The kids were rolling out of the van/station wagon as soon as it came to a halt. They were among the first kids in my riding program. They were excited to a degree that one rarely reaches after about age eleven. They were yelling and racing to be the first one to tell me of the urgent matter at hand.
"Mister Edwards there are horses on an island that need our help. They need someone to adopt them. You have to go help them now."
I assumed that they were referring to Chincoteague.
"No they are in Carolina and they need our help now.!!!!"
The regional paper had run a story on the Corollas. I had not seen it but the kids had and the ride from Portsmouth had given them plenty of time to get whipped into a frenzy. They remembered the key words "wild horses", "Spanish mustangs", "injured" and "adoption."
They were yelling these words as they ran across the pasture to me. One of them had the article which was about the herd management program at Corolla. I promised them that I would call.
I only had two concerns--one based on the ignorance of others and one based on my own ignorance. I wanted a stallion if we were to adopt one for use in breeding. I knew that many such horses were immediately gelded because of the misplaced terror that so many horse people have of stallions.
My other concern was that these horses were simply too small, even to use in a breeding program.
There was absolutely no way that one of these little ponies could carry a grown man, I thought
I was wrong.
This is Manteo, my first Corolla stallion. We adopted him when he was about 18 months old. He was captured because he had a long term problem with a locked stifle that required minor surgery.
Who knows, maybe one day I would get a Corolla mare and breed some of these horses, which I understood were nearly extinct.
Maybe her name would be Baton Rouge.
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