I wasn't alone in my horse-watching.
There they were!
I veered into a condo development, roughly yanking my station wagon into park. I grabbed my camera and leaped out of the car, dropping more rolls of film than I pocketed.
Six horses grazed the front yard of a swank new beach house— two breeding mares, a yearling, two foals, and a muscular stud who followed with an air of authoritative dignity. I slipped between two driveways, quivering with excitement, and observed them through my telephoto lens.
The herd patriarch was a magnificent black stallion, thick-necked, wide, and deep-bodied. He lowered his head a little, flattened his ears, and glared at me from beneath his wind-tossed forelock. I knew that look. "I am going to ignore you right now. If you come any closer, I'm going to have to hurt you." Point taken. I followed the herd at a respectable distance for about an hour, snapping photos as they went about their afternoon grazing.
The owners of the condo hurried out onto their second-story deck and leaned over the rail. "Guess we can forget about landscaping!" one griped affably, watching as the black foal backed into a bush and began to scratch his itchy rump by wriggling it from side to side among the branches.
Corolla and its free-roaming horses were effectively isolated from the modern world until 1984, when the State extended Highway 12 into the little village. 
Before 1986, there were only thirty-five full-time residents in Corolla. A decade later, that number had more than tripled, but the bulk of the population influx came from the hundreds of people eager to rent seasonal beach homes, or just to visit for the day. Price tags were high, but there was no shortage of wealthy vacationers eager to buy into this new paradise. Tourists flocked to see the horses, the lighthouse, and the "undiscovered" beaches.
The dark horses that crossed the highway at night were often killed and injured. In 1989, after six horses were killed in one accident, 
Corolla residents united to secure them protection, founding the Corolla Wild Horse Fund. The horses were officially considered an exotic species, and as such didn't qualify for preservation as wildlife, but eventually were designated a "cultural resource" that was worthy of protection. The Corolla Wild Horse Fund outfitted the horses with reflective collars to make them more visible to motorists, sprayed them with glow-in-the-dark paint, and posted signs along Highway 12 warning motorists, "Horses On Roads at Any Time." These measures helped to reduce the fatalities, but didn't eliminate them.
I ducked around expensive cars in freshly-paved driveways, aiming for a better shot. 
When the herd moved on, I headed north to the lighthouse, where the Corolla Wild Horse Fund kept a few injured and orphaned horses on the grounds.
Around the time sunset pinked the western sky, I turned south again, towards my Colington campsite. I swept through the curves at about 10 MPH below the posted speed limit, and even that felt far too fast to me. The sun drifted below the horizon, and I wondered whether the horses that I had encountered earlier were still nearby.
The other drivers were infuriated. 
A series of tall-wheeled pickups and other off-road vehicles rode my bumper and flashed their lights. There was no safe place to pull over to let them by, so they persisted until they were able to pass (in a no-passing zone) saluting me with one finger and mouthing obscenities, roaring by in a cloud of testosterone. Most of them bore North Carolina plates. The rods on their trucks advertised that they had come to fish.
I cringed, knowing the horses were just up the road, and possibly in it.I continued to proceed with caution. Sure enough, a few miles south, I found the whole band grazing right beside the road. The stallion had just won a power struggle with a young bachelor stud, and was trotting back to his harem. Numerous cars had pulled onto the shoulder to watch. The "horse jam" was actually a good thing, for it snarled traffic and impeded those who insisted on challenging the speed of light.
I realized, of course, that any of these horses could have been in the middle of the road when those impatient four-wheelers had come racing through. I could have been witness to another of the tragic killings. 
Which would have died? The magnificent black stallion? The pregnant mares? The lovely black yearling or the young foals? Any or all of them, dark horses in the shadows cast by the dunes, could have been killed in the twilight gloom. The stallion reached his band and stood his ground. He assessed the snarled traffic, then turned his attention to his band. The little black colt ventured up to him, clapping his teeth in a submissive gesture. The stallion nudged him in a greeting, and the colt affectionately nuzzled his sire in return.
The stud's head went down into the driving posture, and the
colt wheeled good-naturedly and trotted back to the group. The whole band lifted their heads and began to move northward, driven along the roadside and up into the yards of beach houses by the big black horse. I wondered whether they all would survive the night.
Corolla's final answer was to confine the horses to the protected, roadless Currituck Natural Wildlife Refuge and the area north of it. In 1995, a sea-to-sound barrier was completed to exclude them from the village.
Butterscotch, an ingenious lead mare, persistently found her way around the sound side of the fence, leading her herd
members back to the lush vegetation of the golf courses and green sod lawns. Once, she traveled north until she found a sand bar covered with foot-deep water that extended out into the sound and reached 1,500 feet beyond the end of the fence. In 1996, the most persistent horses were removed from the Outer Banks and reestablished in a protected area on the mainland, in Smithfield, North Carolina. The rest of the horses, over forty-two of them, seem content to stay to the north of the barrier, living as wild on the undeveloped land.
This web site is an online companion to the book Hoofprints in the Sand: Wild Horses of the Atlantic Coast, serving as a scrapbook of information, observations, and photographs, and providing links to related sites.
Hoofprints in the Sand is published by Eclipse Press. You may order your copy at www.eclipsepress.com or from Amazon.com
