Horses lend themselves to stories. In America in particular, wild horses, manes streaming, nostrils flaring, hooves thudding, carry with them something of our projected national psyche.

A woman named Marguerite Henry understood this. In 59 wildly popular books, featuring the mostly true stories of famous equines, from a plucky burro who lived in the Grand Canyon to a plain brown stallion in Vermont, Henry, who died in 1997, harnessed horse stories and turned them into a best-selling genre over which she still reigns supreme. But there was only one place where her stories turned the horses into “forever a part of the rocks and streams and wind and sky”: the islands of Assateague and Chincoteague, in the archipelago of Virginia’s Outer Banks.

And so I found myself one morning last summer, soaked to the bone, enduring the third hour of a deluge of pelting rain, in a little red kayak filled at least a third of the way up with storm water. I was following the myth of a pony Henry launched into legend in 1947 with her children’s book about a real pony that lived here, “Misty of Chincoteague.”

I was not alone. It was by now approaching 8 a.m. All around me on the water in the channel, which runs between Chincoteague Island and the uninhabited nature preserve of Assateague Island, were other pony-seekers. We sat quietly, noses of our craft snug in stands of sea grass to keep the boats still in the pelting rain, craning occasionally to look for wild horses. We were a flotilla of readers whose hearts were stolen by a cream-and-tan spotted pony, a creature we all knew from poring over Henry’s pages in grade school, who once swam these waters.