On Thursday in this excerpt from the Eclipse Press book Equine ER, Surely Awesome, the gentle, sorrel-colored Quarter Horse mare with the shattered long pastern bone, was finally able to leave the hospital for a lay-up barn. But the threat of laminitis remains.

In one account of Greek mythology, man was created by Prometheus, the shrewd Titan, and his flighty brother, Epimetheus. Epimetheus started the process, but he first “gave all the best gifts to the animals, strength and swiftness and courage and shrewd cunning, fur and feathers and wings and shells and the like Ð until no good was left for men É no quality to make them a match for the beasts.” Prometheus then stepped in. He shaped man in a “nobler” form than animals, stood him on two feet, and handed him fire. All this was supposed to make man “superior” to any creature.

 Mythology says man is “nobler” than beast … but Surely Awesome defied that theory