buckskin among them. I looked back at Virginia and verified the direction she was pointing, but still did not see him. When we turned directly toward the small group, they parted like a flock of birds. Virginia was right; hidden amongst the bigger, stronger weanlings was a tiny golden baby.
    My enthusiasm to finally see him was momentarily interrupted when his hind end came fully into my view. As he turned and began moving directly away from me, I could clearly see the injuries on both sides of his rump. Although the gashes on his right rump were partially hidden by mud and hair, the left rump injury was over a foot long vertically, with a fist-sized chunk of flesh that was bitten right out of the middle. It was horrifyingly unmistakable. How could anyone with two eyes not see this?
    Dear Lord … how has this infant survived?
I thought, as I noticed a dry trail of bloody serum nearly the width of my arm crusted down the remaining length of his leg.
    I could hardly speak. He
was
small! His tiny stature was supported on stilt-like legs with gigantic knees and even bigger feet. He moved with the same huge-footed “flippity-floppity” gait of a large-breed puppy — the same kind of puppy that makes everyone look at its feet and say, “Holy Cow! This one’s going to