In Part Five of this excerpt from the new book Equine ER,

a Bluegrass polo pony who was found critically injured in a field, and who struggled over many months to heal from devastating injuries.

Now picture the father: It is May and Frank Proto drives down from New York to take his daughter home from college for the summer and to see Selena at the hospital barn. The horse is continuing to recover but she’ll likely never play polo again. She’ll be shipped back up to New York when she’s ready. Frank Proto once dreamed of being a horse doc, as he puts it. (His daughter tells me one of the reasons he’s not is because he couldn’t stand to put horses down.) Now he’s a county legislator and bank vice president. He has thick gray hair and green eyes, wears a corduroy jacket and smokes a pipe. He has an ease about him; he’s probably a great party guest. He played polo in college at Cornell under “Doc” Roberts, the well-known veterinary professor and notoriously tough polo coach who died in 2005 at 89. Roberts once pinned an overly aggressive player against the boards in a Madison Square Garden match not soon forgotten by anyone who was there