The Young Black Stallion

BORN TO RUN

The desert chieftain’s steely gaze settled up on the young black stallion. “Come, Shêtân. Come!” he said in the voice of a man who was used to giving orders and having those orders obeyed.

The young black stallion held his head high. Every line of his gigantic frame trembled. He uttered a soft, muffled neigh and rose to his full height, an awesome, gigantic figure. He was the picture of superb power, his eyes darting fire.

THE BLACK STALLION Series
by WALTER FARLEY

The Black Stallion
The Black Stallion Returns
Son of the Black Stallion
The Island Stallion
The Black Stallion and Satan
The Black Stallion’s Blood Bay Colt
The Island Stallion’s Fury
The Black Stallion’s Filly
The Black Stallion Revolts
The Black Stallion’s Sulky Colt
The Island Stallion Races
The Black Stallion’s Courage
The Black Stallion Mystery
The Horse-Tamer
The Black Stallion and Flame
Man o’ War
The Black Stallion Challenged!
The Black Stallion’s Ghost
The Black Stallion and the Girl
The Black Stallion Legend
The Young Black Stallion (with Steven Farley)

Copyright © 1989 by Rosemary Farley, as Personal Representative of the Estate of Walter Lorimar Farley, and Steven Farley
All rights reserved under International and Pan-American
Copyright Conventions. Published in the United States by
Random House, Inc., New York, and simultaneously in Canada by Random House of Canada Limited, Toronto.
Distributed by Random House, Inc., New York.
RANDOM HOUSE and colophon are registered trademarks of Random House, Inc.
www.randomhouse.com/kids
Library of Congress Catalog Card Number: 89-42763
eISBN: 978-0-307-80497-6

v3.1

For Miranda, age one,
and all the generations of readers past
and all those to come.

“We need another and a wiser and perhaps a more mystical concept of animals. Remote from universal nature, and living by complicated artifice, man in civilization surveys the creature through the glass of his knowledge and sees thereby a feather magnified and the whole image in distortion. We patronize them for their incompleteness, for their tragic fate of having taken form so far below ourselves. And therein we err, and greatly err. For the animal shall not be measured by man. In a world older and more complete than ours they move finished and complete, gifted with extensions of the senses we have lost or never attained, living by voices we shall never hear. They are not brethren, they are not underlings; they are other nations, caught with ourselves in the net of life and time, fellow prisoners of the splendour and travail of the earth.”

—Henry Beston, The Outermost House

CONTENTS

       Cover

       Other Books by This Author

       Title Page

       Copyright

       Dedication

       Epigraph

       Prologue

  1. The Old One

  2. The Last Cry

  3. Ibn al Khaldun

  4. Abandoned

  5. The Cat

  6. The Ibex

  7. The Ruins

  8. The Leopard

  9. Healing

10. Voices

11. Homeward

12. Drinker of the Wind

13. Ambush

14. The Storm

15. The Drake

       Epilogue

       Authors

PROLOGUE

The Black Stallion stood seventeen hands tall, his dark coat glistening with renewed health and shining in the light of Alec Ramsay’s campfire. The night sky over the Arizona desert was a brilliant field of stars. Alec took comfort in their nearness and brightness, thankful that he and his horse were alive to share the night.

He had given the Black one month’s total rest since their terrible trials on the high mesas of the Indian country.* Now, at last, the stallion was bucking and playing once again.