News flash! Equine ER author Leslie Guttman will be signing books at Keeneland Racecourse this Sunday 10/25 at the gift shop from 11 a.m. to 1 p.m. 

Last week in Part 1 of the excerpt from the chapter entitled Marching Orders from the new book Equine ER we met Marching Orders, a former racehorse, as he headed into surgery. In Part 2 today we meet the inmate whose life was transformed by the stoic Thoroughbred with the big heart.

Marching Orders had a noble way about him. He was big and resolute; he had a paddock to himself because he played too rough. He didn’t get lonely like other horses do. He talked to the occasional cow and horses across the fence, but he preferred solitude. At the Blackburn Correctional Complex’s prison farm program in Lexington, the inmates called him The Viking because he would stand outside by himself through the wind and rain and cold. The only time they ever saw him go in his shed was once during a bad snowstorm.

 The barn at the Blackburn prison farm program.

The farm program started at Blackburn in 1999, in conjunction with the Thoroughbred Retirement Foundation, a national nonprofit that saves racehorses that can no longer earn their keep, preventing them from ending up abused, abandoned, or in foreign slaughterhouses. The Blackburn program’s intention is to teach inmates skills to get a job at a horse farm when they leave, as well as instill responsibility, structure, and provide a therapeutic connection to the animals. In the summer of 2008, the program had about seventy horses, ranging in age from four to twenty-six.

In March 2005, Chris Huckleby arrived at Blackburn and started working in the program, where each inmate is assigned an ex-racehorse to care for. He is in his mid-30s, from Western Kentucky, with blond hair, light blue eyes, and an inmate’s complexion: stark-white. He has been in and out of prison for a decade or so. He has a flatness about him, as if prison – and life – has compressed his life force. Huckleby was incarcerated at Blackburn on drug-related charges.

Some inmates at the minimum-security prison sign up for the farm program just for the freedom they get working in the barn, and while this was one of the Huckleby’s reasons, he also grew up with horses. He understood and respected them. When he saw Marching Orders walk off the trailer, the horse fixed what Huckleby called a “spooky eye” – his right eye had white in the pupil – on him. It felt like the horse was following his every move. Huckleby begged: “Assign me that horse; I want that horse.” The two became inseparable. Every time Huckleby would walk out the barn door, Marching Orders, or Mo as he was called, would run up to him. The horse would lean on Huckleby, lick him like a dog, twirl his hair with his lips.

“I don’t want to sound crazy or anything, but I think this horse is trying to tell me he loves me,” Huckleby told the farm manager. Horses do things like that, she replied.

Huckleby started reading books on natural horsemanship to try and decipher equine communication. He was going through a divorce and had three kids he missed. He felt like the horse knew he was having a difficult time, especially during occasions such as his children’s birthdays, when Huckleby got particularly depressed. The horse would bump him with his muzzle, pull on his shirt, or play hide and seek, running behind the barn. When Huckleby came down to the barn at dusk, Marching Orders ran to meet him across the paddock. He became known as “Huck’s horse.” The inmate told himself and everybody else that when he was done serving time, he was going to adopt him.

Thursday: Trouble for Marching Orders in the operating room. 

Equine ER was recently made a "Staff Pick" by Bill Gordon, a longtime bookseller at Joseph-Beth Books in Lexington, Kentucky, one of the largest bookstores in the South. Gordon calls Equine ER "fascinating." To order the book, click here.