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hair grows faster so they don’t get cold.”
    The boy horse with the black patch was starting to work out that the apple was something nice. He bit it in two: Uchenna could hear the sharp crunch of it from ten feet away. Then he straightened up, chewing, and the two other boy horses looked at him with interest. One of them went over to the other half of the apple, snuffled at it, and picked it up in his mouth, mumbling it around like he wasn’t sure what to do with it.
    “Where did they come from?” Emer said, leaning beside her and holding out the plastic bag to Uchenna. The second boy horse was chewing, now, and the third one had come over to him to see what he had.
    Emer shook her head as she dug into the bag for another apple. “It’s too far to walk them over here from the road,” she said. “Somebody must have brought them in a trailer or something…”
    “But why?” Uchenna said. “Who do they belong to?” She pulled out an apple too, threw it toward the mammy horse.
    Emer shook her head again. “Maybe somebody who knows whoever owns this field,” she said. “I think people rent their fields out sometimes so that other people can graze their cows or sheep or whatever on them…”
    Uchenna shrugged. Though she’d been born in Ireland, this was part of life here she didn’t really know much about. She was a city kid: or at least she’d thought of herself that way until the family moved here. The family’s previous house had been buried deep in miles and miles of suburbs, all front yards and driveways as far as the eye could see: pastures and fields with crops growing in them were something you didn’t see until you got on the motorway to go for a Sunday drive or to go to the airport. She could still remember her shock when the family had flown back from London, once, and she’d looked down as they landed and seen the cows grazing in fields just past the runway.
    Now one of the boy horses took a couple of steps toward them. Uchenna began feeling nervous again: the other horses’ heads had come up, and they were watching their braver friend to see what he did. “How many apples have we got left?” she said to Emer.
    Emer dug around in the rustly plastic bag. “Six…”
    “No way this is going to come out even,” Uchenna said, as a second of the boy horses took a step toward them. “That first one’s taking everybody else’s share. Greedy pig!— Look, just throw the apples out there, let them sort it out.”
    Emer rolled the remaining apples across the grass to the horses. The two boys and the mammy horse’s black-and-white friend moved forward, nosing at the apples as Uchenna turned to climb back up the gate. It wobbled.
    “Hey, wait for me,” Emer said. But Uchenna was halfway over already. Emer braced the gate while the horses snuffled at the apples, picking them up and then chomping on them, so that small pieces and chunks sprayed in various directions around the grass. Uchenna turned and hopped down and braced the gate for Emer: Emer climbed up and over, and came down beside Uchenna.
    For a few moments more they watched the horses squabble gently over the remaining bits of apple on the poached-up ground, snorting at each other and shoving each other out of the way. Only the mammy horse hung back, watching the others, looking sad and extremely heavy: when she moved, she let out a little whuff of breath that almost sounded like a moan.
    “She hardly got any,” Uchenna said under her breath. “Poor thing.” She glanced around the little field. It wasn’t big—maybe the size of the property her house stood on, or a little more than that. And there wasn’t that much grass in it. A lot of what there was had already been grazed down short. “This can’t be all they eat,” she said to Emer. “It’s almost all gone, and they just got here.”
    Emer shook her head. “I think they have to have other food too,” she said. “I don’t know. Oats? Some kind of grain, anyway. And