” He rode with the sun coppering his face and the red wind blowing out of the west.  He turned south along the old war trail and he rode to the crest of a low rise and dismounted and dropped the reins and walked out and stood like a man come to the end of something.

There was an old horseskull in the brush and he squatted and picked it up and turned it in his hands.  Frail and brittle.  Bleached paper white.  He squatted in the long light holding it, the comicbook teeth loose in their sockets.  The joints in the cranium like a ragged welding of the bone plates.  The muted run of sand in the brainbox when he turned it.

What he loved in horses was what he loved in men, the blood and the heat of the blood that ran them.  All his reverence and all his fondness and all the leanings of his life were for the ardenthearted and they would always be so and never be otherwise.

He rode back in the dark.  The horse quickened its step.  The last of the day’s light fanned slowly upon the plain behind him and withdrew again down the edges of the world in a cooling blue of shadow and dusk and chill and a few last chitterings of birds sequestered in the dark and wiry brush.”

—–Cormac McCarthy,  All the Pretty Horses