Racehorse by Bonnie Bryant

one way or another.
    Carole spotted Mr. McLeod then, standing at the same place along the rail so he could watch the race for himself. Judy stood next to him. She thought of waving tothem but decided it would be unprofessional. Then Mr. McLeod waved at her. She waved back.
    “Warm-up time,” Stephen said. All around them, the racehorses began cantering and galloping toward the starting gate. Carole pulled her pony away to allow Stephen and Prancer the space they needed to stretch Prancer’s muscles for the race. Stephen didn’t want Prancer to trot or canter. He made her gallop from a standing start, just as she would do in the race. Carole watched Prancer, once again awestruck by the beauty of her movements and the perfection of her speed. She felt she could watch that horse for hours. She was sorry the whole race was going to be over so quickly.
    Stephen and Prancer galloped a quarter of the way around the track and then slowed to an elegant and graceful walk the rest of the way to the starting gate. Carole and the other lead riders withdrew to a special area where they were to wait until the end of the race.
    “You stay here until that horse is ready to go back to the paddock,” one of the other lead riders told Carole, but she already knew that. She just nodded, trying to pretend she was grateful for the tidbit of information. Nobody else seemed to have any other words of wisdom for her. She waited.
    Soon she saw that the horses were all being put into the starting gate. It would be only seconds now. Prancerwent into her little slot without any complaint. Carole could barely see from where she was, but she thought Prancer’s ears were perked up and turning rapidly. That was a good sign. It meant that Prancer was alert to everything that was happening around her. She’d run a good race.
    The bell rang.
    “And they’re off!” the public-address system blasted out. The words that followed were a blur. So much of Carole’s attention was centered on what she was watching that she couldn’t possibly take in the announcer’s words.
    Prancer burst out of the gate, immediately taking the lead. But that wasn’t what was supposed to happen. Stephen was supposed to hold her back until the last part of the race, when he’d been told to make her go as fast as she could. Carole watched Prancer carefully, and the look of the horse told her that nothing was going to stop her. The horse who loved to run fast by herself, alone on the practice track, wanted the utter joy of running by herself, ahead of the rest of the field on the racetrack. Prancer’s legs flew back and forth so fast Carole couldn’t even see them land. Stephen had sensed the urgency in the horse’s gait and had given her all the rein she needed to run wild and free, ahead of everybody else.
    Even from across the track, Carole was sure she couldhear the pounding of Prancer’s hoofbeats, so rapid as to be a single throbbing sound.
    And then something happened. Prancer stumbled. Her right foreleg bent gruesomely under her body. Stephen’s arms flew up in protest, and the reins jerked away. Prancer’s other three legs tried to carry the burden, to continue the race, but then all four legs seemed to collapse at once. To Carole’s horror Prancer stumbled a final time and fell forward, as awkwardly as she had been graceful just a few seconds before.
    Stephen was thrown so completely off balance by the sudden forward and downward pitch of his mount that he flew into the air, off Prancer’s right side.
    Then, suddenly, Prancer wasn’t alone. A crowd of racing horses bore down on her, each rider desperately trying to avoid hitting the downed horse and equally desperately trying to avoid her rider. Stephen rolled away from the path of the oncoming field of racers as fast as he could, just barely escaping the deadly hooves.
    The second the other horses had passed the downed Prancer and Stephen, many things happened. An ambulance rolled onto the track, headed