The glaciated mountains slumped along the horizon, gleaming with new snow. But down here on the plains, on the Wind River Indian Reservation, it was spring. Shoots of new grass lay underfoot, and when I looked at the cottonwoods way down by the river they had a faint tint of green. The Addison men put down their super-sized Cokes and walked into the corral. Yesterday was the first time they’d seen the horses up close in months, and they’d been watching MTV since Thanksgiving, but they were young and Northern Arapaho and their bodies were forgiving and their family had owned horses, lots of them, for generations. Their grandmother had hired herself out as a cowgirl when she was thirteen, back when her name was still Stella Antelope.

Straight and tall and unfailingly muscular beneath their winter fat, the men moved slowly, blinking in the bright sun. The horses swirled around them. They had spent the winter on a range of halffrozen rivers and bunchgrasses that poked through the crusty snow like fields of porcupines. They wanted out of the muddy corral, now. But the two-leggeds were the keepers of the law: You shall not pass. Men’s work. The joy of it.

The horses swooped and turned like a school of fish. Four grays. Four chestnuts with white blazes on their noses and white socks on their feet. Assorted bays. They looked alike. They were alike. They were siblings, all bred from the same stud—an old white Arab named Wizard. The men waved and hollered some of them into a little round corral. The horses turned to face the gate they’d just run through, their faces in a perfect line, each as lovely and wild and expectant as the next.