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Harry hollered his lessons above the cold wind whistling in from the sound. In the ring, he raised the bars up on the jumps and shouted, “You got it! You got it!” He saw the shine that came into the girls’ eyes when they conquered their fears.

Harry saw that their rigidly controlled lives made them timid. He remembered his own days in Catholic boys’ school—perched on the edge of his seat, back stiff, feet on the floor. In 1940, when the Nazis invaded Holland, everyone followed the war’s progress by listening to the radio. When Rotterdam fell, only seventy miles away, his father came to the school to gather up Harry and his brothers, and took the whole family—his mother and all twelve of his brothers and sisters—to a small two-room cottage out in the country. They huddled together, listening to the radio reports of the Nazis’ progress toward St. Oedenrode. Five days later, the family emerged and returned to a town under Nazi control, and a world forever changed. Quiet but determined, Harry’s family fought back in their own way. The German army had commandeered all of the valuable food and supplies in the area, taking the best for themselves and rationing out meager and inadequate supplies to the occupied Dutch. People had scarcely enough to eat, and what they had was of poor quality. The priest in charge of Harry’s school did not have enough food to feed his students and asked Harry’s father, a brewer, for grain from his hidden stores. In the dark of night, they sealed wheat and rye into beer barrels and loaded them onto a horse-drawn cart. Thirteen-year-old Harry was chosen to drive the horse cart the thirty miles back to the school, in the hopes that a young boy on a beer wagon would attract little notice. Harry drove that route at least half a dozen times, holding the reins steady as he approached the armed checkpoints. Surly Nazis stared at him, then let him pass since he was just a skinny kid driving an old wagon through town. Courage and a view of the world seen between a horse’s ears—the two would forever be linked in Harry’s mind.

Now, as a riding instructor, Harry pushed the girls to find and surpass their own limits. One November weekend, he took them to the Junior Olympics, a contest in which teams from all of the local riding schools competed. Bonnie was back on Chief Sunset, whose recent gelding had done nothing to soften his temper. In the arena during the warm-up before the competition started, the horse refused a jump, in what’s called a “dirty stop”: the horse skids to a halt after the rider has already risen in the stirrups and shifted her weight forward. It is very difficult to stay mounted when this happens, and this time Bonnie was thrown. Frustrated with Bonnie for “letting” the horse stop, Harry prepared to get on himself, ready to teach him a lesson. “We feed these horses,” Harry liked to say. “We groom them, clean their stalls, and tend to them when they are sick. And all we ask of them is to jump. So make them jump.” Harry took the reins from Bonnie, swung into the saddle, and galloped toward the fence.

Oftentimes, riders are slightly afraid of jumping, and a horse has a fine-tuned sense of his rider’s underlying fears. When the rider is afraid, the horse is afraid too, and will hang back, reluctant on the approach. But when Harry sat astride and confidently approached a fence at a gallop, horses knew that he meant business. Bonnie watched Harry approach the fence at a good clip; she saw Harry rise up in the stirrups, keeping his legs and heels firmly pressed into the horse’s sides, the signal that means go forward. But at the last second, the horse ducked his head and skidded to a stop. Just as Bonnie had, Harry came unglued, flew out of the saddle, and landed in the dirt. Harry stood up, dusted the dirt off his pants, and chuckled. Undeterred, he climbed aboard and tried again. This time, prodded by Harry’s swift application of the whip before takeoff, the horse jumped the fence. Harry dismounted, handed the