I Entered the Longest Horse Race on Earth at 52 Years Old: 1,000 Kilometers Across Mongolia on 25 Half-Wild Horses. On Day Six, I Had to Choose Between Winning and a Stranger

Her name was Saskia van Dijk. She was thirty-four, Dutch, a veterinarian from Utrecht, and she’d been leading the race since day two.

Her horse had stepped into a marmot hole at full gallop. She’d gone over his head and landed on her shoulder.

When I got to her, she was conscious. White as paper. Holding her left arm against her chest.

“Dislocated,” she said through her teeth. “Maybe broken. Don’t touch it.”

“I won’t.”

“Go,” she said. “You’re in third. If you go now, you can be second by tonight.”

I looked at her. I looked at the sky. A storm was rolling in from the west, black and low, the kind that brings hail on the steppe in September.

I looked at her horse, standing a few meters away, shaking, favoring his front leg.

“I’m not going anywhere,” I said.

“Bennett. This is the race of your life.”

“Lady,” I said, “I’m fifty-two. I’ve had a lot of races. Let me see that arm.”

I’d seen dislocated shoulders on ranch hands. I’d never put one back. I didn’t try. I made a sling out of my spare shirt and a bandana, the way an old veterinarian in Valentine taught me forty years ago for a calf with a broken leg.

She laughed when I told her that. Then she winced.

“So I am a calf.”

“You’re a very smart calf.”

I pressed the emergency button on her GPS tracker. The race medical team answered by satellite phone.

The helicopter could come. But not in the storm. Not until it passed. Maybe four hours. Maybe the morning.

The rain turned to hail.

There was no tree for a hundred kilometers. No shelter.

And then, through the hail, I saw something on the horizon.

A small white circle.

A ger. A herder’s tent.

Six kilometers away.

Saskia couldn’t ride.