My horse Toby has seen the train a million times.

It rumbles along the top of his pasture at least five times a day on schedule. It races past the round pen. I practice getting him used to the train by standing with him on the far side of the railroad road, holding the leadrope with just enough slack so he doesn't feel trapped and talking to him while the massive machine snakes by, its sheer tonnage rattling the sand and rocks beneath boots, hooves, and the freckled paws of the ever present heeler dogs. The Percheron horse stands still as a picture while I wave to the Amtrak sometimes. I can just barely make out the shadows of the tourists traveling in the glass observation car. They wave back. No doubt impressed by my big brave horse and pretty cattle dogs.

I hear the train whistle blowing in the distance, through the pinon and the juniper. Toby is chugging up the last steep hill on the rutted road before we get home, a nearly 2,000 pound freight train in his own right. I'm feeling all smug and happy because we've had a lovely, light ride. The horse doesn't feel the need to rush as much as he used to, and I'm starting to ride him with a tickle of the rein and my intentions. Soon we'll no longer travel as two, but as one--at least some of the time, I am thinking. After all, you've got to start somewhere. I've seen glimpses of it this afternoon, as I sit his lofty, round strides, feel all that happiness rippling beneath me, because the young horse loves to get out, and I'm filled to the brim with myself and him.

As we reach the top of the hill, the coal black train engine careens by. Toby stops, stands, and stares, his ears pricked forward, the tenacious heeler sisters panting at his heels. See, all of that sacking out work has paid off, I am congratulating myself as the red cars rattle by us now. They wobble back and forth on their steel wheels, nearly hynoptizing the both of us, until Toby awakes from the trance like someone's just jabbed him with a cattle prod and he's all of a sudden seeing the train for the very first time. The horse launches himself forward with the full throttle of all the equine flight instinct that's been buried in him since the beginning of horse time, and races away from the train, the iron beast that he's just decided will devour him in one gulp.

He will race.

He will race.

He will race as far away from the threat as possible.

And I will hold on with knees and hands and what's left of my puny intentions. I hold the horse for a moment. We hang suspended in the air, but he's gained too much momentum with all of that muscle and sinew and bone and fear. He's too strong, and he's not listening. And then we're through what's left of the old ranch fence--the remnants of another age, when this land was filled with sheep and adobe homesteads instead of doublewides and broken beer bottles and pit bulls chained to concrete blocks and worse--the strands of barbed wire that I am all too painfully aware of because I've been passing by them on horseback for years now, always careful of them, because barbed wire is anathema. Some are splayed across the ground. Some are coiled up like rattlesnakes waiting to strike. One hangs by a rusty nail or two, suspended between the juniper posts a couple of feet off the ground.

I land flat on my back right in the snarl of barbed wire with stirrups and silver buckles flashing above my head, like the pain rifling through my side and my shoulder. Toby is a black shadow against the sky. The ground is shaking and quaking, and the heelers are barking, and I wait for what seems like a very long time. A very long time is more than a few ticks of the clock that I'm surprised to find myself clutching inside my head just about as tenaciously as I held onto the reins. I wait to be rended to shreds by the barbed wire I suspect the big horse is dragging behind him. The barbed wire that the horse is going to be all tangled up in, and that's going to catch up with me any moment now, and God knows what else.

It's funny how calmly I am anticipating my own demise when all of the control I delude myself every waking moment into thinking that I possess is now vanished into the hard blue ether of what just seconds ago was an agreeable afternoon. On my back in the barbed wire, I'm no longer cradled in the hands of angels, at least not the ones they talked about at Sunday School so long ago. Right now my ass belongs to the laws of physics and matter and the hard-hearted universe. I guess you could call them angels if you want to. But they're anything but nice.

I rip my riding pants and other things getting out of the wire and find Toby trotting back and forth along the back of the new neighbor's dirt yard. A man and woman are standing at the back of their singlewide, staring in disbelief at the super-sized intruder. I hate it that this is the way we meet for the very first time. I point at the horse losing it in their back lot and yell, "I'm sorry," not sure they speak English. They look worried that the big beast will mow their house down like a tornado, right off of its cinderblocks into the dirt.

The percheron holds his head way up in the air, rolling his eyes, prancing like some kind of circus creature. If he could speak, he'd be squealing, "I'm scared. I'm scared. I'm scared." Well, I am too. The heelers are trying to help me round him up, but they're making it worse. So I call them to me, and then all of a sudden I must pop up onto Toby's field of vision. I must register somewhere in the terrified horse's mind. His equine radar. Because he hones in on me like a missile and barrels towards me like a frightened child, bunching himself up into a stop. And we are eye to eye. His nostrils are flaring. Their insides are flaming red, red as the train cars. I feel the blood coursing through his veins, matching the rhythm of my own.

The big horse lowers his head, seeking relief. I lay my hand on his neck. It's hot and wet. He relaxes at my touch, and my knees are suddenly weak, but I kneel to check him, afraid of what I will find in his flesh, all that muscle, all that soul, all that spirit, contained in only skin and a sleek black coat. His leg is bleeding, a cut, just through the skin, up way high above his knee. I check him all over.

There's nothing else.

We are lucky.

I am feeling sick because I let the young horse get hurt. I want to cry, but I can't. If I'm not calm, then neither is Toby, and he's counting on me right now. The heelers are whining. It's a keen now. I should have stood at the horse's head when the train passed, like I have in the past, to give him courage. I let the afternoon and the beauty of a good ride plus thirty-plus years of horsemanship go to my head, and I wasn't careful enough.

I see that I am bleeding through the jaggedy holes in my riding pants. I can hear my mother asking me pointedly in her Oklahoma drawl just when was the last time that I had a tetanus shot, and I'm suddenly painfully aware of all of my human frailty. At my age, I still haven't had enough experience with that sort of thing. Trains, that is. And apparently a lot more.

I bury my head in Toby's coarse black mane and try to tell him that I am sorry.