Mona soon discovers that her newest pet is a willful beast. She falls instantly in love. When she tries to stroke his neck, he snaps his teeth at her. When she leans forward to shoe him, he tries to kick her. Longeing provides further difficulties. Time after time, Macaquinho tries to bite through the rope. Mona is sure that Cosimiro chose this horse because he was so wild, but there is one thing that her mestre has apparently forgotten about her.

For all that she is and for all that she isn't, Mona knows how to break a horse. She understands them. They do not know hatred, but they know fear, and the key to turning a wild horse into a suitable mount revolves around trust.

So for hours upon hours every night for a solid two months, Mona bolts her attention to Macaquinho's training. She saunters up to him, coos the words she wants him to remember in Portuguese. She strokes his neck despite his attempts to snarl her, and when he realizes that she isn't going to eat him, she makes another attempt at longeing. But her folly comes from impatience and a promise she made to Bart.

She asks Cuyler Quinn to lend her the horse that belongs to her daughter, because she wants to so very much to teach Bart to ride. He takes to it like a fish to water, his old steed as sweet as the sugar cubes used to reward him, but Macaquinho is not used to the saddle, the bit or the reins, and he certainly doesn't cotton well to Mona's nymph weight upon his back.

He tries to throw her off, ignores her commands and takes off running across the stretch of sandy shore behind their home. With Bart and his horse little more than a dot on the horizon and a group of jagged rocks growing closer and closer, Mona, now sure that she will lose both her horse and a nice chunk of her skull, closes her eyes, grips the reins tightly, and digs her heels into Macaquinho.

For a split second she imagines Bart finding her body mangled upon the rocks; imagines Macaquinho struggling to stand on his broken legs in the sand. She concentrates so hard on the image that she can smell her own blood, and she closes her eyes and prepares herself for impact.

But it doesn't come. She opens her eyes and discovers the rocks still yards away. She hears nothing but the waves and the gulls and her horse's frantic breathing. She slips from the saddle and begins to unbuckle it from Macaquinho body, all the while keeping her gaze locked upon the animal's large, terrified eyes.

It isn't his fault, it's her own. She drapes the saddle over a small boulder and hoists herself up on her toes to stroke the beast's long face. She croons to him gently, tells him what a good boy he is, and eventually his pale blue eyes close.

"You were just afraid, weren't you? You do not have to be afraid of me. I will not let anything harm you, Macaquinho."

Carefully, she makes her way to the stallion's side and gently takes the reins back into her hands. Without the saddle's pommel to grip, she has to stand upon a stone to scale the beast, all the while stroking his neck and whispering her apologies.

To her surprise Macaquinho does not protest her saddleless presence, and when she clicks her tongue against the roof her mouth and taps his sides with her heels, he follows the slight tug of the reins and turns around. She speaks to him in a whisper, careful not to overuse words meant for commands, and when she reaches Bart she is smiling from ear to ear.