In Part One of this excerpt from the new book Equine ER, Selena, a Bluegrass polo pony belonging to a college student, was found critically injured in a field. Will she survive?
“The horizon is the edge of your polo field, the earth is the ball in the curve of your polo stick. Until you are blotted out of existence as the dust, gallop and press on your horse, for the ground is yours.”
– Twelfth century Persian poet Nizami’s advice on how to live a full life
Picture the college sophomore: She is slender, long black hair, green eyes, a face that belongs on a Roman coin. It is late January. Mia Proto is beat; she played six chukkers (seven-minute periods) of polo, round-robin style, last night at the Kentucky Horse Park on the University of Kentucky polo team. In her calculus class, she gets a text message from the farm where her horse, Selena, is boarded. It says to call right away, it’s about her horse, the vet is coming. Proto runs out of class and speeds to the barn in her old blue Volvo.

Selena five days before being severely injured.
Picture the horse: The day before, Selena’s dark bay coat shone in the arena, all 880 pounds of her doing exactly what Proto wanted in this hockey game on horseback. She held ponies twice her size off the line, galloping full-throttle the length of the arena and stopping five feet from the wall. Proto played Selena again for the third chukker instead of the normal two periods per pony because there weren’t any fresh horses, but Selena was fit enough. Now at the barn, as Proto looks at Selena, it’s an unbearable sight. Her eyeball appears to be hanging out of her left socket; it’s a red jelly-like blob. Her left hind leg, haphazardly bandaged with someone’s T-shirt, has one severe laceration down to the cannon bone, along with a couple of smaller ones. Her head and neck are so swollen, she can barely hold her head up or breathe; the swelling is blocking her airway. Selena looks like a crime victim. The people at the farm say she ran through a fence.
Picture the night before in the pasture: You can’t. Humans know very little about what goes on at night between horses. During the day, they look so peaceful out there … that is not always true. In many pastures, rivalries and competition are everywhere, especially when horses are thrown together at boarding facilities. (With bands in the wild, however, that’s usually not the case, save for stallions vying for a mare.)
Proto asks me: Do you ever notice how they’re grazing and roaming in different corners, some alone, some bunched together? Those are cliques, she says. “Once the pecking order is established with horses,” Proto says, “very rarely does a high-ranked horse get marked down. It’s kind of like working in an office.” Down here in Lexington, at a strange farm away from home, Selena is submissive, one of the lowest on the totem pole. She is the type of horse, according to Proto, who “needs a human next to her to make her feel strong. Someone to protect her. But she also needs someone she can push against.”
Thursday: Selena's owner doesn't think her injuries are from running through a fence. And will the polo pony make it?
In her advance praise for Equine ER
the new book from Eclipse Press by Leslie Guttman, Susan Richards, author of the New York Times
best-seller "Chosen by a Horse," says the book is “as thrilling and
drama-filled as any of the popular hospital shows on television
today.” To order Equine ER, click here. Thank you for visiting this blog.