How a special horse was lost - and found

High-strung and feisty, she swayed impatiently in her stall, chewed the wooden doors, got tangled in her harness, stuck her nose into any box or bucket she could find.

She had proved hopeless on the track, despite having a distant blood connection to the great racehorse Man o' War. She had ugly feet that required special shoes.

To 16-year-old Megan Chance, she was perfect.

"This is the horse I want," she announced jubilantly in 1998, after riding Burma for the first time at a New Jersey stable. Her parents were uneasy but relented. And Burma was hers. For six years, they were inseparable.

When Megan enrolled at Meredith Manor Equestrian College in West Virginia in 2001, Burma went, too. And when Megan graduated in 2003 and went to work at the New Jersey stables of famed Olympian equestrian Frank Chapot, Burma accompanied her.

Time off for travel

In 2004, when Megan decided to take a couple of months to travel across the country with her friend Katie Gaylor, her biggest problem was who could take care of Burma.

Megan remembered a conversation several years earlier with the horse trainer who had shipped Burma to West Virginia. She is so lovely, Megan recalled the woman saying. If you ever want to breed her, please call me.

Megan contacted the woman, who ran a stable in New York's Orange County. They made a deal, Megan says. The woman would pay all Burma's costs - food, shelter, veterinary care - and in return she would breed the mare and keep the foal.

In the fall of 2004, Megan dropped Burma off at well-appointed stables in the New York countryside. They signed a handwritten contract, Megan says, and then she and her friend took off on a six-week cross-country tour. Along the way, she kept in regular phone contact with Burma's barn; returning for Thanksgiving, she visited her horse at the stables, and found her happy and well cared for - and pregnant.

Confident that Burma was in good hands, Megan moved to North Carolina to take over a stable with Katie. She would call every few weeks to ask how her horse was doing - and that was how she learned that Burma had miscarried.

She agreed to leave her at the stable for up to a year longer so the breeder could try for another foal.

Months passed. In the spring of 2005 the breeder told Megan that Burma was pregnant again.

That is the last conversation Megan recalls.

At first Megan paid little attention to the fact that her phone calls were not being returned. But when she called one day and the phone was disconnected, she panicked.

She tried to find the woman on the Internet, but she'd left no trace. She tried email, but her messages bounced back.

What had happened to the breeder? What had happened to her horse?

Six years later

Six years passed. On July 6, 2011, two strikingly beautiful thoroughbred mares stood in pen No. 10 at the weekly horse auction in Cranbury, N.J, calling frantically to each other, eyes wild with fear. Number 912 was a tall, dark bay, nearly black, with a stunning white blaze on her forehead. Her companion, number 911, was a skinny bay. Both had unusual white branding on their necks - t-47 and t-38.

No. 10 is the saddest stall, the feedlot pen also known as the "kill pen." Horses here are destined to be shipped to a slaughterhouse and butchered for horse meat abroad.

At her horse farm in Newtown, Conn., more than 100 miles away, Annette Sullivan monitored the auction on her computer. Something about the dark mare made her pause. This horse has a history, Sullivan thought.

A friend connected to a rescue group offered to pay boarding costs if Sullivan would give the mares a home. She called the auction house and paid $325 for both.

Papers identified the dark horse as Burma's Lady, the 15-year-old granddaughter of Triple Crown winner Seattle Slew. Her companion was 18-year-old Ready to Cry, who had been on the track a few years but had no famous lineage.

Lady was the beauty, but also more shy. Ready to Cry was her protector and muse, nuzzling Lady, stepping in front of her when anyone approached. Touched by the bond, Sullivan renamed Ready to Cry "Anna" - after Anna Sewell, author of the classic novel.

The horses seemed healthy and in good shape, but with one puzzling trait: Though they were broodmares, they had never given birth. Curious, Sullivan emailed the stables listed as their last owner - All-D-Reiterhof Farm in Long Valley, N.J. What she learned disturbed her deeply.

The farm operates a federally approved quarantine station where imported stallions are tested for contagious equine metritis, or CEM, a venereal disease that is treatable but can be devastating if it spreads through a barn. Because stallions show no symptoms, they are bred to two mares. If the mares are not infected, the stallion is released from quarantine.

For at least five years, Lady and Anna (known as t-47 and t-38) had been used as test mares, bred over and over by foreign-born stallions entering the country. Each time, they were injected with hormones and their reproductive organs were swabbed and flushed to ensure that they didn't get pregnant. Sullivan was horrified.

Armin Wagner, who owns the farm, was equally horrified to learn that the horses were alive.

" 'Why do you have my horses? I sent them to slaughter,' " Sullivan recalls him saying over the phone. He also stressed, in emails to Sullivan, that it was crucial not to breed the mares. Their organs had been compromised by all the testing, he wrote.

But the mystery of Lady's past haunted Sullivan.

Twelve-year-old Haley McNulty, who had been riding at the stable for years, fell in love with Lady, too. Her parents had promised her a horse for her 13th birthday in October, and there was no doubt which horse she wanted.

Sullivan was thrilled at what seemed like a perfect match, but she had nagging doubts about Lady's health. The mare's girth was expanding daily: She looked pregnant. But how could that be?

A vet confirmed the pregnancy in late September: Lady would likely give birth within a month. Sullivan's heart sank. Lady's uterus was too compromised to carry a foal to term.

Sullivan braced herself to break the news to Haley: There was a good chance Lady would not make it. She might die giving birth.

"I found Burma!"

On a sunny morning in October, Megan Chance Adams checked her computer in Washington, N.C. She saw a picture of a horse, a beautiful tall, dark bay with a familiar white blaze. Megan gasped.

"I found Burma!" she screamed on the phone to her mother. "Oh my God, she's alive."

She called Sullivan, who listened patiently as the weeping young woman described everything about Lady. There was no doubt: Lady was Burma.

Sullivan assured Megan the horse was safe, but added she had been through a lot.

Over the next week, Megan and Sullivan talked nearly every day. Megan told her about the contract with the farm in New York state, about how the woman and Burma had vanished. She told her how heartbroken she had felt. Now 29, Megan was married with a 4-year-old son and working in a pharmacy, but she had never stopped thinking of Burma.

On Oct. 26, Burma went into labor. For hours she heaved and sweated and moaned. The foal was stillborn.

They tried to present it to Burma, so she would understand her baby was dead. She screamed and reared and banged at the stall.

In desperation, Sullivan went to Anna's stall. She walked the mare over to Burma. Anna nuzzled her friend. Burma grew quiet.

Forgiveness

On the day after Thanksgiving, Megan drove from her mother's house in New Jersey to Zoar Ridge stables in Connecticut. She was about to see Burma for the first time in six years. And she was terrified. Would Burma recognize her? Would she forgive her?

Heart pounding, she walked toward the pasture where Burma was grazing.

"Burma," she called softly, "Burma."

The mare flicked her head and looked up, ears pointed, curious. Slowly she ambled over. Trembling, Megan reached out and stroked her. It was hard to believe, after all this time, that she could touch the horse she had never stopped grieving.

Megan and Sullivan agreed that Burma would stay through the holidays to continue her recovery, and move to North Carolina in the new year. There, a beautiful new barn awaited her. After retiring, Megan's father-in-law had built a small horse farm on a 70-acre tract in Washington. At the Lazy A, Burma would have a warm stall and lots of hay. And Megan would visit every day.

For Megan, the reunion brought back memories - and questions.

Though she had long forgotten the name of the woman she had entrusted with Burma, she did remember the name of her shipping company: Horsefeathers. It turned out the business had once belonged to Kim Martin, a horse trainer in Warwick, N.Y. Martin has a very different recollection of her deal with Megan.

There was no contract for a foal, Martin said. "She gave me the horse because she didn't have the money to keep it."

After running into legal and financial difficulties in 2005, Martin said, she gave the horse to her friend, Wagner, who runs the test facility.

At midnight on Jan. 11, a throng of friends and family gathered at the Lazy A, cheering as a horse trailer pulled into the stables.

Burma was home.