There were gypsies and showmen, shamans and charlatans. Others, it was said, could with but a glance root the hooves of a working team to the earth they plowed.

Some wrought their magic with the bleached bones of toads, plucked from moonlit streams. Often they were seen as witches and perhaps they were. They could see into the creature's soul and soothe the wounds they found there. Since that neolithic moment when first a horse was haltered, there were those among men who understood this. And though later he came pretending friendship, the alliance with man would ever be but fragile, for the fear he'd struck into their hearts was too deep to be dislodged. Deposits of their broken bones bore testimony. Whole herds were driven hurtling headlong to their deaths from the tops of cliffs. But the horse was a creature of flight not fight and, with a simple deadly logic, the hunter used flight to destroy it.

Lions and bears would turn and fight and that was the moment men speared them. Paintings on the walls of caves showed how.

They first knew man as the hunted knows the hunter, for long before he saw them as a means to killing other beasts, man killed them for their meat. A million years before the birth of man, they grazed the vast plains of wiry grass and crossed to other continents over bridges of rock soon severed by retreating ice. “It was in America that horses first roamed.

The divide book nicholas evans