OUR PLAN for the Booloumba Creek trails was to ride about 16 miles through the state forest (922 square miles of subtropical rainforest) with Brook and Leigh Ann Sample, breeders of endurance horses (usually Arabians, who race as much as a hundred miles over varying terrain) and managers of the sheik of Dubai's endurance-horse operation. I was sorry to leave Simon behind, especially when I saw my mount for the day, Arch, who was short, thin, and not particularly pretty. But safe, evidently safe. The Samples were friendly and responsible, but there was, of course, occasion for that croc-snake-spider thing. Every time we passed a certain plant, Brook called out, "Gympie stingers!" We were not to touch the broad-leafed gympie stingers. I didn't know what their effect would be, but I was sure whatever it was would be painful and take 20 minutes or less.

After a while, Brook revealed Arch's registered name, La Mancha Archduke, and I decided that I wasn't the only one who had noticed a resemblance to a certain famous literary mount, Rocinante. But no. In the course of our three-hour ride, often at a fast trot or a gallop, through the forest trails and up at least one long, treacherous slope (at a gallop) that was steeper than any slope I had ever ridden, Arch revealed his true nature. "Oh, yes," said Leigh Ann, "just two weeks ago he won a 50K race." Arch was polite with me but firm. As the ride progressed, he got farther and farther out in front, deigning to trot if I made him (and his trot was big) but preferring to gallop, and always sure, whatever the footing. At one point, Christine, on an almost equally determined mare, was the only one still with me. After a long gallop, Arch slowed down to a trot, and I said, "At last he needs a rest"—but only for three strides. A moment later Arch was galloping again, tireless and ever eager. Our index was Xena, who normally couldn't be induced to walk. When Xena was heaving, La Mancha Archduke was hardly drawing a breath. Brook told me he expected Arch to place in the top three in a 100-mile race at the Australian national championships this year. A day on him was arduous but thrilling.

GAITS OF HEAVEN: Guide Alex Watson, left, and the author on a North Shore beach; BREAK AWAY: Surf seekers at Double Island Point, in Noosa (Brown W. Cannon III)

Christine returned to New Zealand before our last day, which was to be a quiet one—a last ride, from the Noosa North Shore Resort, only Alex on Xena and me back on Simon, in the surf of the North Shore's Teewah Beach—but who should turn up other than Guy McLean, horseman extraordinaire, with his three bright grulla youngsters (dun horses with a pronounced dorsal stripe and zebralike stripes on their legs). Guy, who is 30, is a horses-horses-horses-all-the-time sort of fellow, an example of a certain type of Australian horseman whose expertise is rooted in stock-horse training but who has taken it to a very high level, giving popular exhibitions in Australia as well as the U.S.

Guy's horses do several astonishing things, all at liberty, without saddles or bridles. They gallop and turn in a small portable ring he brings. The best thing he showed us was when he asked one of his three horses to lie down like a dog, his hooves curled beneath him and his chin tucked, and then asked the other two horses, together, to sidestep over the down horse, until he was boxed between their eight legs. Then Guy stood on the rumps of the two horses and cracked two bullwhips in the air. The horses' reaction to all this was on the order of a yawn—no big deal. Then the standing horses sidestepped from the down horse, the down horse stood up, and everyone got a pat. After we marveled at Guy, who has been training horses since he was 15, Alex and I agreed that he was the truest horse tragic of all.