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Bunny Bid, a two-year-old colt (a male, that is; a female of the same age is a filly), lost America's leading quarter-horse race by a neck, and with it lost a healthy share of a purse that, in all three divisions of the race, totaled $670,000. That is more purse than thoroughbred racing's triple crown. Bunny Bid did not go home impoverished. He picked up $83,817 for his owners, a group of six horse fanciers who operate out of Chillicothe, Texas. But the difference between second and first place, between a neck behind and a neck ahead, was $94,671, and that's a hell of a lot of money for a neck. Or think of it in terms of time: Bunny Bid's time was 20.14 seconds, the winning horse's time 20.09 seconds. Ninety-four thousand, six hundred seventy-one dollars for five hundredths of a second. This side of aborted Apollo missions, you don't find money like that anymore. Money's not all of what quarter-horse racing is about, by far, but it does give you some perspective on the form.

This is what quarter-horse racing is also about: Ruidoso Downs, a village of 1600 people set 6400 feet up among piñon pines in the Sacramento Mountains of southern New Mexico, inaccessible except by car or private plane, crowded now on Labor Day with 15,000 people, most of them Texans but some from as far away as Hawaii, baking in the ultraviolet sun, and at the edge of the village in a bowl-shaped meadow a country track, good buff-colored turf watered and raked between races to keep it fast in that inhumid air, the jammed grandstand electric blue before the finish line, ten top two-year-olds at the gate breaking together at the bell and already, in two or three strides, running full at around 40 miles an hour straight down the track to a finish line a mere 400 yards away.

And this: rows of pale-cream Stetsons on tall, beefy men with pale-green and blue and gray eyes and weathered sunburned faces; women beside them with high, coifed hair so fixed that it does not blow even in the incessant New Mexican wind, styles of hair long passed on in the East and even Middle West but still maintained here, because these are women of strident and straightforward sexuality in pointed high bras, whose models remain, as styles elsewhere change, the drum majorette and Miss America, women quick to anger but also quick to warm to strangers, quick to make you feel at home; the men downing bourbons in plastic cups that seem to have no effect at all except to add to the ruddiness of their faces and to tighten their intense silence as each of the day's 12 races go by and the betting tickets pile higher and higher in the aisles and on the floor beneath their feet; the women in slacks and pants suits jumping up and down and pounding their fists on their tables doubly animated because, except for a collective straining forward of backs and arms muscled by life in the outdoors, the men seem hardly animated at all; and then, as the day wears on and the heat mounts, the men gathering in knots across the grandstand as if conspiring some overthrow, chewing on toothpicks or cigars and talking intently from the corners of their mouths, their speech drawled, reluctant, their whole appearance, however much they have won or lost, the physical reality of the word shrewd; and down below in general admission, plain cowpokes and harder women watching almost evilly the races on which they have gambled their spare money; and more than once from no particular corner of the grandstand a wild old-fashioned rebel yell; and on the floor playing with discarded tickets a boy of perhaps two years jutting from an enormous pair of Western boots.

And this: In a packed sale barn as luridly lit as any Moorish slave quarters, the wealthy and the not so wealthy of Texas, Oklahoma, New Mexico, Kansas and Arizona (the wealthy rarely distinguishable from those who are not, often seedier, just folks) pull on their ears or tip their hats to drive up the bidding on yearlings that have not yet even been tried on the track to, in the case this year of Bunny Bid's half sister Darling Bid, $58,500. Darling Bid could drop dead tomorrow. Assuming she does not, she stands a good chance of competing for the top stakes in next year's race.

The race is the All American Futurity, an annual Labor Day weekend event at Ruidoso Downs. It runs in three divisions, a second consolation on Saturday, a first on Sunday and the Futurity itself on Labor Day, with other thoroughbred and quarter-horse events added each day to fill the racing card. To get a horse into it, you must buy one that has been nominated for the race. Then you have to train the horse while making quarterly payments into the purse. That is why the purse is so enormous, because so many owners want to win the race. The All American Futurity is the best proof around that quarter-horse racing is here to stay. It has already reached the East. It may even reach England someday. It's the newest kind of racing in America if you don't count the chariot races (with quarter horses) in Rigby, Idaho. Ironically, it's also the oldest. Our ancestors (in Carolina and Virginia, not in Massachusetts--in Massachusetts they confined themselves to racing God into church and to the pillory) matched Spanish Barbs traded from the Chickasaw Indians down the main streets of their villages for fun and profit. Chickasaw horses they called the Indian stock, but the animals probably came through the Indians from the Spanish settlements in Florida. They originated in Arabia, nomad horses for a nomad people. We had no circle tracks in America in those days: Our first horse race was probably a straight quarter mile, run by stocky horses with thick shoulders and thighs and surprisingly small feet. And after the race the planter might well ride the same horse home. Ultimately, the length of the race would give the horse his name: quarter horse. The only refinement in the race since Colonial days has been to shorten the distance to 400 yards.

It can seem a disappointing race, especially if you are used to thoroughbred lengths. "You've got to learn to watch a quarter-horse race," one man told me at Ruidoso Downs. "You'll see this pack of horses coming down the track and someone next to you will be saying to his wife, 'Number four stumbled coming out of the gate,' and you didn't see anything at all like that, you just saw a pack of horses start." It's the kind of race where every horse has at least the chance of winning. It's the kind of race that a jockey can win only if he and his horse do everything right from start to finish, and even then he will lose if another horse is natively faster. And it's the kind of race where what appear to be the smallest of details--a track slightly softer than it should be, the right breeding five generations back, a race run two weeks ago that the horse hasn't quite come back from--demand major attention.

Jockey Larry Byers, who might, in his dedication and his craft, have come straight out of the pages of Death in the Afternoon, except that he is happily married, who wanted to hear no excuses for riding Bunny Bid into second place in a race that he has worked for years to win, nevertheless heard from well-meaning bystanders after the race that Bunny Bid changed stride (he did, but then took the lead that the winning horse, Rocket Wrangler, then took away) and that the turf was better out at Rocket Wrangler's eighth gate than at Bunny Bid's second (it was: Larry wished he had had a muddy track, because Bunny Bid is a good mudder and Rocket Wrangler, whose legs aren't the best, isn't).

But it is also a race singularly suited to the character of the Southwest, and especially of New Mexico. Drive east from Ruidoso Downs little more than 100 miles and you will approach the edge of the Llano Estacado, the Staked Plain, among the most barren lands in all of America. It was on the Llano Estacado, in the 1890s, that a belated expedition of ranchers located 25 of the last buffaloes left in the entire United States from the 60,000,000 that had thronged the plains in the 1830s, when the systematic slaughter of the buffaloes for hides and tongues began. Only in the forbidding wilderness of the Llano Estacado could the buffalo find peace. That is the kind of state New Mexico is, barren mountains, barren plains, barren white desert, almost no natural surface water, so that you cross a bridge big enough to span a major river and see below you only cracked dry dirt. Yet New Mexicans don't care at all about the hardships of their state: They tout it to all comers as a miraculous place to live. If you like sun and a humidity that averages 15 percent and a wind that averages 12 miles an hour year round, or if you like quarter-horse racing, it is. It is also a place where you can be invited over to a table at a restaurant after the big race to be introduced (continued on page 154)$8884.42 A Second(continued from page 92) to an attractive and wealthy young woman who lost both legs when her plane smashed into a mountain and who then invites you to dance with her and out-dances you on her artificial legs and then laughingly suggests that you come back to watch her ski sometime. Or where a new friend, a man who thinks and looks and sounds like Will Rogers, casually mentions over a drink that he has cancer. This is the kind of state, these are the kinds of people who run a horse at top speed merely 400 yards and hand over $670,000 for the privilege. And throw in a thoroughbred race or two for the small change.

Quarter horses really got their due in the Old West, working cattle. Watching one cut calves is like watching a cat work a mouse: He sways with the indecisive calf and when it bolts he jumps, pounces, to a new stand in front of the calf, forefeet braced and head down, mean as hell, looking to bite the calf if it makes the mistake of getting close enough, and the calf breaks again the other way and the horse is already running at full speed for the fence and he catches the calf there and begins backing the animal up until it backs into the other quarter horse behind it. And then the calf gets roped and branded for its trouble. The horse that could cut and ride and race, the horse with the most comfortable of all gaits, the short gallop or lope, the fastest of all horses in the quarter mile, was the logical horse for the West. He was ideal for cowboying and first choice for bank and stagecoach robbing. He could go places and do things that no other animal could.

He got no stud book until 1940, when the American Quarter Horse Association was formed in Fort Worth, Texas. He is only now getting any attention outside the Southwest and on the Pacific Coast. He is very much the pride of the people who raise him, race him and go to watch him race. He is their answer to the thoroughbred with its Eastern airs, running his biggest race at two years, when the thoroughbreds just get started, running faster than any thoroughbred in the quarter mile, running for bigger purses than any known to races of blood horses anywhere. And running from stock beaten out of the working brush merely 30 years ago, which may be the most important reason of all for the Southwesterner's fervor for him. Most of them didn't hang diamonds on their hands--women and men--much earlier than that.

The race that lasted, for the winner 20.09 seconds and for Bunny Bid 20.14 seconds, started long ago, perhaps as long ago as the day when jockey Larry Byers' grandfather watched the shoot-out at the O. K. Corral and wrote a letter home about it, which Larry still keeps. At 119 pounds for the race, nine pounds sweated out in the last few days, Larry wears the dandy silks of the professional jockey but would look more at home in plain ranch clothes; he is of the West and of horses as naturally as a Comanche, began jockeying professionally at the age of 11 and now at 32 has been jockeying for 21 years and has reached the point where all his friends hope he will retire, but he won't because he hasn't won the All American Futurity yet and intends to keep on jockeying until he does. His dark face juts sharp as a hatchet and his narrow, weathered eyes slant almost Orientally, set back under overhanging black brows and quiet and shrewd. He says, the day before the race, that if he wins you can call his horse Rocket Wrangler Strangler, knowing whom he must beat, a horse owned by J. R. Adams of the construction business and ridden by calm, boyish Jerry Nicodemus. Bunny Bid posted the fastest qualifying time in the Futurity trials, an incredible 19.91.

In two other races on the day of the All American, Larry brings his horse from behind, once from a box in the middle of the pack, to win by a length or more, building for himself a psychology of victory that almost sees him through. Nicodemus places and shows but doesn't win his earlier races and now that you are committed to Bunny Bid, you hope that his psychology isn't built on holding back a little for the big race. But then a jockey is ill and Nicodemus volunteers to take his race and you begin to wonder at the man's cool. After the race you meet him and you understand about the cool, a fact of life for Nicodemus like breathing or talking to the press or catching up his little girl for a tickle while J. R. Adams nervously regards the press camera and the track manager calculates the day's handle. And you think, fine, but Larry even in loss has something else, some quality of inner tension that goes beyond cool, beyond even the obvious flirtation with death that is the essence, as Mr. Hemingway so carefully told us, of all violent sports, of bullfighting and automobile racing and ski jumping and the others. You hear that Larry broke his back a year ago falling off a horse. "We just assumed he was dead when we saw the way he fell," a friend of his says. You hear that Larry has a jinx about Labor Days, his father died just as he was beginning a race on one Labor Day, Larry broke his leg in five places on another. That's the death thing, certainly, and Larry treats it with expected contempt.

But the other thing--his wife is the daughter of an English jockey and has other jockeys in her family, she knows all about the life, expects the problems, follows Larry to his races, bringing the children, too--the other thing has to do with art, with style but also with the substance of style, the impulse to shape a moment of time and a moving pulse of animal material into a recognizable but unique whole, and to do that shaping not with clay nor oil nor marble nor even white sheets of paper but with time itself, and of time one of the smallest recognizable portions in all of sport, a quarter-horse race, a race so nearly impossible to win that not merely the weather and the horse and the track and the gate and the exact force of every hard stride must be on your side but all the gods of Olympus, too, looking down over their bourbon and branch and giving you their quirky odds in token of their esteem.

And yet also not small, not unrecognizable, because if anyone took the time to break down all the things that happen in those mere 20 seconds, he would have a gigantic film, a play in 50 acts, and that would be horse racing, quarter-horse racing, too: the brave Win tickets yellow with red borders with the same rag-threaded surface as dollar bills but thicker, so that they feel more permanent than Government paper and yet fluctuate in value in 20 seconds more wildly than the German mark fluctuated in 1923, and the timid pink black-bordered Place tickets and the withdrawn noncommittal pale-blue black-bordered Show tickets clutched in hands lining the tables that edge the upper grandstand, two tickets or three in most hands, dozens neatly rubber-banded together in the plump brown manicured hand of the squat Mexican gambler five places down, his thick wallet chained within a front pocket to his belt; the gates opening and the horses beginning to run, which you see not as a whole but as a glimpse through the window of a forearm next to you bent up to hold a man's binoculars. Behind you men and women standing on chairs, some of them already beginning ritual chants they will repeat in rising voices throughout the race, "Hit him hard, hit him hard, hit him hard," or "Go now, go now, go on now, go on now," or "Make him go, make him go, make him go"; the horses seeming to reduce speed to slow motion because for three days you have been anticipating this race, learning not only how bets are placed and who the horses and the people are but also learning to watch, to see more than human eyes were intended to see but not more than the human mind can handle, no limit to that, as any good film maker knows, the horses stretching out so that what seemed tall and blocky now seems attenuated into a smooth brown line. (And even as you watch you remember driving past Bunny Bid's stall last night and seeing him rocking his head from one side to the other, rubbing his neck against the yellow-plastic covering of the chain that only formally holds him in who could kick hell out of that weathered wooden box but refrains because he is an even-tempered horse and because his mascot, a thievish and mischievous black nanny goat leashed to a post outside the stall, would like him to and he isn't about to give a nanny goat that kind of satisfaction.) The horses pass the furlong post now, more than halfway there, the post electric blue like the roof of the grandstand with a comic white ball on top lacking only stripes to proclaim the track one vast barbershop, and beyond the post an incongruous shield-shaped lake drying up in the New Mexican sun faster than the fountain in its center can fill it out, and beyond the lake, higher up, the silent hills that surround the track playing with cloud shadows with entire disdain for the brief and finally disappointing pleasures of men. And then your attention snaps back to the race and for the first time you pick out Larry and Bunny Bid in the lead, Larry instantly recognizable not by his colors but by his posture, the way he sits the horse, his legs drawn up under him closer and tighter than any of the other jockeys, his whole body thrown far forward so that his face is almost buried in Bunny Bid's mane as if he intended not to ride the horse to victory but to pull him there by the sheer effort of his body to get ahead and stay ahead, and then you realize what this race is all about: a man doing what he cannot do to make a horse do what it cannot do, which is to move from one place to another with no elapsed time intervening, like electrons changing orbits around a nucleus, instantaneous, defying all Newtonian laws, and that, too, would seem to be something Larry understands, who refuses to quit racing until he has come as close to doing that impossible thing as, in his world, it is possible to come, and in his world he can come closest by winning the All American. And now the horses throw themselves across the finish line and the automatic camera makes its impartial record while dozens, hundreds of other cameras make their partial record, little Instamatics and huge Graflexes and telephoto Pentaxes and television and movie cameras all slicing out a piece of the moment so that later you can look at what happened dozens, hundreds of different ways and remember the event with as many eyes as a bee might have who remembers the most succulent flower of his life, and if you are a horse owner or even merely a gambler, you will look at those pieces of the race over and over again, come-ons, really, teasing hints that something happens once a year on Labor Day that is absolutely vital to your life, a ritual event, a moment outside of other moments when you don't think of your bladder or your hunger or your desires but weld yourself to a horse, ride with a tough Western jockey and feel his strain in all your muscles, become horse and jockey for a few enormous seconds.

And then it is over. The lights on the tote board blink their benediction. The head of the West Texas Florists' Association walks to the grassy ring in front of the tote board carrying a blanket shaped like an elephant's saddlebags made of green satin and covered with red roses held in place by brass pins sticking outward, a bed of nails if the jockey were to sit on it. Jerry Nicodemus rides Rocket Wrangler onto the grass, grins clownishly at the battery of cameras before him. J. R. Adams in a blue short-sleeved shirt appears with his attractive blonde wife, who is shaking with excitement. Others, family, friends, officials, the horse's trainer, arrive to be photographed with the winners, horse and man.

I look for Larry and find him stepping onto the scales to be weighed out, his face drawn and hard, holding himself together by realizing better than anyone else on the track except perhaps Nicodemus, whose thoughts today are elsewhere, that what he has just done is absurd, has no connection with reality, an event completely artificial in its construction, in its purpose, in its conclusion, but also realizing that the absurdity dooms the event to a greater share of reality than anything real, and humanly angry with himself for having placed second, for having won for Bunny Bid's owners only $83,817 less his own ten percent, for having worked a day's work at a rate of something like only $420 per second or $1,500,000 an hour. But even in his anger he is objective where the rest of us are not, knows that horse racing has its roots in our most ancient past, that races have run before and will run again, that among centaurs he is one of the best and that by riding he is fulfilling a destiny within his family and within himself that binds him irrevocably to the American West of his grandfather and the British countryside of his father-in-law.

And Bunny Bid, his saddle off, is already on his way back to his stall and his nanny goat, and one of his owners has a benediction for him, too. "He doesn't know he lost," the man says quietly. "He's always been the kind of horse that hates to be behind, but with his blinkers on he didn't see Rocket Wrangler pull a little ahead. He doesn't know he lost." Can say that, can think about the horse, when the rest of us, the visitors, the dudes, are thinking about the race and the people and the money we won or lost. And that may be the ultimate reason why horse racing, and in the Southwest quarter-horse racing, will be around awhile yet, at least until the air is too thick with monoxides and particulates for man and horse to breathe, and even a little while after that.