I got a Penguin boxed set for Christmas one year … included an anthology of horse poems, stories and excerpts from novels etc. The Brumby and THIS book that I cannot remember. A young woman in, I think Wales, buys a mountain pony and trains it with the help of a gruff but caring veteran horse owner. The girl is very compassionate about her horse and takes it to a pony club day and gets a ribbon for being so patient with her green mare. There is a ring of sheep rustlers going around and they surprise them in the act one night. The girl and the horse are injured but they survive and the last line of the book is “You will know us by our limps” or something like that.  It’s driving me mental not being able to find it. There is a line in it when she thought her horse had died and it is something with the sentiment that she mourned her horse not just for her loss but for her horse’s life in the world … that she loved living so much and now she wasn’t … I would love to read it again and really want to get that quote correctly.

I’ve posted on some book finder blogs and no luck so far … unfortunately my parents’ house flooded in 2008 and they had to throw out a bunch of stuff from the basement … up until then this boxed set would have been there.  Sigh.  And original editions of The Black Stallion, a large picture book on the creation of the Misty of Chincoteague series etc. etc.  I try not to think about that too much.