While participating in a rehabilitation program training wild mustangs, a convict at first struggles to connect with the horses and his fellow inmates, but he learns to confront his violent past as he soothes an especially feisty horse.

In the inconclusive assessment in his initial placement as reintegration into the general population at the Nevada correctional facility where he's been housed, long term inmate Roman Coleman, a brooding loner, is assigned to outdoor maintenance, which largely entails shoveling the manure from around the animal enclosures. Noticing his seemingly natural draw to the horses, Myles asks that Coleman be reassigned to his rehabilitation program: the training of captured wild mustangs ultimately to be sold at auction. The program matches each inmate solely to one animal to train, Coleman who names his mustang, one of the more spirited ones, Marquis. The ebbs and flows in Coleman's time in the program with Marquis may mirror Coleman's own ebbs and flows in his reintegration in light of the issues he faces in dealing with various groups and individuals: the prison administration; Myles and the others in the training program; the general prison population; and the one and only visitor he currently receives, his pregnant young adult daughter Martha who has only come to clear up some administrative family issues, and thus who would have not wanted to see her father otherwise.—Huggo