An Act of Grace
Equine Vet William Bradley Pens a Colorado Memoir
By Hillary Brown
Photo by John Verner
Long before William Bradley became one of New England Equine Practice’s most respected veterinarians, he was a boy in a high mountain valley in southern Colorado, riding horses, working ranches, and absorbing the kind of life lessons that don’t come from textbooks. “We hunted, fished, rode, and rodeo’d,” he recalls. “All the stuff that boys do in that kind of country.” It’s that world—rugged, beautiful, and unforgiving—that forms the backdrop of his debut book, The Heart and The Eagle, a true story he carried for more than 60 years before finally putting it to the page.
Growing up in a valley ringed by 14,000-foot peaks, Bradley was immersed in ranch life from an early age. His father, a surgeon at the local hospital, had gone into business buying and selling horses throughout the Southwest. By the time Bradley was 14 or 15, his path was clear. “I decided to be a veterinarian and that I was going to work with horses,” he says. He graduated from Colorado State, completed a surgical residency at Kansas State, and spent time working racetracks in California, Colorado, and Nebraska before setting his sights east.
The move to New York could have been a culture shock, but horses have a way of making the unfamiliar feel like home. What caught him off guard was the landscape. For someone raised in the dusty high plains of the Southwest, the rich greenery of the Northeast felt almost
otherworldly. “Everything seemed so lush,” he notes. “Especially coming from an arid, desert environment where water was always a consideration.” He joined what would become New England Equine Practice in Patterson, New York, drawn by the chance to build something from the ground up. More than four decades later, the practice counts ponies, Standardbreds, and Olympic-level warmbloods among its patients—though Bradley is quick to keep the latter in perspective. “They’re really just horses with a job,” he says with a laugh.
Away from the practice, the man who spent his boyhood summers devouring Western novels has written one of his own, of sorts. The Heart and The Eagle revolves around a hunting accident in 1963 that claimed the life of his best friend’s older brother, and the extraordinary response of the victim’s father—a tough-as-nails Colorado cattle farmer and decorated World War II veteran who survived the Bataan Death March. What he did in the aftermath of that tragedy left a young Bradley with a lesson he has never stopped thinking about. “I thought it was the most compassionate thing I’d ever seen,” Bradley recalls. “He didn’t ask, ‘Should I do that?’ He just did it.”
Written in the spirit of Hemingway—short sentences, no showmanship—the self-published memoir is many things for Bradley: a tribute, a memory, and a reminder. “Those magnificent peaks cast shadows,” he writes near the book’s end, a line that says everything about the place and the people who made him.