The Young Black Stallion (15 page)

That night he returned to the wharf to find a place to sleep. He tried to make himself comfortable behind a pile of lumber. His thoughts turned to Abu Ishak. Somewhere out there in the night, he knew the desert lord was searching for Shêtân and the one he blamed for the old herder’s death. Would Abu Ishak find the truck and follow their trail here? What if the locust storm hadn’t covered the truck’s tracks? What if …?

Rashid looked up into the sky. The stars were big, liquid and brilliant. Slowly his eyes began to close and he drifted off into the whirlpool of sleep. Just before he did, there came to his ears a sound, strange yet horribly familiar—the cry of a bird. It was not a night bird or a sleepless gull. It was the distant call of a hunter falcon. She was calling for him. She would haunt him for the rest of his days.

Years later and thousands of miles away, Alec Ramsay heard that same falcon cry. He lay on the ground beneath a canopy of stars. A cool breath of wind slapped his face. He felt his spine stiffen and tense. A chill jolted him like an electric shock. He sat straight up. His eyes were wide open, staring out into the desert sky. Glistening threads of starlight unraveled there, in the absolute heart of blackest night.

The Black, where was the Black? He jumped to his feet and called to his horse. The stallion’s neigh answered him from somewhere in the darkness. Alec could tell by the sound that his horse was safe. But what had happened? He was sure they had bedded down in the trailer, not out here. Something in this starry night had drawn them both outside. He felt strange, almost lightheaded. A song came to his lips:

Hypnotically he found himself repeating these strange words over and over again. Where had he heard them before? Like a dam, the floodgates of memory burst open.
It was the watering song
.

The shrill cry of a sky bird peeled off into the night. He remembered the falcon, the mountains and Abu Ishak.
He must stay downwind, he must cover his tracks
.… But wait—he was Alec Ramsay, not a Bedouin scout.

The eerie tune echoed clearly in his head. If all he remembered had been but a dream, how had he come to know the melody, even the strange foreign words, of this tribal song? He pinched himself to make sure he was really awake.

Alec went back to the trailer and found a lead rope there. He set out into the dark, calling to the Black, but this time the stallion did not answer. Alec was not worried—his horse would not wander far. As he searched the dark his thoughts returned to the incredible dream. Or was it more than a dream? He remembered having heard about people recalling past lives under hypnosis. Some experts tried to explain these phenomena by comparing them to what happens when telephone wires accidentally cross each other and one person suddenly finds himself eavesdropping on someone else’s conversation.

If anyone had ever told Alec that he could have one of these experiences, he would have called them crazy. But now he couldn’t help but wonder if this “crossing of wires” might explain what had happened and how, for a short amount of time, he had shared the life and experiences of someone else in a far different time and place. Who could explain it? Whatever had
happened, the Black seemed to be connecting everything together. Perhaps this living memory had somehow been conducted through the Black to Alec. Perhaps his horse was the key to the mystery, acting like a lightning rod that attracts and draws electricity from a stormy sky.

Once again Alec found himself unconsciously singing the familiar refrain to the desert song:

The Black shrilled loudly in response and came to him, just as if Alec had called him in from the pasture back on the farm. As Alec snapped the lead rope onto the halter ring, he remembered how that was the very way Rashid had called to the stallion as they wandered together in the mountains.

A gust of wind cut through the sky, overpowering the sounds of the desert. Yet somehow those rambling melodic notes remained. Alec looked up at the Black. It was as if they shared some great secret known only to the two of them. The stallion’s eyes were ablaze as he ran his soft nose over Alec’s hand, arm and neck. His chest quivered and he neighed in long-drawn, silvery notes. Alec felt a settling calm pass over him, as if he had just taken a glass from his lips after quenching a great thirst.

The stallion’s long black mane billowed in the wind as he turned his gaze to the sky. Alec reached up and gently rubbed the Black’s forehead. He thought of
all their adventures together and the races they had won. Even after all that had happened, Alec still couldn’t help but wonder why he and
he alone
had been able to win the trust and love of this wild stallion. The Black was the kind of animal that could never be tamed. Yet this marvelous stallion had chosen him as a friend and altered the course of their lives forever.

Alec leaned up against the statuesque figure of the big black horse, and he too turned his head to the starry panorama, letting the beauty of the night sink into him. Some things would never change, things like the desert, the sky, the stars. Time seemed to be frozen in the starshine. Alec barely noticed the dish-shaped moon dip below the horizon. When he finally led the stallion back to the trailer, the pale morning light was already beginning to brighten the eastern sky. Red clouds streaked the heavens.

The dust from the earthquake that had clouded the sky for days finally seemed to be settling. Soon, Alec thought, it would be time to begin their journey home again, back to Hopeful Farm, Henry and his family. But for now he was content to breathe the clean desert air and be with his horse.

Walter Farley’s love for horses began when he was a small boy living in Syracuse, New York, and continued as he grew up in New York City, where his family moved. Unlike most city children, he was able to fulfill this love through an uncle who was a professional horseman. Young Walter spent much of his time with this uncle, learning about the different kinds of horse training and the people associated with them.

Walter Farley began to write his first book,
The Black Stallion
, while he was a student at Erasmus Hall High School in Brooklyn, New York, and Mercersburg Academy in Pennsylvania. It was published in 1941 while he was still an undergraduate at Columbia University.

The appearance of
The Black Stallion
brought such an enthusiastic response from young readers that Mr. Farley went on to create more stories about the Black, and about other horses as well. In his life he wrote a total of thirty-four books, including
Man o’ War
, the story of America’s greatest thoroughbred, and two
movies. His books have been enormously popular in the United States and have been published in twenty-one foreign countries.

Mr. Farley and his wife, Rosemary, had four children, whom they raised on a farm in Pennsylvania and at a beach house in Florida. Horses, dogs and cats were always a part of the household.

In 1989, Mr. Farley was honored by his hometown library in Venice, Florida, which established the Walter Farley Literary Landmark in its children’s wing. Mr. Farley died in October 1989, shortly before publication of
The Young Black Stallion
, the twenty-first book in the Black Stallion series.

Steven Farley, the third of Walter and Rosemary Farley’s four children, was born in Reading, Pennsylvania. He was brought up near there and in Venice, Florida; in both places there was always a horse in the backyard.
The Young Black Stallion
, co-written with his father, was Steven’s first novel. He followed that up with two more Black Stallion novels and the Young Black Stallion series. Steven has worked as a circus roustabout, bookseller, and set builder for commercials and music videos. He has also spent time as a long-haul truck driver, traveling between Europe and the Middle East. Parts of
The Young Black Stallion
were drawn from his experiences there. Currently, he divides his time between New York, Florida, and Mexico.