Smoky the Cowhorse

Will James tells the whole story from inside a horse's own experience, opening with Smoky's wild birth on the open range and following him through his capture and gentling by a cowboy named Clint, who trains him into an exceptional cutting and cow horse the two of them come to trust completely. Horse thieves steal Smoky away from the ranch, and the beatings and abuse he suffers under their ownership curdle his trust into open hatred, a change that finally erupts when he kills one of his abusers and is captured by authorities who rename him the Cougar and enter him into rodeo bucking competitions rather than recognize what actually happened to him. He earns a rough kind of fame as a bucking bronc under that new name, wearing his body down further with every ride, and after his rodeo days end he passes to an owner who renames him again, works him nearly to death, and starves him. Clint eventually recognizes the broken, half wild horse for who he once was, buys him back, and nurses him slowly toward the trust and health he had before any of it happened, closing the story where it effectively began, a working partnership between a man and a horse rather than either owning the other outright.

James writes in a rough, plainly spelled cowboy vernacular and illustrates the book with his own confident drawings of horses in motion, a combination that gives Smoky's story real physical authority even in its most sentimental passages. He was startled that the book won a children's award at all, since he had written it, and expected it to be read, as a book for adults, and that adult edge, real cruelty shown without much softening, still surprises readers who pick it up expecting a gentler animal story.