THE DARTMOOR PONIES,
OR
THE WANDERINGS OF THE HORSE TRIBE
[Illustration]
Put away the telescopes and microscopes to-day, boys, the holidays are
close at hand, and we will take a rest from peeping and peering till we
come back in the autumn laden with specimens for the microscope, while
the rapidly darkening evenings will tempt us again on to the lawn
star-gazing. On this our last lecture-day I want you to take a journey
with me which I took in imagination a few days ago, as I lay on my back
on the sunny moor and watched the Dartmoor ponies.
It was a calm misty morning one day last week, giving promise of a
bright and sunny day, when I started off for a long walk across the moor
to visit the famous stone-circles, many of which are to be found not
far off the track, called Abbot's Way, leading from Buckfast Abbey, on
the Dart, to the Abbey of Tavistock, on the Tavy.
My mind was full of the olden times as I pictured to myself how, seven
hundred years or more ago, some Benedictine monk from Tavistock Abbey,
in his black robe and cowl, paced this narrow path on his way to his
Cistercian brethren at Buckfast, meeting some of them on his road as
they wandered over the desolate moor in their white robes and black
scapularies in search of stray sheep. For the Cistercians were shepherds
and wool-weavers, while the Benedictines devoted themselves to learning,
and the track of about twenty-five miles from one abbey to the other,
which still remains, was worn by the members of the two communities and
their dependents, the only variety in whose lives consisted probably in
these occasional visits one to the other.
Yet even these monks belonged to modern times compared to the ancient
Britons who raised the stone-circles, and buried their dead in the
barrows scattered here and there over the moor; and my mind drifted back
to the days when, long before that pathway was worn, men clad in the
skins of beasts hunted wild animals over the ground on which I was
treading, and lived in caves and holes of the ground.
I wondered, as I thought of them, whether the cultured monks and the
uncivilised Britons delighted as much in the rugged scenery of the moor
as I did that morning. For many miles in front of me the moor stretched
out wild and treeless; the sun was shining brightly upon the mass of
yellow furze and deep-red heather, drawing up the moisture from the
ground, and causing a kind of watery haze to shimmer over the landscape;
while the early mist was rising off the _tors_, or hill-tops, in the
distance, curling in fanciful wreaths around the rugged and stony
summits, as it dispersed gradually in the increasing heat of the day.
The cattle which were scattered in groups here and there feeding on the
dewy grass were enjoying the happiest time of the year. The moor, which
in winter affords them scarcely a bare subsistence, is now richly
covered with fresh young grass, and the sturdy oxen fed solemnly and
deliberately, while the wild Dartmoor ponies and their colts scampered
joyously along, shaking their manes and long flowing tails, and neighing
to each other as they went; or clustered together on some verdant spot,
where the colts teased and bit each other for fun, as they gambolled
round their mothers.
It was a pleasure, there on the open moor, with the lark soaring
overhead, and the butterflies and bees hovering among the sweet-smelling
furze blossoms, to see horses free and joyous, with no thought of bit or
bridle, harness or saddle, whose hoofs had never been handled by the
shoeing-smith, nor their coats touched with the singeing iron. Those
little colts, with their thick heads, shaggy coats, and flowing tails,
will have at least two years more freedom before they know what it is to
be driven or beaten. Only once a year are they gathered together,
claimed by their owners and branded with an initial, and then left
again to wander where they will. True, it is a freedom which sometimes
has its drawbacks, for if the winter is severe the only food they can
get will be the furze-tops, off which they scrape the snow with their
feet; yet it is very precious in itself, for they can gallop when and
where they choose, with head erect, sniffing at the wind and crying to
each other for the very joy of life.
Now as I strolled across the moor and watched their gambols, thinking
how like free wild animals they seemed, my thoughts roamed far away, and
I saw in imagination scenes where other untamed animals of the horse
tribe are living unfettered all their lives long.
First there rose before my mind the level grass-covered pampas of South
America, where wild horses share the boundless plains with troops of the
rhea, or American ostrich, and wander, each horse with as many mares as
he can collect, in companies of hundreds or even thousands in a troop.
These horses are now truly wild, and live freely from youth to age,
unless they are unfortunate enough to be caught in the more inhabited
regions by the lasso of the hunter. In the broad pampas, the home of
herds of wild cattle, they dread nothing. There, as they roam with one
bold stallion as their leader, even beasts of prey hesitate to approach
them, for, when they form into a dense mass with the mothers and young
in their centre, their heels deal blows which even the fierce jaguar
does not care to encounter, and they trample their enemy to death in a
very short time. Yet these are not the original wild horses we are
seeking, they are the descendants of tame animals, brought from Europe
by the Spaniards to Buenos Ayres in 1535, whose descendants have
regained their freedom on the boundless pampas and prairies.
As I was picturing them careering over the plains, another scene
presented itself and took their place. Now I no longer saw around me
tall pampas-grass with the long necks of the rheas appearing above it,
for I was on the edge of a dreary scantily covered plain between the
Aral Sea and the Balkash Lake in Tartary. To the south lies a barren
sandy desert, to the north the fertile plains of the Kirghiz steppes,
where the Tartar feeds his flocks, and herds of antelopes gallop over
the fresh green pasture; and between these is a kind of no-man's land,
where low scanty shrubs and stunted grass seemed to promise but a poor
feeding-ground.
Yet here the small long-legged but powerful "Tarpans," the wild horses
of the treeless plains of Russia and Tartary, were picking their morning
meal. Sturdy wicked little fellows they are, with their shaggy
light-brown coats, short wiry manes, erect ears, and fiery watchful
eyes. They might well be supposed to be true wild horses, whose
ancestors had never been tamed by man; and yet it is more probable that
even they escaped in early times from the Tartars, and have held their
own ever since, over the grassy steppes of Russia and on the confines of
the plains of Tartary. Sometimes they live almost alone, especially on
the barren wastes where they have been seen in winter, scraping the snow
off the herbage as our ponies do on Dartmoor. At other times, as in the
south of Russia, where they wander between the Dnieper and the Don, they
gather in vast herds and live a free life, not fearing even the wolves,
which they beat to the ground with their hoofs. From one green oasis to
another they travel over miles of ground.
"A thousand horse--and none to ride!
With flowing tail, and flying mane,
Wide nostrils--never stretch'd by pain,
Mouths bloodless to the bit or rein,
And feet that iron never shod,
And flanks unscarr'd by spur or rod.
A thousand horse, the wild, the free,
Like waves that follow o'er the sea."[1]
[1] Byron's _Mazeppa_.
As I followed them in their course I fancied I saw troops of yet another
animal of the horse tribe, the "Kulan," or _Equus hemionus_, which is a
kind of half horse, half ass (Fig. 74), living on the Kirghiz steppes of
Tartary and spreading far beyond the range of the Tarpan into Tibet.
Here at last we have a truly wild animal, never probably brought into
subjection by man. The number of names he possesses shows how widely he
has spread. The Tartars call him "Kulan," the Tibetans "Kiang," while
the Mongolians give him the unpronounceable name of "Dschiggetai." He
will not submit to any of them, but if caught and confined soon breaks
away again to his old life, a "free and fetterless creature."
[Illustration: Fig. 74.
_Equus hemionus_, "Kiang" or "Kulan," the Horse-ass of Tartary and
Tibet. (Brehm.)]
No one has ever yet settled the question whether he is a horse or an
ass, probably because he represents an animal truly between the two.
His head is graceful, his body light, his legs slender and fleet, yet
his ears are long and ass-like; he has narrow hoofs, and a tail with a
tuft at the end like all the ass tribe; his colour is a yellow brown,
and he has a short dark mane and a long dark stripe down his back as a
donkey has, though this last character you may also see in many of our
Devonshire ponies. Living often on the high plateaux, sometimes as much
as 1500 feet above the sea, this "child of the steppes" travels in large
companies even as far as the rich meadows of Central Asia; in summer
wandering in green pastures, and in winter seeking the hunger-steppes
where sturdy plants grow. And when autumn comes the young steeds go off
alone to the mountain heights to survey the country around and call
wildly for mates, whom, when found, they will keep close to them through
all the next year, even though they mingle with thousands of others.
[Illustration: Fig. 75.
Przevalsky's Wild Horse, the "Kertag" or "Statur."]
Till about ten years ago the _Equus hemionus_ was the only truly wild
horse known, but in the winter of 1879-80 the Russian traveller
Przevalsky brought back from Central Asia a much more horse-like animal,
called by the Tartars "Kertag" and by the Mongols "Statur." It is a
clumsy, thick-set, whitish-gray creature with strong legs and a large,
heavy, reddish-coloured head; its legs have a red tint down to the
knees, beyond which they are blackish down to the hoofs. But the ears
are small, and it has the broad hoofs of the true horse, and warts on
his hind legs, which no animal of the ass tribe has. This horse, like
the Kiang, travels in small troops of from five to fifteen, led through
the wildest parts of the Dsungarian desert, between the Altai and
Tianschan Mountains, by an old stallion. They are extremely shy, and
see, hear, and smell very quickly, so that they are off like lightning
whenever anything approaches them.
So having travelled over America, Europe, and Asia, was my quest ended?
No; for from the dreary Asiatic deserts my thoughts wandered to a far
warmer and more fertile land, where between the Blue Nile and the Red
Sea rise the lofty highlands of Abyssinia, among which the African wild
ass (_Asinus taeniopus_), the probable ancestor of our donkeys, feeds in
troops on the rich grasses of the slopes, and then onwards to the bank
of a river in Central Africa where on the edge of a forest, with rich
pastures beyond, elephants and rhinoceroses, antelopes and buffaloes,
lions and hyaenas, creep down in the cool of the evening to slake their
thirst in the flowing stream. There I saw the herds of Zebras in all
their striped beauty coming down from the mountain regions to the north,
and mingling with the darker-coloured but graceful quaggas from the
southern plains, and I half-grieved at the thought how these untamed and
free rovers are being slowly but surely surrounded by man closing in
upon them on every side.
I might now have travelled still farther in search of the Onager, or
wild ass of the Asiatic and Indian deserts, but at this point a more
interesting and far wider question presented itself, as I flung myself
down on the moor to ponder over the early history of all these tribes.
Where have they all come from? Where shall we look for the first
ancestors of these wild and graceful animals? For the answer to this
question I had to travel back to America, to those Western United States
where Professor Marsh has made such grand discoveries in horse history.
For there, in the very country where horses were supposed never to have
been before the Spaniards brought them a few centuries ago, we have now
found the true birthplace of the equine race.
Come back with me to a time so remote that we cannot measure it even by
hundreds of thousands of years, and let us visit the territories of Utah
and Wyoming. Those highlands were very different then from what they are
now. Just risen out of the seas of the Cretaceous Period, they were then
clothed with dense forests of palms, tree-ferns, and screw-pines,
magnolias and laurels, interspersed with wide-spreading lakes, on the
margins of which strange and curious animals fed and flourished. There
were large beasts with teeth like the tapir and the bear, and feet like
the elephant; and others far more dangerous, half bear, half hyaena,
prowling around to attack the clumsy paleotherium or the anoplotherium,
something between a rhinoceros and a horse, which grazed by the
waterside, while graceful antelopes fed on the rich grass. And among
these were some little animals no bigger than foxes, with four toes and
a splint for the fifth, on their front feet, and three toes on the hind
ones.
These clumsy little animals, whose bones have been found in the rocks of
Utah and Wyoming, have been called _Eohippus_, or horses of the dawn,
by naturalists. They were animals with real toes, yet their bones and
teeth show that they belonged to the horse tribe, and already the fifth
toe common to most other toed animals was beginning to disappear.
This was in the Eocene period, and before it passed away with its
screw-pines and tree-ferns, another rather larger animal, called the
_Orohippus_, had taken the place of the small one, and he had only four
toes on his front feet. The splint had disappeared, and as time went on
still other animals followed, always with fewer toes, while they gained
slender fleet legs, together with an increase in size and in
gracefulness. First one as large as a sheep (_Mesohippus_) had only
three toes and a splint. Then the splint again disappeared, and one
large and two dwindling toes only remained, till finally these two
became mere splints, leaving one large toe or hoof with almost
imperceptible splints, which may be seen on the fetlock of a horse's
skeleton.
The diagram (Fig 76) shows these splints in the horse's or ass's foot of
to-day. For you must notice that a horse's foot really begins at the
point _w_ which we call his knee in the front legs, and at his hock _h_
in the hind legs. His true knee _k_ and elbow _e_ are close up to the
body. What we call his foot or hoof is really the end of the strong,
broad, middle toe _t_ covered with a hoof, and farther up his foot at
_s_ and _s_ we can feel two small splints, which are remains of two
other toes.
Meanwhile during these long succeeding ages while the foot was
lengthening out into a slender limb the animals became larger, more
powerful, and more swift, the neck and head became longer and more
graceful, the brain-case larger in front and the teeth decreased in
number, so that there is now a large gap between the biting teeth _i_
and the grinding teeth _g_ of a horse. Their slender limbs too became
more flexible and fit for running and galloping, till we find the whole
skeleton the same in shape, though not in size, as in our own horses and
asses now.
[Illustration: Fig. 76.
Skeleton of Horse or Ass.
_i_, Incisor teeth. _g_, Grinding teeth, with the gap between the two as
in all grass-feeders. _k_, Knee. _h_, Hock or heel. _f_, Foot. _s_,
Splints or remains of the two lost toes. _e_, Elbow. _w_, Wrist. _ha_,
Hand-bone. _t_, middle toe of three joints, 1, 2, 3 forming the hoof.]
They did not, however, during all this time remain confined to America,
for, from the time when they arrived at an animal called _Miohippus_, or
lesser horse, which came after the Mesohippus and had only three toes
on each foot, we find their remains in Europe, where they lived in
company with the giraffes, opossums, and monkeys which roamed over these
parts in those ancient times. Then a little later we find them in Africa
and India; so that the horse tribe, represented by creatures about as
large as donkeys, had spread far and wide over the world.
And now, curiously enough, they began to forsake, or to die out in, the
land of their birth. Why they did so we do not know; but while in the
old world as asses, quaggas, and zebras, and probably horses, they
flourished in Asia, Europe, and Africa, they certainly died out in
America, so that ages afterwards, when that land was discovered, no
animal of the horse tribe was found in it.
And the true horse, where did he arise? Born and bred probably in
Central Asia from some animal like the "Kulan," or the "Kertag," he
proved too useful to savage tribes to be allowed his freedom, and it is
doubtful whether in any part of the world he escaped subjection. In our
own country he probably roamed as a wild animal till the savages, who
fed upon him, learned in time to put him to work; and when the Romans
came they found the Britons with fine and well-trained horses.
Yet though tamed and made to know his master he has, as we have seen,
broken loose again in almost all parts of the world--in America on the
prairies and pampas, in Europe and Asia on the steppes, and in Australia
in the bush. And even in Great Britain, where so few patches of
uncultivated land still remain, the young colts of Dartmoor, Exmoor,
and Shetland, though born of domesticated mothers, seem to assert their
descent from wild and free ancestors as they throw out their heels and
toss up their heads with a shrill neigh, and fly against the wind with
streaming manes and outstretched tails as the Kulan, the Tarpan, and the
Zebra do in the wild desert or grassy plain.