Palomino (Cream) Genetics

Sometimes scientists get it wrong. With time other scientists generally catch and correct the errors, but the initial efforts to explain the palomino color were wrong on two counts: first, the assignment of palomino dilution to the albino locus C (for color,now known to be the gene that codes for the enzyme tyrosinase) and second, the assumption that all dilute colors were palomino. We now know both are false, but the early investigators did explain why palomino does not and cannot breed true.

Palomino. A bay and another palomino are in the background.

A palomino is, ideally, a horse the color of a new-minted gold coin with a white mane and tail. At one time, breeders tried to get them to breed true, and there are still breed registries based on palomino color. But two dark-skinned palominos, mated together, will produce only about half palomino foals, and many of them will not be the pure gold with white manes and tails wanted. Why?

Palomino is an example of what is sometimes called over-dominance or partial dominance. The color is due to a dilution gene, cream or cremillo, acting on a chestnut background. The locus is still called C, with primary alleles C⁺ and C^Cr. A single dose of cream will dilute red pigment to golden yellow, while having very little effect on black pigment—thus the dark skin. A double dose will further dilute the red to a pale cream hard to tell from white, and black to a shade that varies from a slightly dirty white to pale gray.

Palomino with a Bend Or spot on the neck, far more conspicuous on a palomino than it would be on a chestnut.

All horses, in fact all mammals, have two copies of each gene, one from the father and the other from the mother. If the basic color of the horse is chestnut and the horse has a cream gene from one parent and a non-cream gene from the other, the result will be a palomino. If one parent is a cremillo (the result of a double dose of cream acting on chestnut) and the other is chestnut all of their foals will be palomino. But if both parents are palominos, about a quarter of their foals will get the non-cream gene from both parents and will be chestnut, a quarter will get the cream gene from both parents and will be cremillos, and half will get one of each kind of gene and be palominos.

Cremillos are popular with some horse owners today, but at one time they were considered very undesirable by palomino breeders. They have pink skins and blue eyes, and they may be more subject to sunburn than horses with dark skin and eyes. They are not, however, albinos or due to any form of the albino gene. The cream gene has been found and sequenced, and a DNA test for cream is available.

Palominos don’t necessarily have a clear gold body color, or white manes and tails. Remember chestnuts have varying amounts of black hair sprinkled through the coat, and these black hairs will remain and become even more conspicuous if the red of the coat is lightened to gold. Some chestnuts even have what are called Bend Or spots, areas much darker than the body, or even black. These will be much more conspicuous with  the C⁺  C^Cr combination..

Further, chestnuts often have manes that are self-colored or even darker than their bodies. These characteristics will carry over into the dilute animals, and it is not unusual to find palominos with considerable black shading or dappling, and black hair mixed into their manes and tails.

What happens if the cream gene is combined with a base color other than chestnut?

The effect of a single does of cream dilution on a bay, giving buckskin. There is considerable confusion between buckskin and dun, but this horse has the palomino or cream dilution.

One dose of cream on bay gives a buckskin, with a yellow body and black mane, tail, and lower legs. A double dose of cream gives a perlino, a cream horse with mane, tail and lower legs very slightly darker than the body, blue eyes and pink skin.

A single dose of cream on black may be missed entirely, and the horse just called black. Some blacks with a single dose of cream are slightly lighter than normal, and are called smoky. With a double dose of the cream gene, a black becomes a smoky cream, again with blue eyes and pink skin.

Although the darkest variants of cremillo, perlino and smoky cream can be distinguished from each other, the lighter variants are very difficult to tell apart. Often they are just called cream, the distinction becoming important only if they are bred.

A base color of brown or very deeply black-tipped bay? I saw one once in winter coat, and at first glance he looked like a blue roan. Looking closely, however, he did not have a mixture of black and white hairs; rather each hair had a cream base and a black tip. I was able to recognize the same horse in summer coat only because a stable employee pointed him out. In summer coat he was a typical seal brown.

I emphasized palominos with black skin because it turns out that gold horses with lighter skin (sometimes called pumpkin skin) are due to a completely different gene, champagne. I’ll talk about this later.

If you want to read some very basic information about genetics, especially genetics of coat color, have a look at http://bowlingsite.mcf.com/Genetics/Genetics.html

Types of Color Genes in Horses

The basic coat colors of horses already described can be modified by a large number of other genes. These genes may dilute the phaeomelanin or eumelanin pigments. They may make some of the hairs on the body white. They may organize white or black hairs as to where on the body they occur. They may cause areas of the body, face or legs to be white, usually underlain by pink skin. They may affect the mane and tail more than the body, or leave certain areas unchanged when the rest of the coat is lightened. Finally, there are genes that darken the apparent color by adding black hair to the coat.

Not all of the genetic basis for these colors are understood, but I will try to explain the ones we know something about.

The first group is dilution genes.

At one time, the assumption was that dilute was palomino. Talk about a gross oversimplification! There are at least six different dilution loci in horses, three of which were initially thought to be palomino. These are:

Cream (C), which probably has two alleles in addition to wild-type and is responsible for dark-skinned palomino, buckskin, smoky, cremillo, perlino, and pearl, among others.

Dun (Dn), which produces a dorsal stripe as well as dilution, and which sometimes leaves the head and lower legs dark. Dun, red dun and grullo are all dun colors. Dun on bay is sometimes called buckskin, but it is genetically a completely different color from cream on bay.

Champagne (Ch), a dilution gene which on a chestnut base produces what was once called pumpkin-skinned palomino, but which on other colors can only be called champagne.

Silver Dapple (Z), called by different names in different breeds and sometimes called taffy. The allele producing dilution affects black more than red, and mane and tail more than body.

Mushroom (Mu) is a rare color which at first sight looks like silver dalpple, but is quite different genetically.

Finally, there is a form of dilution in Arabians which appears to be genetic.

The second group involve interspersed white hairs.

Grey (G) is the commoner form especially in Thoroughbred and Arabian breeds, and produces white hairs showing first on the head and increasing with time. Aged greys are not infrequently pure white, but they normally retain black skin. In fact, black-skinned whites are really greys.

Classic Roan (Rn, tends to darken with age, and white hairs may not occur or be vary sparse in head, legs, mane and tail. Scars on roans are often of the base color, lacking white hair.

Other types of roan occur, but in most cases the genetics are not well understood

The third group is made up of spotting genes.

At one time, these were limited to face and body markings, two types of pinto, and Appaloosa. We now know of a bewildering variety.

Face and leg markings are widespread and appear to be quantitative in inheritance, but their inheritance is poorly understood. Even nomenclature varies.

Tobiano (To) is a type of vertically oriented spotting in which the head normally remains plain or conservatively marked but the legs are white.

Sabino is still a catch-all term for paints not known to be due to a specific gene, though sabino-1 is often treated as a locus. Minimal sabinos often have both blazes and high white on the legs. Roaning can be part of this pattern.

Frame (Fr) is a type of horizontally oriented white spotting. Minimal Frames generally have very wide blazes or bald faces but pigmented legs.

Splashed white (Spl) has white spreading up from below and often nearly all-white heads.

Manchado and Brindle are rare and not well understood.

White (Wh) produces white with pink skin and dark eyes, but this phenotype may also be produced as the white extreme of several of the spotting genes.

Leopard (Lp) is often called appaloosa in North America, but the gene is found worldwide in breeds from ponies to draft horses. This gene produces a wide variety of patterns, but at least one Lp^Lp allele seems to be necessary for all of them.

Finally, there are at least two mechanisms that darken the coat.

The genetics of sooty and shading are still uncertain.

Note that a horse may have any combination of these genes. In the trilogy I’m working on now Roi has a horse, Buttermilk, who is a palomino classic roan with Lp^Lp giving her white splashes over her hips: E^eE^e C⁺C^Cr Rn^RnRn⁺ Lp^LpLp⁺.

I have old posts on all of these (see index, at the top of the page) which I will be freshening up with new photos and re-issuing over the next few months.

The Agouti and Extension loci in Horses

This was originally posted on November 27, 2010 with different photos and no comparison with other animals. Since I now have far more photographs, I have decided to re-post some of the old horse color genetics posts with better photos.

Blood bay with star

The base colors of horses are bay, black and chestnut, possibly with the addition of wild bay and seal brown (tan-point.) These colors are distinguished by where red and black pigment are found, both where on the whole horse and where on individual hairs. I’m going to go into more detail this time on what determines these base colors.

Red pigment in horses (more correctly, phaeomelanin) can appear brownish red to copper, sometimes approaching gold, in the absence of dilution factors. With dilution factors, it can include white, cream, tan, yellow and gold shades.

Black pigment (more correctly, eumelanin) is black in the absence of modifying genes. In horses, the genes that dilute black to blue-gray or black to chocolate brown are not known to occur, though they do occur in other species. Chocolate Labradors, for instance, have the gene that dilutes black to brown, but this is very rare, if it occurs at all, in horses. Some dilution genes in horses do affect black, changing it to shades from bluish to sepia to dirty white or even nearly pure white.

The Agouti locus is known in almost all mammals. It codes for a protein that affects more than coat color, and is complex to sequence. In general, however, more red pigment is dominant to more black pigment.

The Agouti locus is given the symbol A. Agouti alleles are A with a superscript showing the particular form of the allele. Thus A^a is the symbol for recessive black, also called non-agouti. A^t stands for seal brown (black with tan on the inner legs, flanks and muzzle, very hard to tell from black with the mealy gene) which is also called tan-point in some mammals. A^A is the symbol for bay. A⁺ is the so-called wild bay, where some red pigment appears on the lower legs. Note that + is always the symbol for the “wild-type” allele, that which is believed to be the predominant gene in a truly wild or ancestral population. The wild-type allele can be very rare in a domesticated population if it has been selected against.

Every horse has two alleles at each locus. If one allele is dominant to the other at the agouti locus, that is the allele that determines the color of the horse—if the extension locus allows it to. The order of dominance at the agouti locus is wild bay is dominant to all others, bay is dominant to black and tan-point but recessive to wild bay, tan-point is dominant to black but recessive to both bays, and black is recessive to the other three alleles. This means that two recessive blacks can produce only black foals, while two wild bays can produce any color they carry the genes for.

This horse could be a seal brown or a very darkly shaded bay.

The agouti gene, by the way, was named for a South American rodent, the agouti. It was originally defined as controlling banded hair, seen in many wild animals. In fact, banded hair (black tips on red hairs) can be found on most bay horses, though you’ll need a magnifying glass and very good light to find it. Many of the darker shaded bays actually have rather deep black tips on individual hairs. In a few extreme cases, only the tips are visible in summer coat, and a bay horse may appear to be a seal brown (black with tan shading on muzzle and flanks) in summer and a definite dark bay in winter. The horse in the photograph is probably of this type.

Sable and white Shetland Sheepdog–genetically Agouti.

Agouti in horses is bay. In dogs the same genetic color is sable, and in mice the standard gray color. (The yellow is very light.)

The Extension locus is given the symbol E. Again, this locus is very widespread in mammals. The wild-type allele, E⁺, allows the agouti alleles to be expressed. There is also a recessive allele, E^e, which suppresses the black pigment. Not completely—a horse with two E^e alleles can still have black whiskers and may have black hairs scattered throughout the coat. (In contrast, an E^eE^e dog has no black in the coat or whiskers, but an E^eE^e fox will be a typical “red fox” color.) But it will not have the black mane, tail and lower legs of a bay. In fact, an E^eE^e horse will be a chestnut, regardless of what may be at the Agouti locus.

E may also have two alleles dominant to the wild-type allele. These are dominant black E^D and countershading, E^B. (I have to say I have my doubts about countershading, though countershading on bays is well established.)

At the E locus, alleles with more black are dominant to alleles with more red. Further, the E locus can hide what is present at the A locus. An E^D horse will be black regardless of what alleles are present at the A locus, and an E^eE^e horse will be chestnut regardless of what is present at the A locus. The word epistatic is sometimes used to define this relationship between loci—Extension is epistatic to Agouti.

Note that I am following Sponenberg, Equine Color Genetics Third Edition, plus my own observations on hair color.

The Basic Colors of Horses

One of the lighter shades of chestnut, with flaxen mane and tail. This horse almost overlaps the darker shades of palomino, but it is a chestnut.

This is a repeat of a post originally dated October 2010. Because I now have far more photographs of horses than I had at that time, and because the horse color genetics series has been so popular, I am reissuing it with more photographs.

I got a new book two years ago: Equine Color Genetics third edition, by Philllip Spoenenberg. I already had the first two editions–and how things have changed since the first edition came out! Even the second edition had only four types of dilution genes. Now there are six, with at least one more that has not been located yet.

A more typical shade of chestnut, with a flaxen mane and self tail.

Lineback duns and creams were clearly separate by the second edition, which also greatly expanded on silver dapple and added champagne. But the third edition added pearl, mushroom and a rare dilution, probably recessive, found in Arabians.

Before starting to look at the effects of the dilution genes, not to mention the other genes that affect horse color, it is important to realize that horses, like most mammals, have two kinds of

A fast glance might misidentify this horse as a bay but the mane and tail, while darker than the body, have red as well as black hairs and the lower legs lighten toward the hooves.

pigment. One, eumelanin, is black, and while some of  the dilution genes may affect it, the kind of brown that produces the chocolate Labrador is not known to occur in horses. The other pigment, called phaeomelanin, varies from rich red-brown to a lighter golden red which can be confused with palomino. We’ll call that red, but that color can also be changed by other genes.

The three basic horse colors are chestnut, bay, and black. (Seal brown may be a fourth color genetically, but that is still under investigation.) Patterns of white,

A very dark shade of chestnut, sometimes called liver chestnut. A magnifying lens would show that the darkness of color is not due to the red/yellow phaeomalanin, but to interspersed black (eumelanin) hairs. The darkness of mane and tail are likewise due to interspersed black hairs, but the legs clearly lighten toward the hooves. The two horses in the background are more typical chestnuts.

interspersed white hairs, or dilution may act on any of these colors, as may a general scattering of black hairs through the coat. But these three colors are the base for all horse colors. DNA tests are now available for the genes that produce all of these colors.

Chestnut is predominantly red, including mane, tail and lower legs. The mane and tail may be lighter than the body (often called flaxen, and sometimes with interspersed white hairs) or darker than the body (usually due to interspersed black hairs.) The dark shades of chestnut, called liver chestnut, often have interspersed black hairs over the entire body.

Chestnut is due to a recessive form of the same gene, called extension, that produces yellow Labrador Retrievers. Chestnut is recessive to normal extension (which allows black mane and tail) but in contrast to dogs, black can occur in the coat. Recessive means that chestnut to chestnut breedings can produce only chestnut foals, but bay to bay (or bay to black or black to black) can produce chestnut.

Typical bay, cantering. Any shade of phaeomelanin found in chestnut can also be found in bay, but the black mane, tail and lower legs are diagnostic.

Bay horses have red on the body, but the mane, tail and lower legs are black. Interspersed black hairs are again a possibility. In addition, many bay horses have some body hairs (most numerous on the upper part of the horse) which have red bases but black tips. This type of hair, with a band of red on a hair with black tips (and sometimes even black bases) is very common in mammals, and is called agouti. Bay is in fact an agouti gene. and is dominant to non-agouti.

Black horse with star and snip. The owner thinks this horse could be a brown, but it is not uncommon for black horses to sunbleach slightly in summer, in which case they may appear to have brown in their coat.

Black is most commonly due to non-agouti. Black horses have primarily black hair. There is a separate gene, called mealy, that can produce lighter shading on the muzzle, though there is some evidence that a similar effect can result from an agouti gene called tan-point. Black is usually recessive to bay–that is, two bay parents can have a black foal, but it would be very unusual (and probably an indicator of the rare dominant black) for two black parents to have a bay foal.

Any of these colors may have white markings, and as long as the markings are confined to face and lower legs, the horses will still be called chestnut, bay or black. A bay, for instance, can have four white stockings and still be a bay. Only the most extreme white markings can hide which base color is present.

I’ll be blogging on more of the horse color genes in the next few weeks. If you want a primer on basic genetics, check out my website on coat color genetics in dogs.

Quotes from Anne McCaffrey

All of this past week’s quotes but the last were taken from Dragonsdawn, by Anne McCafffrey. This is the first of the Pern novels in terms of internal (Pernese) time, but nineth in terms of when it was written.

“Things were going far too well.” Kenjo, on the first landing approach to Pern.

“History was something one read about in books.” Sorka, then elementary age, is unimpressed by the idea that she is making Pernese history.

“Horses, always. We were promised horses.” Sean, talking with Sorka about the need of the traveling folk for draft animals.

“Alaskans had a reputation for never throwing anything away.” Sallah Telgar, commenting on the way the quartermaster (who is Alaskan) has stripped the colony ship, sending everything remotely usable down to the new colony.

“It’s one thing to see, and another to know.” Sorka, when she is taken along on an exploration trip.

“Mankind prove[s] in many ways that greed is universal.” Admiral Benden at a meeting of the colony’s leaders while they are discussing a legal framework for the new colony.

“If they drink that much beer, they wouldn’t be drinking that much water.” Tourist Trap, by Sue Ann Bowling. Roi’s observation on the Eversummer plague situation, which sends Marna looking for a water-borne source.

Note that all of these quotes were tweeted on @sueannbowling. Follow to get more Context? Quotes, and challenge yourself to identify them before these weekly roundups!

Platform Campaign, 7’s Meme

Kathy Collier-Miehl tagged me for the Fourth Writer’s Campaign Lucky 7 meme. The Rules are:

1. Go to page 77 of your current MS/WIP
2. Go to line 7
3. Copy down the next 7 lines – sentences or paragraphs – and post them as they’re written. No cheating
4. Tag 7 authors
5. Let them know

I’m not going to do numbers 4 and 5, because I understand how exponentials work and I’m not sure there’s anyone left who hasn’t been tagged. If you haven’t been and want to do this, consider yourself tagged. And I have a little problem with 1, because my files are by chapters, with no consecutive multi-chapter page numbering. So I went to line 7 of page 7 of chapter 7 instead. (Which leads me to wonder what one does if one’s WIP is less than 77 pages long.)

I interpreted the start as the paragraph in which the 7^th line fell, and then copied that and the following 6 paragraphs. The WIP in question is science fiction, with a working title of Rescue Operation.

Well, the horses hadn’t been that dirty to start with.  Each had free access to a generous grassy paddock, and a daily session with the autogroomer.  Their stalls and paddocks were likewise kept clean by robot extensions of the Big’Un.  The dirt Rabbit had managed to accumulate, however, was mostly now on Crys, who was continuing to brush as high as she could reach on the mare’s hindquarters.

“Is she clean enough?” the child asked, turning as she heard Dusk’s hoofbeats.  “I couldn’t quite reach the middle of her back.”

“Clean enough to ride,” Roi chuckled, and gave Dusk a firm mental order to stand still.  “Here, hold Dusk for me a minute, will you, while I get a saddle on Rabbit?  Dusk needs to be cooler before I put him up, and you might as well ride along while I’m getting him walked dry.”

The sheer bliss on Crys’s dirt-smudged face told him that he was finally getting to understand her.  I think, he thought at Emeraude, that you’ve just lost your horse.

___________

“You really don’t mind?” Roi asked that evening, watching Emeraude brush her hair before bed.

“Of course not.  I like being with you, and you like company when you ride.  I’m not all that fond of horses and riding, but I know you are.  If Crystal is, wonderful.  With a little practice, and you contacting Rabbit’s mind, she’ll probably keep up with you better than I do.  You need children, Roi.  She’s already done a lot to relax you.  I don’t know why the Genetics Board doesn’t want you to foster R’il’noids that need parenting any more.”

“They figure I’m too busy trying to run the Confederation.  Young R’il’noids take a lot of attention.”  Roi lay back on Emeraude’s bed, letting his eyes roam over the rather spare room.  Like his other two wives, Audi had her own building, opening off the series of jump-gated rooms loosely called the corridor system.  As a general rule she preferred Roi’s oversized bedroom to her own, and she’d put most of her energies here into facilities for her sociological research.  The bedroom was adequate for sleeping and had a bed large enough for two, but that was about all.

Prehistoric Predators (DVD Review)

No, they’re not dinosaurs. These critters are much more recent than the 60 million years since dinosaurs walked the Earth. In fact, our own species may be in part responsible for their demise. They were the top predators of Ice Age North America, and while the cause of their extinction is still subject to debate, they died out, along with their prey, shortly after humans first migrated into the Americas.

The DVD has National Geographic programs on three animals: the saber-toothed cat, the dire wolf, and the short-faced bear. Fossils of all three are found in the La Brea tar pits, and the excavations at La Brea are repeatedly discussed on the DVD. It is subject to the usual bias of this series: good interviews with scientists; poor quality animation clips which are repeated over and over. Another problem is that the science is posed on a “proof” basis when in fact science works by disproof. In general the narrator speaks of “proof” when the scientist involved has shown that his or her hypothesis as not been disproved. This is a very common problem with National Geographic science DVDs.

All three animals hunted the same mega-herbivores: bison, horse, and mammoth. In the same habitat they selected somewhat different prey. Camel and (for the short-faced bear) ground sloth may also have been on the menu, but all three predators were specialized to go after very large prey.

The saber-toothed cat was no more a tiger than it was a house cat. Its weight was in the same range as the modern lion, but it was far stockier and more muscular, with a short tail which reduced its agility at a run. It probably was much more of a wrestler than the modern large cats, and a fair part of the program is devoted to the question of how it used its saber-like but brittle canines for killing. It’s not as obvious as it seems; those oversized canines would have slid off the rounded belly of a prey animal. Nor was its skull constructed for a hard bite. But I have a feeling that it may have used its momentum more than the video clips suggest in pulling down a large animal. (I suspect also that any mammoths it killed were young, very old, or injured. I have a highly unsuccessful saber-tooth attack on a mammoth calf with its mother close by in Tourist Trap.)

The dire wolf closely resembled the modern gray wolf, but was considerably larger and sturdier, with greater bite strength. It probably ran in larger packs than modern wolves, but is thought to have had a very similar hunting style. I suspect the video clips show a far more immediate pulldown of prey than actually occurred. With very large herbivores thick on the ground, the dire wolf would have been an advantage over the gray wolf. When only smaller game became available, the faster, lighter, more behaviorally flexible gray wolf survived and the dire wolf did not.

The third of the predators, the short-faced bear, may not have been a predator so much as a scavenger, stealing kills from the other large predators. It was a very large bear, larger than the largest of the modern grizzlies, such as Kodiak bears. Its legs, however, were relatively long and slender, and it seems to have built for efficiency of gait rather than speed. It probably had an exceptional sense of smell (modern grizzlies have a better sense of smell than bloodhounds) so it was actually well adapted for stealing the kills of other predators. Certainly grizzlies today steal wolf kills if an opportunity occurs. But as I said, possibility or even probability is not scientific proof.

As an introduction to these three Pleistocene predators, this DVD is definitely worth watching. But don’t take everything it says too literally.

Six Sentence Sunday

Hi, welcome to Six Sentence Sunday. This is from chapter 2 of a WIP, Rescue Operation, and is a continuation from last week.

He [Tod] hoped they had sense enough to hide.  He sure wasn’t going to give their captors any information, but he wasn’t convinced about the others.  Especially about his brother and Callan.

Tod looked back at his wrists, and began pulling carefully at the stuff holding them together.  Some kind of synthetic, he thought, but it didn’t give at all, to pulling or to his teeth, and it seemed to be molded to the cable.  He was trying to avoid attention, but the woman guarding them didn’t bother to look up, even when the others began coming around, struggling to their feet and shouting empty threats.

Visit the other participants in Six Sentence Sunday.

Fairbanks Weather 8/8/11

Sunrise this morning was at 5:14 am and the sun will set at 10:37 this evening, for 17 hr 23 minutes above the horizon. It’s now pretty dark at night – dark enough that the Fair will be setting off fireworks Saturday when it closes – but if I stayed to watch them, it’d be too dark for me to drive home. The sun will dip over 9° below the horizon tonight – not astronomical twilight, but dark enough to see stars and aurora, if the clouds will just clear away. They’re not really expected to, today or tomorrow, but they might by Thursday. At least it doesn’t look like we’ll have any more frost warnings in the coming week! In fact, highs may be up to 70 again by the weekend.

Giant cabbage display, winner at lower left.

It wouldn’t be Fair week without rain, anyway. So far, Saturday was the only clear, hot (by Alaska standards; it got above 70) day.

I’ve mostly been getting photos of horses, checking the Alaskan Authors booth (they have my first book for sale) eating what Fair Food I can with an insulin pump, checking out the crafts booths, and checking other exhibits one or two a day. Yesterday I looked over the giant cabbage entry, but it wasn’t very impressive. The winner didn’t even make 50 pounds.

Photos of horses? Last winter I was blogging weekly on the genetics of coat color in horses. I need more photos, once I can get them off of my camera. Meanwhile, I went through and linked all of my horse color posts from my author website. After all, I mentioned under the Leopard (Appaloosa) gene that all of the horses in Tourist Trap were spotted.

I’m also feverishly checking the mail. I ordered copies of my second book, Tourist Trap, thinking it could be added to the Fair booth. They were shipped July 22 – but in spite of my repeated insistence that they be shipped USPS Priority Mail, they were apparently sent media mail – 4 to 6 weeks to Alaska, if I’m lucky.

My own garden is now providing beets, a few wax beans, and squash faster than I can eat them. My camera, alas, is still not talking to my computer, so until I can get it fixed I’m stuck with iPhone photos.

More on the Fair (and the quilt show) tomorrow.

Calypso

Twigs and branches, once reaching for the sky
Now bent and held by iron bands
To the likeness of a horse.
But is this not reality?

Sun’s energy,
Giving life to grass and leaves
Which in turn pass on that life
To the newborn foal.
Bound by the iron of blood
To the growing form—
Feet dancing, tail proud, neck arched.

And in the end
Giving itself back to earth
From which grow the twigs and branches
Reaching for the sky.

©Sue Ann Bowling

“Calypso”, a 2003 sculpture by Tamara Schmidt, greets visitors in the lobby of the Museum of the North on the University of Alaska Campus. The poem was inspired by the sculpture, which is life-sized.