The Horse Thief
Memoir
The bus ride home from school was a long and boring affair through the outskirts of the sleepy lakeside country town. Most of my schoolmates were sleepy from the long day. Only the occasional spitball launched in high arc overhead broke the monotony.
I dreaded the coming summer. Third grade was coming to an end and the isolation I faced for the three months between grades seemed endless. I hoped that my plans to visit my friend would come together. It was a long walk down a gravel road under the power lines to reach my friend. I did have a pony that I could ride to shorten the trip, but my parents would not allow me to ride her off our land. My visits would not be frequent this summer.
I leaned against the cool glass of the bus window. The country road held houses at infrequent intervals. They mingled with endless clumps of blackberry and huckleberry bushes filling in the space between the conifers. Later in life, I would realize that I lived in natural beauty, but as a child it was normal and rather boring.
A bump in the road jostled me awake. Looking out the window, I spied our family’s ponies tied to an oak tree in front of a stranger’s slat-board house. Misty was the elder of the pair, a silver gray with a white mane and tail. When my father had purchased our ponies from the Woodland Park Zoo two years before, she was the…
