When Melissa Farlow was a little girl growing up in Paoli, Indiana, she was completely enamored with the idea of having a horse.

“I dreamed about them, I drew them in church, I played like I was a horse,” she says. She wanted a horse so badly that she even wrote to Roy Rogers asking if he would send her Trigger. He sent a signed autograph instead. But her parents finally caved, and at age six, she got a “sad, one-eyed pony,” as she describes it. “He wasn’t pretty, but he was docile, and I rode him around the backyard.”

Farlow, a contributing photographer to National Geographic, has now turned that childhood obsession into a photo-rich book called Wild at