One bitterly cold winter afternoon, a nine-month-old colt--extremely weak, starving, left to die--was frozen to the rock-hard white landscape of a northern Wisconsin pasture. His whinny for help barely carried through thirty-mile-an-hour winds lashing snow and ice against his thin coat. But somewhere inside him a light refused to go out.

The colt's call for help was answered, and that light inspired a worldwide response to his story. The struggle of the little colt, called Windchill by his rescuers, was reported widely, and soon 1.2 million people were following Windchill's progress on...