Chapter Five of Thundering Hooves is almost finished and I thought since I’m no longer publishing a chapter at a time, maybe I’d provide and excerpt from the midst of it.
Caleb at a Crossroads
If you remember from Spirit of the Wolf, Caleb’s soulmate had moved back to Montana following her successful modeling career in London. Unimaginable tragedy confronts Caleb and Lacey in Chapter Four of Thundering Horses and now Caleb attempts to restore his spirit in Colorado. The words below are an excerpt from Caleb’s low point in the transition. Chapters one through three are available to read by clicking the link at the top of the book’s introduction here.
“The enormity of the summer’s tragedy slowly enveloped Caleb’s mind and tears began to flow, and there was nothing he could do to stop them. There was no sobbing, no audible acknowledgment of their presence, just water involuntarily flowing down his face. After a while a numbness began to take hold. He didn’t know if it was the brandy, or if it was the sensation of his spirit hardening. In any case, the tears eventually stopped and only the numbness remained.
The last embers of the fire grew dim and Caleb climbed into the camper shell hoping for a good night’s sleep for a change. Soon images of wild horses overtook his thoughts, and he was once again filled with hope and anticipation as he drifted off to sleep.
Wild horses running free may have been on his mind as sleep overtook him, but it was a vision of he and Lacey running free that filled his dreams that night. As dawn approached, he and Lacey were running along Steven’s Canyon Road at the base of the Santa Cruz Mountains, just as they did on the day they met so many years before. The dream was so vivid that it was disorienting, and Caleb had to lay still for a few seconds before realizing that it wasn’t real, and that he was in Colorado and not California.
He propped up the back window and lowered the tailgate to greet the new day. The crisp air of a Rocky Mountain autumn morning filled the camper, and the bright Colorado sunshine warmed his shoulders as he sat on the tailgate surveying his surroundings. He leaned back into the truck bed and pulled out his one burner propane stove. Normally he would be eager to grab the camera bag and head out in search of wildlife, but on this morning there was no pressure to write an article, no words to type into a new book. There was only the sunshine and the mountains, a fitting landscape for the vast expanse of uncharted time that now lay before him.”
Thundering hooves is the second in a series of novels about America’s most mistreated wildlife, wolves and wild horses. In this installment, our main characters Caleb and Lacey want to move from Bozeman Montana to help save the wild mustang horses in the Colorado Sand Wash Basin. Their friend Angie relocated to Colorado in Spirit of the Wolf and is eager to help them in their efforts.
Join Caleb, Lacey and Angie in their exciting adventures as they try to save wild horses from attempts by greedy welfare ranchers and the government itself, to round them up for adoption where they often are illegally sent to slaughter. I hope to have this novel published in the summer of 2024.
Steven W. Krull
Photographer and author Steve Krull has been photographing and writing about the of the Colorado Rocky Mountains and it’s amazing diversity of life for over two decades. He has published thousands of images and several books including his latest novel Spirit of the Wolf.
