by Betsy Byars
My fingers dug into the ground like steel hooks, but I kept slipping. I was right by the colt’s legs now, and although I hadn’t touched him, he started slipping too. He was scared, I knew that, and for a moment I thought we were both lost. I squirmed around to avoid hitting him, and right then my foot found a rock ledge and I stopped.
“It’s all right, Alado. It’s all right, boy,” I gasped.
He whinnied now, a loud high whinny. I turned over on my back and looked up. His pale legs were flashing by my face, thumping against the earth. Alado wasn’t slipping any more, but the dirt was still sliding down the slope and over the cliff, and that gave him the feeling he was. I tried to reach up and hold him, but at that moment his wings flashed out. The wind from them beat against me. I drew back.
Alado paused a moment, the wings lashing at the air, covering me when they came down. It was a strange, eerie thing. The wings blocked out the sky, the whole world. I couldn’t move and I couldn’t speak. The colt slipped again. I was frozen against the ground. Then he slid a few more inches down the slope, and he was in the air.
I managed to sit up then and look down the cliff. For a second the colt seemed to drop straight down. He just sank. The huge white wings flashing in the night seemed powerless. His body was turned a little sideways. It was like a fever dream. Then, at the last moment, just when I thought he was going to crash into the rocks, an updraft of wind rose beneath his wings and he flew.
He flew away from the cliff, his pale wings powerful now, sure. This was the way I had dreamed he would fly. I couldn’t move for a moment and it wasn’t my hip either. It was the sight of that colt in the air. In all my life I have never seen anything like that, terrible and awesome at the same time. It was something that was going to be with me the rest of my days.
Then Alado landed about two hundred yards away and, without a break, ran off into the night.
I stayed there a moment, hanging on the slope like a kid halfway down a sliding board. I was still too caught up in what I’d seen to move. Finally I made myself turn and work my way back up. I limped over, picked up my hat and put it on my head.
Then I stood there. I knew how Mrs. Minney felt that night on the roof when Alado went flying off, however badly, and she fell to the ground like a sack of grain. I hitched up my pants and started down.
I’ve heard men say that coming down a mountain is harder than climbing up, but it wasn’t for me. After I climbed down the first part, which was red rock, I slid down the rest of the way—or fell sitting down, whatever you want to call it. I was rolling down the last part when Charles ran up and threw himself on top of me. It stopped me from rolling anyway. I hesitated a minute, and then I put my arms around him and he started crying. He didn’t make any noise doing it, but I knew he was crying because his tears were rolling down my neck.
“It’s all right, Charles, It’s all right.” I patted him on the back.
He said, “You could have been killed.”
For some reason his seeing me as I was, just a plain person, made me feel like crying too. I patted his back again. “It’s all right.” I waited until he was through crying, and then I said, “Did you see Alado?”
He nodded against my chest.
“You saw him fly?”
“Yes.”
We stayed there a minute. “It was something, wasn’t it?” I said.
“Yes.”
“It was really something.” I took a deep breath and slapped him on the back. “Well, let’s get Clay and start for home.” I could see when I raised up that Clay had walked over to the stream for a drink.
“I’ll get him.” Charles went running over to Clay and grabbed at the reins. He didn’t get them on the first try, and the horse turned and trotted away a few steps. He looked at Charles. Charles went running at him again, and this time Clay turned and took off in the direction of home.
“Clay!” I yelled, but he was gone.
Charles came back slowly. He shrugged. “I don’t know what I do wrong with horses.”
I grinned a little in the dark. I said, “Give me a hand up.” He helped me to my feet and I dusted myself off, and we started walking home.
Charles said, “I never will be the master of a horse, I know that now.” He shook his head. “Never.”
“You know what the Comanche used to do, don’t you?”
“No.”
“He used to find a wild mustang and rope him and throw him, and then he used to put his mouth over the horse’s nose and breathe into it. He believed he was putting the controlling spirit into the horse.”
“Well, I’ve tried everything else.”
We heard the sound of a horse coming toward us and I said, “Well, old Clay’s coming back. We’ll be riding home after all.”
I tell you it made me feel a lot better to think of easing myself up on Clay’s back. Instead, when I looked, I saw Alado coming toward us. Alado went to Charles and nuzzled him and started walking beside him. I said, “It doesn’t look like you’re going to need that old Comanche trick after all.”
“Maybe not.” I could feel he was smiling a little.
We kept walking. It was slow because of my hip. I looked at the colt and the boy. I said, “I’ll tell you something, Charles. One day that colt is going to fly as easy as he walks.”
Charles looked at Alado. Without glancing back at me he said, “I know.” I knew he was seeing again the pale wings in the dark sky just as I was. Seeing the colt fly like that, being the only two people in the world to have shared that awful and beautiful sight, touched us so much we couldn’t speak of it any more. I knew he was thinking as I was, “One day—”
Suddenly I heard the sound of Clay’s hoofs in the distance. “Clay,” I shouted, “get over here.” The sight of that horse coming out of the darkness was one of the best of my life. I limped to meet him. “Am I glad to see you, boy.” I lifted myself into the saddle. Then I turned.
“Here, Charles, take my hand.” I pulled him up behind me. “Let’s go home.” And we rode off together with Alado following behind.
A Biography of Betsy Byars
Betsy Byars (b. 1928) is an award-winning author of more than sixty books for children and young adults, including The Summer of the Swans (1970), which earned the prestigious Newbery Medal. Byars also received the National Book Award for The Night Swimmers (1980) and an Edgar Award for Wanted . . . Mud Blossom (1991), among many other accolades. Her books have been translated into nineteen languages and she has fans all over the world.
Byars was born Betsy Cromer in Charlotte, North Carolina. Her father, George, was a manager at a cotton mill and her mother, Nan, was a homemaker. As a child, Betsy showed no strong interest in writing but had a deep love of animals and sense of adventure. She and her friends ran a backyard zoo that starred “trained cicadas,” box turtles, leeches, and other animals they found in nearby woods. She also claims to have ridden the world’s first skateboard, after neighborhood kids took the wheels off a roller skate and nailed them to a plank of wood.
After high school, Byars began studying mathematics at Furman University, but she soon switched to English and transferred to Queens College in Charlotte, where she began writing. She also met Edward Ford Byars, an engineering graduate student from Clemson University, whom she would marry after she graduated in 1950.
Between 1951 and 1956 Byars had three daughters—Laurie, Betsy, and Nan. While raising her family, Byars began submitting stories to magazines, including the Saturday Evening Post and Look. Her success in publishing warm, funny stories in national magazines led her to consider writing a book. Her son, Guy, was born in 1959, the same year she finished her first manuscript. After several rejections, Clementine (1962), a children’s story about a dragon made out of a sock, was published.
Following Clementine, Byars released a string of popular children’s and young adult titles including The Summer of the Swans, which earned her the Newbery Medal. She continued to build on her early success through th
e following decades with award-winning titles such as The Eighteenth Emergency (1973), The Night Swimmers, the popular Bingo Brown series, and the Blossom Family series. Many of Byars’s stories describe children and young adults with quirky families who are trying to find their own way in the world. Others address problems young people have with school, bullies, romance, or the loss of close family members. Byars has also collaborated with daughters Betsy and Laurie on children’s titles such as My Dog, My Hero (2000).
Aside from writing, Byars continues to live adventurously. Her husband, Ed, has been a pilot since his student days, and Byars obtained her own pilot’s license in 1983. The couple lives on an airstrip in Seneca, South Carolina. Their home is built over a hangar and the two pilots can taxi out and take off almost from their front yard.
Byars (bottom left) at age five, with her mother and her older sister, Nancy.
A teenage Byars (left) and her sister, Nancy, on the dock of their father’s boat, which he named NanaBet for Betsy and Nancy.
Byars at age twenty, hanging out with friends at Queens College in 1948.
Byars and her new husband, Ed, coming up the aisle on their wedding day in June 1950.
Byars and Ed with their daughters Laurie and Betsy in 1955. The family lived for two years in one of these barracks apartments while Ed got a degree at the University of Illinois and Byars started writing.
Byars with her children Nan and Guy, circa 1958.
Byars with Ed and their four children in Marfa, Texas, in July 1968. The whole family gathered to cheer for Ed, who was flying in a ten-day national contest.
Byars at the Newbery Award dinner in 1971, where she won the Newbery Medal for The Summer of the Swans.
Byars with Laurie, Betsy, Nan, Guy, and Ed at her daughter Betsy’s wedding on December 17, 1977.
Byars in 1983 in South Carolina with her Yellow Bird, the plane in which she got her pilot’s license.
Byars and her husband in their J-3 Cub, which they flew from the Atlantic coast to the Pacific coast in March 1987, just like the characters in Byars’s novel Coast to Coast.
Byars speaking at Waterstone’s Booksellers in Newcastle, England, in the late 1990s.
Byars and Ed in front of their house in Seneca, South Carolina, where they have lived since the mid-1990s.
All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this ebook onscreen. No part of this text 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 hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of the publisher.
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, businesses, companies, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.
Copyright © 1973 by Betsy Byars
cover design by Elizabeth Connor
978-1-4804-1065-7
This edition published in 2013 by Open Road Integrated Media
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New York, NY 10014
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