Above Lepus he made out the constellation of Orion, easy to recognize by the three stars in the hunter’s belt. It was there his gaze remained.

If he were to believe in legends and prophecies, as the Indians did, it was there that his life with a black horse had begun many years ago.

He recalled going with his parents as a child to the Hayden Planetarium in New York City. Among the photos of the heavens taken by the world’s most powerful telescopes was a picture he would never forget.

It was of the Horsehead Nebula in the constellation Orion, three light-years across and one thousand, five hundred light-years away from the earth. Directly in the center of the nebula, as plainly as one could see, was the head of a beautiful black horse, silhouetted against a curtain of glowing gas and illuminated by millions of stars.

His father had bought him a poster of the picture, and Alec had hung it in his bedroom. Looking at it every day, he had come to think of the starry black horse as his horse.

Years later the poster was still there—but now hanging beside it was a photo of the Black Stallion. If one looked closely, there was a similarity in the finely molded heads.

So, Alec decided, he had his own legend, as mystical as any Indian legend—and just as rewarding. For the horse of his childhood fantasy, the dark horse of the nebula, had become in his mind the Black!

Strange as it seemed, it was a fact that a special bond existed between the Black and himself. One believed what one wanted to believe. The Black had come into his life and forever changed it.

Alec turned to the great black stallion, who was busily chomping his feed. “Anyway,” he said aloud, “you’re part of me, and that’s all that matters. The horse up there may be just a lot of gas and dust, but down here you’re real.”

The Black was standing quietly, contentedly beside him, and yet Alec knew that the stallion was so physically tight and right that it would have taken two people to walk him under the shed row back home at Hopeful Farm. In fact, he was so feisty that few, including his trainer, Henry Dailey, would care to try it. The Black was everything a horse should be, could be. How had it happened? Where did he come from?

The Black was not of pure Arabian blood. The stallion’s head was Arabian, but he was too tall, his body was too long, his croup and hindquarters too high and powerful for an Arabian. He was a breed of his own, Alec thought, a mystical breed.

“I wish you could talk,” Alec said aloud to his horse. “I wish you could tell me how it was for you in the beginning, in the mountains of Arabia, before I saw you for the first time. You must have been something, really something.”

The Black continued eating and Alec turned back to the stars, his eyes fixed on Orion, on the unseen Horsehead Nebula. Gradually, his eyelids grew heavy with sleep, finally closing for the night.

The radiance from the stars brightened as the night grew colder and clearer, shining ever more brilliantly over the trailer holding Alec Ramsay’s great black stallion of the sky.

And this is his story, the way it was in the beginning.

*As described in The Black Stallion Legend

THE OLD ONE
1

In a high, grassy pasture, well concealed in the remote mountains of eastern Arabia, two herders tended their horses.

“It is a dying breed,” the old herder said in a deep, guttural voice. “Our chieftain knows this as well as I do. His only hope rests with the black one.” He waved his gnarled hands in the direction of the small band of young horses grazing in the light of the setting sun.

The young herder, tall and thin, lowered his body to sit on the ground beside the old man. His kufiyya, a white headdress made of fine cloth, was drawn back, revealing a look of childish eagerness and anticipation on his face. He had heard this talk many times before. Still, he asked his questions and listened eagerly for the old one’s replies.

“O Great Father,” he said, “thou who knowest everything, is it not true that our leader is the richest of all sheikhs in the Rub‘ al Khali? Is it not his wealth that enables him to breed and maintain horses of such power and dazzling beauty as we see before us? Look at them, Great Father. Their coats have the gleam of raw silk and although they are still young, little more than a year old, their shoulders are muscular and their chests deep. Truly they are horses of inexhaustible strength, endurance and spirit, all worthy of the great tribe of Abu Já Kub ben Ishak.”

“It is true our leader is one of great wealth, but that does not make him the wisest breeder of all,” the old man proclaimed, his small, sharp eyes never leaving the horses. Reaching for his walking stick, he tried to get his old legs beneath him. After a brief struggle, he gave a weary sigh and sank down again.

The young man drew back before the harshness of the ancient one’s words. He wanted no confrontation. His only recourse was to humor the old man.