PALOMINO: The entire coat of the horse is golden-yellow, unless white markings are present. The mane and tail are usually flaxen.
WHITE: The entire coat, including the mane, tail and legs, is predominantly white.
— Jockey Club Registry
* * *
The master of color is the gene. The gene is found inside the cell on the chromosome, coiled material formed in arkan pairs, a chain provided by each parent with the allele a blind toss from dam and sire to foal. Genes, like many tyrants, are small but manifest in a multiplicity of forms. Allele pairs dictate the genotype, which, due to the vagaries of expression, may or may not correlate precisely to phenotype: black, brown, bay, dun, grullo, buckskin, chestnut/sorrel, red dun, palomino, silver dapple, cremello, which subdivide to reflect allelic combinations of jet and raven and summer black; or dark and light and seal browns; slate, lobo, olive, smutty, or silver grullos, and so on; also the white markings, which increase upon the infinite with roans, or the gray of age, or rabicano, frosty, paint, or tobiano; this is to say nothing of the effects of dappling, foal transition, seasonal change, & Etc.
Nature manipulates her colors — or color happens, insofar as the gene has no Mind to mind the gene — either as alleles occupy loci in homozygous and heterozygous pairs, or through the wily machinations of epistasis, where brute dominance shoulders its autocratic way through the old bloodlines, while recessives wait in genetic shadow, eyeing the dominant pairs and biding their time until, in tandem, the recessives in a surprise move—
No, perhaps it’s better to render genetics a descriptive but meaningless math as it concerns the hard colors, these colors being chestnut, black, and bay:
ee
EE or Ee
&
EEAA, EEAa, EeAA, or EeAa
But math won’t satisfy. Why do we always want the story? A dominant allele storms the House of Agouti and seizes half its resources, producing a bay horse, AA or Aa. Most recessive combatants will ultimately join forces with the house to produce the expected black EE or Ee, but sometimes a chestnut, ee, emerges victorious from the House of Extension, outmaneuvering the blacks and dominant bays of Agouti.
One would imagine that mastering the houses — Agouti, Extension, Dun, Silver Dapple, Champagne, and their meddling servants Pangare, Sooty, Shade, Flaxen, Brindle — would allow for the rational construction of color, including the dilutes that form from the hard, fundamental colors. But then there is white. White is less a color than a superimposition. It is a pigmentless pattern, a roan or gray intrusion upon all the hard colors and their various configurations. A white is the only horse without pigment, though even the white horse has dark eyes, WhW. White serves to mask color, though color lives forever in the genes. Therefore, a white horse — or what seems a white horse — is capable of great reproductive surprises.
Ultimately you may breed for color just as you may breed for conformation, speed, strength, & Etc, but the organism itself exerts no will to form. The natural dispersal of color is neither random nor intentional. Which is all to say that there may be tyrants with no ambition for power.
2. THE SPIRIT OF LESSER ANIMALS
On the principle of the multiplication and gradual divergence in character of the species descended from a common parent, together with their retention by inheritance of some characters in common, we can understand the excessively complex and radiating affinities by which all the members of the same family or higher group are connected together.
There was a culling of resources: which represents tolerance of risk, a form of courtship display, i.e., the organism’s ability to assert itself in the war of sexual selection. So, the detritus of the old plantation was sold away: the slump-shouldered plow, a corn planter with its four ugly teeth, jointers and froes and poleaxes and chisels and a thousand antiques lined out for appraisal and bidding on the side lawn, all sold to strangers on Valentine’s Day 1966. Even the old Tennessee Walkers were auctioned off, but purchased by the Millers, so the six were led in a head-hanging line down the drive like bewildered cow ponies off to their first cattle drive, while Henry stood on the el porch, bourbon in hand, watching without regret. At this point both of your grandparents have died.
There followed a reorientation of remaining resources: Stallion paddocks were arranged in two-acre units near the house with a yearling barn erected some way behind a stallion barn. The old whipping post was not uprooted in the redesign of the farm, but left to stand perversely in the path of an emerging thicket windbreak, so the evergreen bushes grew up around it like a rose around its thorn. The Osbournes’ land was purchased when they went bankrupt in the summer of 1968, so the old land of the silt bowl, which had once been Forge property before being sold in William Iver’s generation, was Henry’s and yours once again, and it came with a broodmare band and a foaling barn only thirteen years old and the assurance of hardy grass over limestone; also a sweet-tasting Stoner Creek streamlet that pooled in the bowl, glimmering there like gray ice on cloudy days.
Another note on display: Your father paints the plank fences wedding-dress white instead of black, an unnecessary expense. However, in the wild, male suitors often develop brightly colored, highly ornamented tails or wings that display genetic excess, which is to say wild tolerance of risk (see above), in order to secure a suitable mate and reproductive success. The female, frequently the choosier of the species, selects. Note how in this schema, the male and female are merely avenues to reproduction, dispensable agents of futurity.
A note on the 1 percent: The human is an organism defined by its 1 percent genetic difference from the chimp, which involves improved hearing, protein digestion, sophisticated speech, and all the other necessary conditions of humanity, not least of which is hope: in this case a horse. Hellbent is well balanced with a head neither too large nor too small, situated nicely on her neck over a slim swell of belly; driven by quarters that are strong but not stocky; legs set neither forward nor back but perfectly straight; unimpressive in her first races, but intriguing on paper; a gamble, your father’s roughcut gem, a daughter of Bold Ruler, showing some of his high temperament and nerve, if not his power at the mile and beyond.
But there follows disappointment: dejection at the frustration of design. During Hellbent’s life the broodmare band was expanded then culled, stallions were purchased and sold, mares crossed out and inbred, but there never came a horse that made the farm, or made your father. Hellbent herself became a solid producer of horses, including stakes winners, though a few broke down, overextended in distance by overeager trainers, and one died of colic in the pasture, its guts twisted like engorged ropes, striking its head against the ground in vain attempts to rise, so it had beaten itself to death before the vet could arrive.
Disappointment is compounded by perfection: Henry sees Secretariat, the big red colt by Bold Ruler out of Somethingroyal, at the 1972 Laurel Futurity, then again at next year’s Belmont, where the chestnut springs from the inside and establishes a lead along the backstretch against his rival Sham and ahead of Twice a Prince and My Gallant, firing out the first three quarters in 1:09⅘, at which point Sham begins to fall away under the scorching pace—Secretariat is widening now, he is moving like a tremendous machine, Secretariat by twelve, Secretariat by fourteen lengths—with Turcotte wild-eyed and asking for nothing and the grandstand rising with an oceanic roar around Henry, who stands transfixed as Secretariat takes the only purse of real value, greatness, charging under the wire thirty-one lengths ahead of Sham in 2:24, a record that stands even today.