A panic welled up inside her. Hold On! Where was Hold On? Had he disappeared with Pego? No … no, he’d been beside her near the rock wall!
Something awful shivered through her. And Pego? Where was he? She remembered him from the night before, sleeping away from the others with his mares and Azul. It dawned on her now — the sand was so soft and silent. Pego knew what was coming! He had gotten out with his mares and filly. This was Pego and Coyote’s doing! Just as coyotes brought death and chaos, so had Pego brought the forces of destruction down on the herd!
“Where’s Hold On?” Corazón whinnied.
“I thought he was right beside me!” Grullo said.
“Did he … did he … ?” Verdad couldn’t complete the thought.
“No! Never!” Estrella whinnied, her voice harsh from the smoke. She coughed violently and her front knees buckled. “He didn’t die. Hold On can’t die!” Estrella turned furious eyes on the colt.
Angela and Corazón exchanged worried glances. Angela slowly approached Estrella and began to run her muzzle through the filly’s singed mane.
“Maybe, Estrella,” she began gently, “he’s like his name.”
“What do you mean?” Estrella cried, frantic eyes on the blaze of fire in the night sky behind them.
“His name is Hold On, and maybe it’s his talisman. Maybe that old stallion is holding on.”
Corazón came up to her other side and began to nuzzle Estrella softly. “And remember the other meaning of his name, dear. Espero, hope. We can hope.”
When the herd recovered their strength, they began to stagger through a new terrain studded with rock formations that seemed to lift straight from the ground. It was a country of many shapes, flat-topped rocks, spires, and pillars. It was a land worn by wind and water, polished for eons by the forces of nature into the mystery unique to all things timeless.
The two horses dearest to Estrella had been destroyed, one by water and one by fire. First the dam who had nursed her and then the old stallion who had guided her so faithfully — both were gone and Estrella’s chest was tight with grief. Had she been foaled only to endure loss? The world felt empty to her, hollow. Behind her she could hear the smoky gasps of the herd. They were following her, but why? How could she lead without Hold On by her side?
They came to a small pond and waded in to slake their thirst. Their lungs burned still from the heat of the smoke. Estrella stared at her reflection. Part of her forelock had burned away, and her star was obliterated by soot, her mane thick with ashes. Her eyes were red and streaming, and her white stockings had turned gray. It would have been easier to —
But she didn’t complete the thought. A breeze riffled the water, and the light from the morning sun danced across the dark surface of the pond. She blinked. For a moment, she thought she saw the reflection of a tiny horse leaping the small waves of the pond. Then there was a tendril of a scent — a sweet scent untouched by fire. She lifted her tail and shoved her ears forward. The grass — the sweet grass! How could life and death intertwine so closely? Did the others smell it? No. It didn’t matter.
She was the keeper of the scent, the leader of the herd … The leader, yet she felt so alone. She had lost so much. First her dam, and now Hold On. But there was still a kindling in her mind like the light of the most distant and ancient stars. Was it a remnant flicker from her dam’s eye? For with it came the scent of the sweet grass. She would go on. She would lead this herd, this first herd. She turned her head to the north and felt a tremor pass through her withers. I have grown strong from my dam’s milk. I can go to the farthest edge of this continent. This is my destiny.
She turned and watched the herd as they drank. Grullo looked up toward her.
He wants to know where we go from here. She whinnied. The others looked up. Estrella began to speak.
“I know you are tired, our eyes still weep from the heat of the fire. Our manes are singed. But remember, we have swum through shark-filled waters. We have leapt over the lashing tails of crocodiles. We have been hobbled, tethered, beaten, tricked into a fiery canyon. And yet we have come out into clear air beneath this starry sky. We are strong. If there are deserts, we shall cross them. If there are mountains, we shall climb them. If there are rivers, we shall swim them. For we … we are the first herd in this new world!”
Winston Churchill once said that history is written by the victors. The Escape is, in one sense, a novel of alternate history in that it is not being told from the point of view of the victors or the vanquished, but of the horses. In my equine retelling of the coming of horses to the New World, I have conflated certain events and pressed them into a shorter time frame. Here is what is true and what is fiction:
Christopher Columbus discovered America in 1492. However, the key event of what we think of today as the conquest of the New World began nearly thirty years later, in February of 1519, with Hernando Cortes sailing from Cuba to Mexico. This single voyage marked the return of horses to the continent for the first time in tens of thousands of years.
Eohippus equus, or the dawn horse, was considered the very first horse on the North American continent. It was tiny — no more than ten to twenty inches in height. Its evolution began some fifty million or more years ago. This first horse, the dawn horse, survived for several millions of years and became the progenitor of three other species of ungulates, one of which, Orohippus, continued the horse lineage. The horse evolved through millennia of cataclysmic geological upheavals and changes of climate, as well as shifts in tectonic plates that caused mountain ranges to rise and then buckle, and rivers to carve new courses.
Millions of years later Mesohippus horses arrived, and then Merychippus. Each successive species became larger and resembled more closely the horse of today. One of the most modern looking, Equus caballus, evolved about 1.7 million years ago. It was considered the “true horse” and closest, in terms of its genetics, to the horses Cortes brought to America.
However, Equus caballus had disappeared from North America nearly twelve thousand years before Cortes ever reached the continent. Why these first, true horses, the descendants of the dawn horse, left the continent is a puzzle. Some scientists believe the Ice Age drove them north across the Bering land bridge to Asia. Others feel it was human migration south across the same bridge that killed them. In either case, the horse vanished from its original homeland, and it was not until Hernando Cortes decided to conquer Mexico that horses came home, setting foot once again on the soil of their origin. The year was 1519, and these were the horses from which the wild mustangs of the West descended.
Cortes’s first stop when he left Spain as a young man was Hispaniola, in 1504. In 1511, he accompanied Diego Velàsquez de Cuellar on an expedition to conquer Cuba. When, in 1519, Cortes set out to explore and conquer the Aztec empire of Mexico, ruled by Montezuma, he sailed with eleven ships, five hundred men, and sixteen horses. In my novel I have not specified how many ships, but I have increased the number of horses to seventeen. Bernal Diaz de Castillo, who accompanied Cortes and wrote the definitive history of the Spanish Conquest, gave names and details of several of these horses. He commented on which ones had “good mouths,” and which were steady or skittish. Some of the names that he reported in his writing I have kept — Arriero and Bobtail are real names. Castillo mentioned that a Jewish blacksmith, Hernando Alonso, who was fleeing the Spanish Inquisition, was aboard one of the ships. He also reported that, in one battle, Indians cut off the head of a horse and sent the head around their villages to prove that horses were not gods, but mortal.
The Cortes expedition landed on the Yucatan Peninsula. They advanced to the Aztec capital, Teotihuacan, where they were received peacefully by Montezuma. There, the Spaniards imprisoned Montezuma. Some months later, in the summer of 1520, a rebellion broke out and Cortes and his men had to fight their way out of the city. On this night Montezuma was thrown from a parapet of his own palace and killed. The retreat of Cortes became known as La Noche Triste. Some horses
escaped and headed north.
Subsequent conquistadors followed, though not precisely in Cortes’s tracks, very shortly thereafter or in the following decades. They brought with them more horses and cattle as they began to settle regions of the southwest. Francisco Vasquez de Coronado came into the desolate reaches of Arizona with more than five hundred horses. Juan de Onate brought fifteen hundred horses and mules into New Mexico. Many of these horses died in the early days of the conquests.
There is one story that I found particularly haunting. Deanne Stillman, in her book Mustang, The Saga of the Wild Horse in the American West, writes that, contrary to the records, there is a legend “that [a] foal born to [a] brown mare en route from Cuba survived, escaped at some unknown time, and ran toward its ancestors, over mountains and across valleys and canyons and rivers, through cloudbursts and dust storms and days of no water, left to carry on by jaguars and wolves and snakes, perhaps aided by animal spirits, particularly chattering birds that urged the foal onward as it grew older,” until it eventually found its own kind.
It is my feeling that fiction often begins where history leaves off.
KL
KATHRYN LASKY is the author of the bestselling Guardians of Ga’Hoole series, which has more than seven and a half million copies in print, as well as the Wolves of the Beyond series. Her books have received a Newbery Honor, a Boston Globe–Horn Book Award, and a Washington Post–Children’s Book Guild Award. She lives with her husband in Cambridge, Massachusetts.
Copyright © 2014 by Kathryn Lasky
All rights reserved. Published by Scholastic Press, an imprint of Scholastic Inc., Publishers since 1920. SCHOLASTIC, SCHOLASTIC PRESS, and associated logos are trademarks and/or registered trademarks of Scholastic Inc.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Lasky, Kathryn, author.
The escape / Kathryn Lasky. - First edition.
pages cm. — (Horses of the dawn ; 1)
Summary: Estrella is a filly, daughter of the lead mare, one of a shipment of horses bound for the new world, but when the ship is becalmed and the horses are dropped overboard to lighten the load, Estrella finds that it is up to her to lead the herd to land and safety.
ISBN 978-0-545-39716-2 (jacketed hardcover) 1. Horses — Juvenile fiction. 2. Mothers and daughters — Juvenile fiction. 3. Leadership — Juvenile fiction. 4. Responsibility — Juvenile fiction. 5. North America — History — Juvenile fiction. [1. Horses — Fiction. 2. North America — History — Fiction.] I. Title.
PZ10.3.L3773Es 2014
813.54 — dc23
2013037215
First edition, January 2014
Cover art by Richard Cowdrey
Cover art © 2014 by Scholastic Inc.
Cover design by Whitney Lyle
e-ISBN 978-0-545-63346-8
All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. No part of this publication may be reproduced, transmitted, downloaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereafter invented, without the express written permission of the publisher. For information regarding permission, write to Scholastic Inc., Attention: Permissions Department, 557 Broadway, New York, NY 10012.
The Escape Page 15