Excerpt Twelve hundred pounds of hot muscle and bone quivered between Jesse Burrell’s legs as the brown mare squatted deeper into her hocks. She pinned her ears and poked her nose at the cow desperate to get around her. Tapping the earth with her front feet like a boxer bobbing, she dared the cow to try. The herd behind the mare was where the cow wanted to be. It drew her like a magnet. She darted to the right. The mare, a flashing, mirror image of the cow, cut her off. She dove to the left. In a sweeping blurred arc, the mare cracked over her hocks, splattered out in front of the cow and stopped her dead. Locked eye to eye, she blew in her face and shuddered her shoulders. Jesse stared at the cow, the breath of the mare hot in her face. Overwhelmed, the cow quit. Jesse picked up light as a feather on the loose reins. Instantly, the tense mare softened, came out of the ground-hugging crouch, and stood alert. The savvy audience whistled and whooped in boisterous appreciation as Jesse turned her back to the herd to cut another cow. Jesse Burrell had the gift—the feel, the sensitivity and balance, and the willingness to listen and hear what the horse tells him. The mare was stout, very quick. She could jar a lot of people loose. But when Jesse was on a horse, he gave up part of himself to the horse and the horse did the same. They came together as a single entity—a brilliant, graceful poem of flesh and blood in motion. He had thirty seconds before the buzzer would sound ending his two and a half-minute run. He looked between the mare’s ears at the cattle milling in front of her and decided on the brockle-faced heifer. He drove the heifer out in front of him and just as he dropped his rein hand on the mare’s withers, the cue to go to work, it happened. His concentration faltered. A blade of grief slammed through him. Why always at the weirdest times would he see his son’s face and realize it would never be there in the flesh again? Doubts about his ability had begun to creep into his consciousness. His financial life needed oxygen. If he could just keep these last few seconds together and get a good challenge from the heifer he could win $23,500.00, a decent dose of air. The heifer made two quick moves. The mare matched them. The cow dashed for the wall and Jesse just wasn’t there. The mare sensed his absence, and in that microsecond of confusion the heifer scooted under the mare’s neck and made it back to the herd. The run was over and Jesse had blown it. He looked down and shook his head as the crowd applauded in support. He rode out of the arena stroking the mare’s smooth hide with his fingertips. He leaned low along her neck and spoke a soft apology. There was a time when the mistake he’d just made would not have occurred. He’d have won the twenty thousand dollars and tossed his $400 hat like a boomerang and not care if it ever came back. That was when Zack was still alive. Before the hollow feeling, the paralysis that would overwhelm him, the red-hot impulses to lash out a cocked fist to the face of someone merely impolite. Web site: http://www.FeatherintheRain.com ISBN 1-58985-011-4 $ 24.95 Published by Five Star Publications, Inc. Published 2005 Hardcover with Dust Jacket Main   Author   News   Interview Questions/Fact Sheet   Interviews/ Reviews   Book Tour   Excerpt   © 1996-2007 Five Star Publications, Inc.. No portion of this website may be reprinted without express written consent of Five Star Publications, Inc.