The Girl Who Loved Wild Horses

Description

“The Girl Who Loved Wild Horses” is a straightforward tale of the Plains Indians, retold and illustrated by Paul Goble, unlike those that he has told about the trickster, Iktomi. This myth does not follow any one story exactly but is put together from a great number of stories belonging to the peoples who lived on the Great Plains that Goble had read or listened to over the years. This story is premised on the importance of horses to these peoples. The title character is a girl in the village would loved horses so much that she would led them to drink at the river and when she spoke softly to them they would follow her. Her people recognized that she understood horses in a special way, which explains why this story ends the way that it does.
Every day after doing her chores the young girl would run off to be with the horses. One day there is a great lightning storm that drives the horses, carrying the young girl, over the horizon to a land she had never seen before. There she finds a beautiful spotted stallion, stronger and prouder and more handsome than any horse she had ever dreamed of. He is the leader of all the wild horses who roamed the hills and he welcomes her to live with them. But a year later two hunters from her people discover her in the hills where the wild horses lived and they will try to bring the girl back to her parents. The question is whether the girl can be happy back with her people now that she has lived with the wild horses.
Goble’s distinctive artwork, which recalls the art of the Plains Indians of the 19th century, is particularly well suited to this simple tale. As was the case in one of his earlier books, “The Gift of the Sacred Dog,” which told how the first horses came into the lives of the people, you can tell that Goble likes to draw horses. In “The Girl Who Loves Wild Horses” he has ample opportunity to draw dozens of them, as well as the young girl decked out in her colorful garb, and I particularly liked the plant life he draws this time around. No wonder this book was the winner of the Caldecott Medal.