The Last Free Thing - N. S. Streets

She did not know she was ancient.

A blue roan mare stands in the Nevada basin with her colt at her flank,
her hooves hard as obsidian, her blood carrying fifty million years of
this continent's memory. She knows the wind. She knows the water. She
does not know about the helicopters being fueled at airstrips in Elko
and Winnemucca, or the sixty thousand horses already penned in holding
facilities across the West.

The Last Free Thing traces the wild horse from the dawn of the Eocene
through the Comanche empire, from a secretary named Velma Johnston who
followed a truck dripping blood to a slaughterhouse and spent twenty-seven
years fighting to protect what she found inside, to the holding pens and
policy failures that threaten the mustang today.

Part natural history, part biography, part investigation, and part love
letter to the American West, this book tells the story of the oldest
animal on the continent and the people who have loved, used, betrayed,
and fought to save it.

All author proceeds go toward the creation of a wild horse sanctuary.