Her father always claimed he rode his first horse home from Russia. Not bought, not borrowed—rode. The story went that she was a three-year-old filly named Carolina, a cast-off work horse with too many scars and too little kindness in her past. Vodka had been involved in the negotiations, he admitted with a grin, though whether he paid too much or too little was anybody’s guess. What mattered was that when the blizzard came, he and Carolina set out together, climbing through the snow-choked passes of Poland, following their instincts more than any map.

Several days later, border patrol officers knocked on his door, asking about the mysterious tracks winding away into the mountains. He shrugged and played the fool. Meanwhile, the little bay mare—part Arabian, quick and sharp-eyed—stood snug in the stable, already chewing happily through her first mountain of hay.

The narrator’s earliest memory of her mother was not from a cradle or a photograph, but from that same story: her mother flying along an unpaved mountain road on Carolina’s back, an old army saddle cinched tight, dark hair streaming as tourists slowed their cars to gawk.

Years later, the narrator herself was born in those mountains. She didn’t remember much—maybe nothing at all. Sometimes she wondered if she had only memorized the black-and-white photographs that once lined her teenage bedroom, the ones that made her dream of a horse of her own. But she still felt the mountains in her bones, as if they’d carved themselves into her without asking permission.

As a child, the visions came easily. She could see herself astride a bay mare—maybe Carolina’s filly, Kiwi, fiery and clever—galloping free through high Carpathian passes while a German Shepherd loped close behind. Wolves and wild boars wouldn’t scare her. Elk would scatter as she laughed into the wind. Her horse’s hooves would strike sparks against the hardy ground, carrying her further and further into freedom.

In reality, her parents sold their hostel and left the mountains behind. They fled communism before it collapsed and made a new life in America, where they raised their children with love and comfort. It was a good life. A safe life.

But at night, when the house was quiet, she would lie awake and ache for something else. She longed for the endless trail, the kind only a steady horse could carry her across. She longed for challenge, for wildness, for a life measured in miles and hoofbeats.

That yearning never left her. It only grew louder.