My Horse Escaped 14 Times in One Month, and Every Time I Found Him in the Garden of the Same Woman. She Was a Retired Opera Singer, and She Was Not Amused

Escape number seven was a Tuesday.

By then, I had replaced two sections of fence, installed a hot wire, and padlocked the barn. My liability insurance agent had called twice to ask why I kept filing reports about “livestock at large.”

Bandit got out anyway.

I never saw how. Nobody ever saw how. I started to believe he was teleporting.

I found him in her garden again, standing perfectly still, ears pricked forward toward the house, so focused he didn’t even eat a rose.

That’s when I heard it.

Music.

Coming from her open window.

Not a radio. A voice. A woman’s voice, singing something in Italian, so big and so beautiful that it seemed to come out of the whole house at once. It went up and up and up, and then it held a note that made the hair on my arms stand straight up.

Bandit didn’t move a muscle.

Neither did I.

When it ended, the window slammed shut.

A minute later, the door opened.

“You,” she said.

“Ma’am.”

“Again.”

“Ma’am, I think I figured it out.”

“Figured what out?”

“He comes for the singing,” I said. “Every morning at nine. That’s when you practice. Isn’t it?”

She opened her mouth to say something sharp.

Then she closed it.

She looked at Bandit. Bandit looked at her. He took two steps forward and very gently put his big golden head over her shoulder, the way he does with me when he wants a scratch.

She froze.

“What is he doing?”

“That’s a horse hug,” I said. “He doesn’t do that with everybody.”

She stood very still with a twelve-hundred-pound palomino breathing into her silk scarf.

Then her shoulders started to shake.

I thought she was crying.

She was laughing.