Jumper (10 page)

“I know.” I heaved a happy sigh. “That's okay. After all that we went through, I'm just glad she's really here. It's all over.”

Grandpa smiled. “Actually, Reese, it's only just begun.”

Thanks go to David Poulsen and Jodi Malm for their helpful advice on the general practices involved in shipping animals for meat, and to Sara Compton for allowing me to sit in on riding lessons at Teesdale English Riding School and for letting me “borrow” Grady, one of Teesdale's horses, for a promotional photo. An especially big thank-you is owed to Gigi Morse for sharing her insight and knowledge about show jumping, for inviting me to her horse shows so I could see first-hand what it's like, for reading this manuscript for accuracy, and for her sincere enthusiasm about the writing of this book.

While Reese's story is fictional, the events described in this novel are based on a real incident. On January 25, 1994, a military-sanctioned roundup of over 1,200 feral horses began on Canadian Forces Base Suffield. Those horses were called feral instead of wild because their forebears were originally domesticated horses that escaped or roamed, forming a herd that bred and became untamed. True wild horses have never been tamed, but for the purposes of this story I have referred to them as wild. I have also fictionalized the actual roundup for my story.

The Suffield wild horses roamed the military land for more than fifty years. In the early 1990s, arguments were made that the horses were destroying fragile grasslands, and the roundup began. Animal-rights activists opposed the roundup, fearing that the horses might be mistreated or sold for meat. Although the Canadian military put rules in place to try to protect the horses, there were later allegations that many of the horses, which were supposedly adopted legitimately, were slaughtered for profit. While these allegations were never proven, this scandal was the basis for Reese's story.

Michele Martin Bossley
is the author of a number of sports books for young readers. She is also the author of
Swiped
in the
Orca Currents
series. Michele lives with her family in Calgary, Alberta.

For more titles in the Orca Sports series, please
click here
.