I've been thinking about the dark horses recently as I work on my book. The shadows. The ones that taught me something about myself that I wasn't quite ready to know. This memory of one of my dark horses is from an autumn 30 years ago. An autumn afternoon very much like this one. We were looking for a move up for me from my little quarterhorse gelding, and one of my dad's friends had a racehorse he wanted to sell to us greenhorns.

Doodles Donovan gazes over his shoulder at me with one white-rimmed eye as I pick up the reins. Under the western saddle that previously belonged to my chunky quarter horse—a veteran babysitter with one bad eye and an equally bad attitude—the lanky thoroughbred looks like a prepubescent boy in a size 42 suit. He is named Doodles, Mr. Fix, his owner, explains to us, because the only non-midnight-black part of the gelding is the white mark on his forehead. A backwards question mark, Mr. Fix says. The young horse lets me trace it softly with my index finger when we meet.

A frisson of excitement unfurls down the gelding's spine as I grab the saddle horn and find the stirrup with my foot, careful not to poke the unschooled youngster in the ribs and send him careening off across the ocean of grass that’s lapping up against us in emerald waves, reaching nearly to his belly. Doodles presses his lips together tight. He is not tempted to sneak one bite.

The edge of a jet nostril flicks in my direction. Doodles holds his head aloft, so high I think he might actually tip over off of those long stilts that are his legs. He’s sniffing for clues about this sixteen-year-old girl who seems to think she’s going to take him for a ride out here in this 60-acre pasture beneath all this autumn sky, exactly the kind of day that tempts most young horses to gallop for miles just for the sheer joy of it.

The fact that the full breadth of Doodle’s experience has been on an Ohio racetrack doesn’t escape me, even though I'm almost as green as he is, as I've owned one horse so far in my lifetime. And the knowledge that the horse's brief racing career was a failure doesn’t give me much comfort either as I exhale and swing into the saddle, gently.

Gently.

Doodles freezes.