Correction: Because of an editing error, a story in last week's Extra incorrectly said that Dianna Shellmer advised her sister Becky to see a psychiatrist. Shellmer advised her sister to see a physiatrist, a doctor who specializes in alternative physical rehabilitation.

Maybe somewhere there are old photographs of Elation, head down and neck stretched, nostrils flared, driving for a win; or wearing a garland in some winner's circle. Maybe she didn't win enough times in her prime years, so she was discarded.

Nobody really knows how Elation, or "Ellie," as she is now known, ended up on the auction's slaughter truck in late summer 1996. By then, the horse had hit rock-bottom. She was down to 700 pounds, with prominent ribs. Her sleek coat of hair had become coarse. The once beautiful horse had been reduced to an agricultural commodity.

Lucky for Ellie, though, she never made it to the slaughterhouse. Just as the truck was leaving Delaware, a woman in the throes of a contentious divorce spotted Ellie's classic appaloosa markings out of the jostling mass of horse hide and purchased the animal on the spot. She wasn't able to keep Ellie long, just long enough to pad her ribs and sell her to a family on Maryland's Eastern Shore whose son turned her into a 4-H champion. When the boy grew tired of horses, his mother began searching for a new home for Ellie's regal strut.

Across the Chesapeake Bay, about the time Ellie hit the auction block, Becky Shellmer, then 13, had found a riding stable and brought her friend along to see about riding lessons. The horses had been wonderful.

But afterward, as Shellmer stepped away from the corrals and shifted her weight onto her own legs -- one strong, one weak, both spastic from cerebral palsy -- one of the stable managers approached her. He had seen her walk with the stiff, lopsided gait that had long ago branded her as "disabled." The manager told Shellmer that she had to leave because of insurance restrictions.

Shellmer, a wisp of a girl with yellow-blond hair and blue eyes, was mortified.

Not only had she been restricted from being near horses, which she had loved throughout childhood, she had been humiliated. Despite a lifetime of punishing therapy to help her walk without falling, she had been reduced to a liability.

In the years after she was kicked out of the stables, Shellmer had to deal with more losses. Friends moved away or joined popular cliques. After toughing out three years in the halls of Benjamin Tasker Middle School in Bowie, where she lives, Shellmer suddenly opted to be home-schooled. She quit going to the therapy sessions where her leg muscles were stretched to keep her limber and mobile.

"For five years, I sat around sulking because I thought my heart was broken," Shellmer said, her voice trembling.

She couldn't trust her friends. She couldn't trust her body, whose inability to balance had sent her to the nurse's office throughout her elementary school years. She didn't want to trust her therapists, who kept telling her that adolescence is especially tough on young people with muscular disabilities because their bodies grow too fast for their balance to adjust.

Becky's sister, Dianna Shellmer, who is working on her doctorate in child psychology, noticed her sister's increased isolation and became concerned.

"My sister had a lot of confidence when she was younger," Dianna Shellmer said. "That was shattered when she got older."

Dianna advised Becky to start working with a psychiatrist, a doctor who specializes in alternative rehabilitation. The psychiatrist, hearing of Becky's love of horses, referred her to Maryland Therapeutic Riding, a treatment center that promotes horseback riding as a way to help people with a wide range disabilities such as cerebral palsy or spina bifida and even emotional problems or developmental delays.

The six-year-old riding center, on a rolling equestrian estate in Crownsville, uses riding sessions to strengthen muscles, improve balance and move joints. The program has also been known to boost the self-esteem of its clients.

Shy and withdrawn, Becky Shellmer was nervous about the prospect of group therapy as it was explained in Maryland Therapeutic Riding's brochures. But in June 2001, she and her parents, Richard and Elisa Shellmer, visited the riding center. There, she met Ellie, who had by then had been donated to the center by the mother of the Eastern Shore boy.

In Ellie, Shellmer discovered a creature whose legs would help her own move faster and more gracefully. In Shellmer, Ellie found a caring soul.

A friendship was born, albeit a tentative one.

Almost from the beginning, Ellie and Shellmer tested each other. Ellie didn't like to stop when Shellmer said "stop." So Shellmer took up the horse's challenge by discarding the word. Instead, Shellmer began to restrain the horse by using light touches and subtle pressure from her legs to slow Ellie.

The horse started picking up other cues too, like the way Shellmer turned Ellie's head in the direction she wanted the horse to ride.

After a few months of riding with two volunteers at her side and one in front, Shellmer gave up her therapeutic saddle for a hard leather one. Unlike the jerky movements that characterized her first rides with Ellie, Shellmer had quickly advanced to riding in smooth circles around the therapeutic center's riding rings, responding to the rhythm of Ellie's gait.

"The horse's walk mimics the human walk," said Kerrie Mansfield, 30, program director and riding instructor at Maryland Therapeutic Riding. "It tricks the rider's body into thinking it's walking by moving the pelvis, trunk and legs."

By their first winter together, the last volunteer -- the one holding the horse's lead -- was sent out of the ring, leaving Shellmer and Ellie moving through their paces.

"Becky wants to post, trot, canter," said Mansfield. "For her, she wants to be a rider who does what other equestrians do and she's able to do that and benefit therapeutically."

Those benefits also include greater strength and endurance. With her muscles now more limber, she can out-walk her mother at the mall.

Shellmer's upper body has grown stronger too, especially since she began volunteering at the center twice a week, hauling heavy tack around the stables, grooming horses and shoveling stalls. Shellmer's outlook has improved as well, in part, because at Maryland Therapeutic Riding she is not viewed as a liability, and in part, because she's happiest when she's riding Ellie.

"Becky is really coming into her own at that barn," said Dianna Shellmer. "I see her riding and I just bet she feels free."

Certainly, Becky and her family did not always feel that way.

Born 15 weeks premature in Venezuela, Shellmer weighed just two pounds at birth. She spent four months in an incubator while her lungs matured. At six months, Shellmer wasn't moving much. Her family brought her to specialists who diagnosed the infant as having cerebral palsy, a muscular disorder that the doctors said was likely caused by pressure on the baby's brain during the last strained weeks in her mother's uterus.

Doctors told Shellmer's mother that her baby would have trouble swallowing food and walking. And, the doctors said, she would be developmentally delayed. Shellmer's parents refused to let the doctors' assessment be the last word.

They sought out therapies for their daughter. When she was 6, Shellmer underwent a risky spinal surgery to help her walk better.

"For a long time, I didn't want to walk," Shellmer said, adding that she eventually pushed herself to walk. "It was very difficult and painful."

After hearing of Shellmer's background, Mansfield thought pairing Ellie with Shellmer seemed logical. The appaloosa, now back up to a healthier weight of 1,200 pounds, had a touch of Shellmer's feistiness. Mansfield figured the two could push each other to go faster and get stronger.

"I feel better keeping my strength up in the course of life than going to therapy all the time," said Shellmer, who is now 18, has finished her high school work and is working toward her GED. "To get on this horse and go without help and have a relationship with the horse . . . I feel like I've been released from a pattern I was into where people think I'm inferior."

Although, Shellmer has clearly benefited from her time with Ellie, such outcomes are tough to pinpoint. With about 90 riders coming for help, there are simply too many variables to accurately measure outcomes, Mansfield said.

"Results speak for themselves," said Mansfield, who in 1999 quit her job as a medical laboratory technician at a doctor's office in Annapolis to follow her passion of dispensing more natural cures. "We've got people talking who aren't supposed to be talking and people walking who aren't supposed to be walking."

Shellmer has set new goals. Among them is going back to the stable that rejected her five years ago and strutting her stuff.

But that can wait.

Right now, she wants to get her GED and her driver's license. And she is considering a career as a horse therapist, or maybe a trainer.

Looking around Maryland Therapeutic Riding, it is hard for Shellmer to believe a year has passed since she found the Crownsville barn that she calls her "oasis."

The pastures that lured her to the horses are the same, maybe a little browner because of the drought. But the barn has gone through a couple of changes.

There are two new horses now, Max and Bo. A few weeks ago, Maryland Therapeutic Riding board members got together to build a little viewing stand from which spectators watched the center's first horse show, which was held in June.

On this sun-drenched day, Shellmer and Ellie are getting their first award as a team. Ellie, whose short mane has been braided into neat knots along her dappled back, ducks her head so that Shellmer can accept a red carnation and a blue ribbon. Shellmer, shoulders squared, knees out, elbows at perfect right angles, holds the reins loosely and smiles through her tension, her yellow hair crushed around her face by a riding helmet.

Then, out the ring they galloped -- the girl who wasn't supposed to walk and the horse who can't stop running.

Maryland Therapeutic Riding is at Arden Farms, off Sunrise Beach Road in Crownsville. The center charges between $40 and $45 per riding lesson, or $360 for an eight-week session if riding once a week. For more information, call 410-267-8900.