A former movie stunt man and his bookish nephew, spending the summer together, seem to have little in common until a winged colt enters their lives.
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We stood at the railroad station and looked across the tracks at each other. He was a boy in a dark suit with his hair combed down flat. He was holding a Mad magazine. I was a man in dusty boots and dusty pants with a scar down the side of my face that no amount of dust could hide.
When Uncle Coot met Charles that day at the station, you could tell they were going to have a hard time hitting it off. Charles was a serious, bookish kid, whose mother had left him pretty much on his own in boarding schools and had farmed him out to his uncle for that summer. Uncle Coot was tired and bitter, a former movie stunt man who had made hundreds of spectacular leaps and falls—until the day he accidentally killed the best stunt horse he ever had. Charles and Uncle Coot had nothing in common but their mutual distrust.
They might have continued that way for a long time, maybe forever. Then Mrs. Minney, Uncle Coot's eccentric neighbor, drove up in her truck. The mare she had bought from Uncle Coot had foaled. The colt had wings.
Uncle Coot couldn't believe it, even after he saw it for himself. Charles was ecstatic. They took the colt home and cared for it, but when it was lost during one of the fierce Texas electrical storms, the tension between Uncle Coot and Charles began to grow. The colt returned, and everything was almost all right, until that heart-stopping moment they both saw the colt stumble, leap—and fly.
In this unusual and imaginative story, Betsy Byars writes with compassion and insight of loneliness, isolation—and hope.
—from the dust jacket
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