BEYOND ROPE
AND FENCE
[Illustration]
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[Illustration]
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Beyond Rope
and Fence
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_DAVID GREW_
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[Illustration]
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_Boni and Liveright_
_Publishers ~ New York_
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_Copyright, 1922, by_
BONI AND LIVERIGHT, INC.
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PRINTED IN THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA
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_To you, dear old Dora, who inspired this book, I dedicate it. I regret
most poignantly that life has ordained that you may never know, despite
my caresses and my quart measures filled to overflowing with oats, how
deeply I have sympathised with you in those moments when you stood
motionless before me and I could see by the strange, sad light in your
eyes that you were dreaming of long departed, happy years of freedom on
the plains._
D. G.
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CONTENTS
CHAPTER PAGE
FOREWORD i
I. FOR THE LOVE OF HER FOAL 1
II. TO THE NORTH! 25
III. DEATH IN THE HOWL OF COYOTES 35
IV. A SEEKING THAT FOUND 48
V. MAN, THE USURPER 59
VI. HOW MAN BREAKS THE SPIRIT AND 75
THE BODY
VII. THE CONSPIRACY OF MAN AND 87
COYOTE
VIII. RETRIBUTION 116
IX. SLOWLY MAN CREPT NORTHWARD 123
X. THE DOORS OF THE TRAP SHUT 133
XI. ROPE, IRON AND FIRE 163
XII. THE STRENGTH OF THE WEAK 178
XIII. LABOUR WITHOUT LOVE OR WAGE 195
XIV. ONLY JUSTICE HAD BEEN DONE 201
XV. THE TRAIL OF THE MOOSE 225
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FOREWORD
In the fall of the year, the farmers and the ranchers of the northwest
prairies of Canada release their horses for the winter. Strange as it
may seem to those of us who shudder at the very thought of raging
blizzards on the open plains, the horses that are left free to roam over
unsheltered space and are obliged to dig down through feet of snow for
their grass, not only survive the severest winters but are generally
found fat and strong the next spring.
If while you are out riding you happen upon a group of these free
horses, they will stare at you curiously until they begin to fear that
you have come to gather them up and to take them back to the farm yard,
then with angry, defiant tossing of heads they will turn and gallop out
of reach, going so fast that you will not see them for snow dust. The
horse you are riding, if he has ever enjoyed a winter of that freedom,
will struggle to get away from you so that he may join them. Because you
will not let him go, he will show his displeasure like a petulant child
and long after you have forced him to abandon the attempt to get loose,
long after the happier group has disappeared, he will keep turning his
head back and calling yearningly to them.
The farmer who releases his horses in the fall rarely loses any of them.
Every farmer knows every horse within a radius of twenty-five miles or
more, knows them by name and colour, knows their histories and
peculiarities. When the farmer is in doubt as to who some distant rider
may be, you can hear him think aloud thus:
“That’s Skinner’s sorrel, Billy. Skinner’s goin’ for his mail.” Or:
“That’s Spicer’s white nag, Madge. I’ll bet Spicer’s comin’ to see about
them oats.”
So in the spring of the year, when the farmers are all out searching for
their horses, they know those they come upon, and if some farmer sees
Skinner’s sorrel, Billy, he will drive him in the direction of Skinner’s
homestead, talking to Billy as he does so, in some such fashion as this:
“Well, Billy, you little devil, you ain’t any the worse for the worst
winter in twenty years. You’re fat as a pig. Go on now, get home! I know
you don’t like the idea of gettin’ back to work, but it’s soon seedin’
time, you know!”
The farmer who works beside his horses daily, who gets to understand
every expression of these beautiful, intelligent creatures, always talks
seriously to them. This sounds strange to us until we have come in
contact with these animals for a short time, when, hardly being
conscious of it, we soon start talking to them ourselves. They certainly
understand many words and I have seen evidences of horses recognising at
once what sort of temper or mood men happen to be in as soon as they
approach them.
Just as they learn to understand us, we learn to understand them. Every
neigh or whinny takes on the meaning of a word, and their scowling or
angry shaking of heads, and their protests against certain discomforts
we impose upon them appear as clearly as the similar expressions of
people. The most amazing fact, however, that slowly dawns upon us, is
the fact that these lovely animals live in a conscious world of their
own, not half so different from ours as we had allowed ourselves to
think.
The rancher is not as intimate with the horses he breeds and rears in
virtual wildness on the vast ranges which he leases from the government
and about which he builds his barbed wire fences. Naturally so. He has
from several hundred to several thousand horses and they are virtually
in a wild state until he sells them, when they are broken-in and most of
the untamed spirit is crushed out of them by heavy labour.
A rancher can rarely tell you how many horses he has. During the spring
when colts are most often born, his stock may double for all he knows.
He does not attempt to find out until the fall, when he rounds them up.
The young colts are separated from their mothers and branded. The poor
young things are tied and thrown and the red hot iron, with the shape of
each rancher’s particular brand, is pressed upon the shoulder till the
insignia is burned through hair and skin, where the mark remains as long
as the creature lives.
The ranch horses are wilder and more spirited than the farm horses, but
when the latter are released for the winter, they often mix with the
former, breaking up into groups of those who seem to feel themselves
more congenial to each other. Every animal has a character and
personality of his own, and while he will get along beautifully with one
horse, he will fight all the time with another. From my observation, it
seems to me that the wild free horse does much less quarrelling than the
horse that has toiled on the farm, which would indicate quite clearly
how much like ours his nature is.
Very few of the great herds that rustle for themselves all winter long
die while they are away. Those that die are horses that either have been
kept in the barn too late in the season or else that were in a starved
condition when they were released. A horse that has been kept in the
barn till after the cold season has set in and has been inured to the
warmth of the barn, when suddenly exposed to the unsheltered open
plains, if the weather happens to be severe, will sometimes die because
it finds it is unable to adjust itself to the change in temperature.
But there is one peculiarity of horse nature which sometimes kills the
best horse, not only in the wilds but in the pasture or barn yard, if no
one is about to come to its assistance. Every horse loves to roll. He
will lie down on a sandy spot or on the snow and roll over from side to
side. It sometimes happens that he selects a spot that has a deep rut,
or that is near a wall, a stone, or a straw-stack. He will roll over and
strike the wall or the straw-stack or get caught in the rut in such a
way that he cannot force himself back. He will remain helpless on his
back till some one comes to his rescue. If he gets no assistance he will
die in a very short time, sometimes within less than an hour.
But I am interested in the horse as a fellow being, subject as we are to
limitations; and, to a degree less perhaps than we are, capable of joy
and sorrow. In so far as these beautiful creatures are able to
communicate to others an indication of the emotions out of which their
lives are built, I have taken my story directly from them. My story,
too, comes fresh from the prairies. I did most of its planning while
riding on horseback over hundreds of miles of rolling Alberta plains,
often coming upon hills from which I could see a perfectly circular
horizon without a sign of human life, save perhaps some telltale
arrangement of stones, laid on the hilltop by Indians whom fate had long
since swept from the plains of their fatherland. At such times my pony,
whose wild and exciting history forms the greater part of this story,
seemed as much moved by the open vastness and the stillness as I; and,
each in his own way, we held communion with the spirit of the
wilderness.
D. G.
Langmark, Alberta, Canada.
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BEYOND ROPE AND FENCE
CHAPTER I
FOR THE LOVE OF HER FOAL
ROLLING hills and shallow valleys—an ocean of brown waves with fast
drying sloughs, like patches of sunshine on the surface of the sea—such
was the Canadian prairie that autumn day—such were the miles and miles
of Alberta range, bounded by a barbed wire fence that was completely
lost in the unobstructed play of sunshine. It was an open wilderness, so
vast that it seemed to stretch on almost endlessly beyond the horizon,
which lay desolate and unbroken like a rusty, iron ring, girding the
earth. Its immensity, by an inexorable contrast, dwarfed everything that
crept over the surface of the plains into a helpless puniness.
The hundred horses on the range, scattered and grouped by their
predilections for each other, looked, in the distance, like ants
crawling over the surface of a rock. Within sight of each other, bound
by the ties of race, they nevertheless had their loves and their
preferences. Most of the mothers with their little colts grazed in a
group by themselves; while a few mothers, as if they felt that their
children were better than their neighbour’s children, kept themselves
apart from the herd, though always within sight.
Among the latter was a shapely, light-brown or buckskin mare who was
grazing peacefully about her precious, buckskin coloured daughter. The
little one was asleep on the grass. Her graceful little legs were
stretched as far as she could stretch them. Her lovely little head lay
flat on the ground. Her fluffy tail was thrown back on the grass with a
delicious carelessness.
She was only six months old, but already the very image of her mother.
From the white strip on her forehead and the heavy black mane down to
the unequal white spots on her two hind fetlocks, she was like her. Only
her wiry, delicately wrought little legs seemed somewhat too long for
her.
Suddenly the old mare’s head went up high in the air; her grinding teeth
ceased grinding as a broken machine comes to a dead stop; and the round,
dilated, knowing eyes pierced the slight haze in the atmosphere. The
little head on the grass raised just a bit, looked inquiringly at her
beloved mother—quite near; then with the innocent confidence of
childhood, dropped back again, rubbing the soft fragrant grass in an
ecstasy of contentment.
But the old mare continued to gaze intently, standing motionless as a
stone. She saw that all the other horses were gazing just as intently as
she was. Small moving objects—two men on horseback—had broken over the
line of shadow along the southern horizon. One of them was loping away
to the right and the other to the left. The old buckskin mare had
already lived more than twenty years. Not only had she herself suffered
at the hands of man, but she had had so many of her babies taken from
her and cruelly abused—often before her very eyes. Her mother’s heart
began beating fast and apprehensively.
The other mares, not far from her, also showed signs of extreme
nervousness. The buckskin saw them run off for a short distance as if in
panic, then stop and gaze anxiously at the approaching riders. It was
time to act. She looked questioningly a moment toward the north; but she
realised that that direction would soon be closed to her, for she could
tell that the riders, loping straight north, meant to turn in time and
come back upon them.
She called nervously to her little one. The little thing sprang to its
feet, sidled up to her and gazed at the dark specks that were coming
together in the north, with fear glowing moist in her large, round eyes.
Until she had seen a group of horsemen dismount, one day, she had
thought that man was a monstrous sort of horse with a frightful hump on
its back. What little she had been able to learn about him since that
time had served only to intensify her fear of him; and despite her
abiding confidence in her mother, she trembled timorously as she heard
the ominous hoof-beats in the distance.
The animals instinctively gathered into a bunch and started away at full
speed. While one of the horsemen remained some distance behind, ready to
prevent the group from going off to either side, the other plunged into
the midst of them and deftly separated the mothers and their colts from
the rest of the bunch. Then they allowed the single horses to run off to
the north at their will; while they came together behind the mothers and
their colts and drove them southward toward the long line of shadow that
lay like a black elongated reptile, below the horizon and parallel to
it.
That long line of shadow, which widened as they neared it, was a great
canyon which the Red Deer River had cut out of the level plains. From
the jaws of the mouth of the canyon, which were a mile or so apart, the
floor of the prairies fell away sheer in places, to a depth of a
thousand feet. In many spots there were several parallel cuts in the
edge of that floor. Where, during the ages, the elements had been unable
to remove the loose earth, it lay along the bank in steep hills which
rose up from the bottom of the canyon like gigantic teeth, all crumbling
more or less, all dotted with stones and covered here and there with
blotches of sagebrush and cacti.
In the centre of the flat-bottomed canyon, as if an ancient torrential
flood had spent itself and narrowed down at last to a small, shining
stream, a quarter of a mile in width, ran the Red Deer River. In the
middle of the half-mile wide space between the river and the hills that
made the wall of the canyon, stood the buildings of the ranch. The
house, a small shingled structure, stood on the east end of the
spacious, sandy yard; while opposite and facing it was the long, red
barn with its open door below and the gaping window space in the loft
above. North of the barn and against its blind wall there was a big
corral, divided into two parts by a partition. The corral walls as well
as the partition were made of logs laid horizontally, a foot apart and
rising to a height of some eight feet. Each of these two sections had
huge swinging gates which opened inward.
As helplessly as the waters of Niagara, the frantic mothers, stealing
side glances at their little ones and feeling them at their sides,
poured down the steep incline, between the giant teeth, into the mouth
of the canyon, slipping, sliding, and leaping downward riskily, in haste
and fear. On the level bottom of the canyon, the buckskin mare made an
attempt to turn from the path which led to the rancher’s buildings in
the hope of getting to the river beyond; but one of the horsemen divined
her rebellious intention and shot by her like a flash of light, heading
her off and forcing her back. She realised the futility of baffling
their superior wills; but went back with an angry shake of her wise old
head and a deliberate scowl of hatred for the tormenting man and the
servile horse under him who was betraying his kind.
However the old mare happened to feel, the little buckskin, since the
forces of evil had as yet made no attempt to separate her from her
mother, shook the fear from her heart and took all the delight there was
to take in this unexpected excitement of the day. Healthy to the last
cell in her body, the race had merely accelerated the circulation of her
blood; and the ease with which she was able to keep up with her mother
made her conscious of a great and thrilling power. Her eyes and nostrils
dilated, her mane bristling and her tail unfurled, her springy legs
carrying her with ease, there was an expression of boundless joy in the
motion of her graceful body.
The gates of the corral stood wide open. Being so driven that they could
not swerve from the path, half the group poured into one section of the
corral and the other half into the other. When they turned at the
opposite walls realising that there, there was no way out again, and
came back toward the gates, they saw the men closing them.
Only the soul that has been trapped knows the crushing torment of four
relentless walls. Round and round they went, madly and stupidly, and
clouds of beaten earth rose from under their feet and choked them.
Finally becoming aware of the fact that the men were not pursuing them
any longer, they packed into a corner of the corral and, looking over
the corral walls and between the logs, sought to learn what they were
doing. They saw one man building a fire in the open, but a few paces
from the corral; while the other was calmly and portentously making
preparations that were only too familiar to the old mares.
The little buckskin, beside her mother, always beside her mother,
clinging to that big beloved body as the soul clings to life, was wedged
into the very corner and right against the logs of the wall, so that her
frightened eye, in the middle of the open space between two logs, could
see the rancher’s house some four rods away.
Her sides were still throbbing violently when she saw the house door
open. A little girl appeared. The little filly did not know what kind of
animal that was except that she guessed that it was some sort of man.
She perceived with renewed trepidation that the little girl was hopping
and skipping directly toward her. In her fright she pressed tight
against her mother, but her mother, much more concerned with the men and
apparently indifferent to the little girl, would not move an inch. When
suddenly the little buckskin felt the touch of the little girl’s hand on
her back, she called out frantically to her mother. But the old mare
bent down her long neck, touched the little head with her soft, warm
lips, murmured reassuringly and then looked away again. By that time the
filly realised, uncomfortable though she was, that the little hand was
not going to hurt her.
The little girl climbed up two of the logs, moved slowly toward the
little buckskin’s head, talking softly and coaxingly as she moved. The
filly listened with ears pricked high. In the stream of meaningless
prattle, the foal became aware of the existence of the combination of
sounds, “Queen,” as one becomes aware of a constantly repeated melody in
a piece of music. By the time the little girl had carefully pushed her
head through the space between two logs, directly in front of the
filly’s muzzle, the little buckskin, though frightened again, became
exceedingly curious. There was something very disarming about that soft
voice and the soothing repetition of the word, “Queen.” She cautiously
stretched her muzzle, sniffing at the little mouth, moving it closer and
closer and just when she touched the little girl’s face, with a cry of
delight the little girl kissed her fervently on the nose.
She drew her muzzle away quickly and looked with a frightened eye. It
had interrupted her attempt to sniff, however, and once more assured
that there was nothing harmful about the little girl, she made a second
attempt. The little girl continued calling her, “Queen,” coaxingly, till
the little muzzle touched her lips again and once more she kissed her,
crying out again with delight.
This sweet, unofficial christening might have resulted in a beautiful,
enduring friendship, but a sudden, terrific patter of feet in the next
corral came through the air accompanied by a nauseating cloud of smoke,
and all was confusion again. Round and round their section of the corral
they swept again till they realised that the men were not yet molesting
them. When they stopped to investigate, little Queen saw a man in the
other section of the corral rush toward a mare with a long hideous
stick. She saw him strike the colt that tried to follow her and saw the
colt run back into the corral while the mother had run out. She could
not quite understand what he was doing; but she experienced an
overwhelming fear of losing her mother, and clung to her beloved sides
with more tenacity than ever.
The other section of the corral was finally cleared of all the mares
who, standing on the outside, would not go away; but in concert rent the
air with their cries of protest. Queen was so curious that, despite her
beating heart, she moved to where she could see what was going on. She
saw ropes flash through the air and immediately after, a little colt
fell to the dusty ground. The cry from the little one’s mother was
answered by a stifled cry from the ground and as Queen, unable to stand
still for fear, listened to that cry, there suddenly began coming to her
the odour of blood and burning flesh. Madness seized upon them once more
and the dizzying whirl round the choking corral gave them some relief.
They finally stopped to rest a while, only to have another colt thrown
and his cries and the smell of burning flesh set them through the
frenzied motion round the corral, all over again.
Most of the afternoon it took before all the colts in the first section
had been branded and mutilated. It was a noisy, dusty, cruel process;
and the men, perspiring heavily, their faces wet and black with the dust
that settled on them, looked like tormenting imps of hell; but they were
no more to be blamed for the cruelty that was theirs to do than were
their helpless victims.
All that clamour of pain and struggle could not disturb the mist-like
loneliness that brooded over the far-reaching distance. On the other
side of the river, visible beyond less rugged banks, stretched a
lifeless country of hills and plains, so desolate and so motionless that
the very stones that dotted them seemed with their feeble reflections to
be futilely protesting against their destitution.
A pause came to the torturous struggle. The gate of the first corral was
opened and the sickened little colts shambled out into the open where
their frantic mothers caressed them, then led them away to the east. The
men walked off and disappeared in the house. Taking advantage of the
silence and the respite, the still captive colts, one after another,
took to sucking. It was not very long, however, before they were
interrupted by the reappearance of the men. The skin on every captive
began to tremble and the eight mothers with their eight colts packed
into one corner.
One man, carrying a long stick, entered the section and advanced to the
middle while the other stationed himself at the gate. First the man with
the stick forced the group to move into the opposite corner, then, after
a long struggle, he singled out the buckskin mare. He had driven her
toward the gate but a few feet, when little Queen, bending so low that
she passed under the stick, rushed out of reach of it and gained her
mother’s side. Had it not been for the vigilance of the man at the gate
they would have both escaped. It was getting to be late in the afternoon
and the man was tired and impatient. As with most impatient people, his
common sense gave way to his impatience. He was not only determined to
get the buckskin mare out first, but he was even more anxious to punish
her. He singled her out again and reaching her, struck her with his
stick. In pain and fright, the mare rushed for the gate. It was
partially opened and she was half way out when a cry from little Queen,
who saw her leaving her, brought her to her senses.
Rebelliously, she reared and fell with full force upon the gate. It
swung violently backward, striking the man who held it so severely that
it knocked him off his feet and sent him rolling to the wall. The second
man who was trying to prevent Queen from following her mother was away
over at the other end of the corral. The gateman’s cry and the image of
him on the dusty ground, so confused the other that for a few moments he
stood still, unable to move a muscle. When he saw his partner pick
himself up, he realised that he should have hurried to the gate and
closed it; but by that time the whole group had escaped and were racing
for the hills, the buckskin mare in the lead and her precious Queen
eagerly behind her.
With a majestic toss of her head, conscious of having scored a victory,
and determined to keep it, the buckskin mare fled across the flats. It
was now not only the overwhelming desire to get away. Vaguely she
realised that she had crossed the man’s will and that that was a
punishable offence.
The mothers whose foals had been branded were off on a field at the foot
of the hills. The field had yielded a crop of oats and the oats had been
reaped and taken from the field; but there was still enough grain left
to make it worth their while to remain there. If, when they followed the
fugitives with their eyes, they had any desire to go along, they knew
that their sickened colts would not go with them.
The buckskin mare gave them hardly a glance. She struck up the steep
incline with risky speed, bent upon getting out of the men’s reach, as
soon as was possible. The men, on the other hand, were at a
disadvantage. Before they could saddle their ponies, the mares, they
knew, would be off somewhere at the other end of the range. They
realised, too, that the mares were now so excited that they would have
very great difficulty in rounding them up. They were angry at the
rebellious mare, but these animals were their property and they did not
want to hurt them. Another struggle at that time, they felt, might even
endanger their own lives. The man who had been knocked over was not only
as tired as the other fellow was, but he was aching from head to foot.
Besides, the afternoon was rapidly giving way to early evening. They
decided to finish the branding on the following day.
But to the buckskin mare the spaces behind her seemed peopled with
imaginary pursuers, and she struggled up the slippery incline as if her
very life depended upon getting to the top and away. The rest of the
mares that fled with her and their little ones seemed to find greater
difficulty in getting to the top, but they followed as eagerly. Rocks
and sand rolled thunderously down behind them and the dust rose from the
mouth of the canyon like volcanic smoke.
When they finally reached the level plains above, the old mare was white
with foam. They had that afternoon been rounded up in a hollow toward
the northeast of where they now were and fear of being rounded up again
sent the buckskin mare to the west. Her usual fear of man, many times
intensified by the feeling that now she would be severely punished for
breaking loose, aroused in her old head the instinctive desire of the
animal that is pursued, to get under cover. Though there was neither
sight nor sound of any one behind her, she ran with might and main for
the coulee that she knew was a mile and a half to the west, and until
she had turned over the lip of the coulee and had reached the very end
of its slope, she did not slacken her pace, several times almost
breaking a leg in badger holes that she avoided by only a hair’s
breadth. Down in the gulch there was a path, made by the water of the
melted snow in spring as it had wound its way to the river. Along this
path, which led northward, they trotted without stopping till they came
to where the range fence forced them to halt.
Here at last they rested, though the buckskin mare kept anxious vigil
for the first sign of any one pursuing them. The mothers began grazing
slowly while their young, moving with them, strove to get the milk they
felt belonged to them. As soon as the colts had had all the milk there
was for them they went leisurely in search of tender grasses and soon
all were grazing as if nothing had ever happened.
But the buckskin mare was still worried. She walked to the two wires
that barred her way and with her head above the upper wire she gazed to
the north. A quarter of a mile away, the coulee ended. Its floor curved
upward like the bottom of a ship. Where it ended and the prairie floor
began there was a cluster of sagebrush. The evening was rapidly turning
the sage into a silhouette against the bright background of the sky.
Fear of pursuit came back with the coming of the night and the old mare
roused herself. With a sudden impulse she backed away from the wires and
dropped to her knees. Pushing her head under the lower wire she moved
cautiously forward, an inch at a time. Slowly she felt the wire move
backward over her body and each time the barb dug through her skin she
stopped and tried to crouch lower. With a sharp scratch it rolled over
her withers and stuck painfully into her back. She tried again to crouch
down lower, but failing to rid herself of the barb, she rested a moment.
The barb hurt her considerably and she made a strenuous effort to lower
herself out of its reach, and in so doing pressed her outstretched
muzzle right into a rosebush. While the pain of thorns still pricked her
lips there was a sudden flash of white right before her eyes and a thump
on the ground as if a rock had been thrown at her. With all the strength
in her body, forgetting in her fright the wire on her back, she sprang
backward to her feet, snapping the lower wire and stretching the upper
one as if it had been a string.
Her frightened jump, the momentary struggle with the upper wire that had
caught in her mane, and the cry that escaped her, set the group into a
stampede, and she herself, when finally freed from the entangling wire,
dashed off to the rear for a dozen rods. The slopes of the coulee were
dotted with the mares and colts who had fled in every direction. Outside
the range and on the rim of the coulee lay a silly rabbit, stretching
himself and gazing down with foolish eyes.
There was nothing dangerous visible and nothing in the air to worry her,
so the old mare started slowly and cautiously back again toward the one
wire now hanging limply, and, in one place, less than two feet from the
ground. There she sniffed about carefully and suddenly raising her head,
she caught sight of the rabbit, as he was bounding away.
There were many things that the old buckskin was afraid of, but a rabbit
was not one of them. Realising that she had allowed herself to become
alarmed at nothing, she went at her task with greater determination. She
was about to get down to her knees again when she realised that the
remaining wire was now low enough for her to step over it. Carefully
lifting each leg, her skin quivering with her excitement, the buckskin
mare stepped over the wire into freedom; and little Queen, frightened to
see her mother beyond the fence, made it with a single leap.
The old buckskin was for running now as fast as she could for the north,
but she wanted the rest of the mares to go with her. She turned to look
at them. There they were grazing at various points with absolute
indifference to the great achievement she had consummated. She called to
them to follow, but beyond a busy reply they paid no heed to her. When,
however, they heard the sound of her tearing the more abundant grass
outside the range, they awoke to the fact that they were not getting all
they might get. Whereas the ideal of liberty had been an abstraction to
them, the fact of abundant grass was a reality, and it was not many
minutes before, one by one, they had all made their way over the hanging
wire.
The late autumn nights had steadily grown colder and, since hollows are
colder than the higher portions of the prairie at night, they moved
rapidly to the plains above. Round about them lay the silent night, dark
and infinite, and the stars looked down upon its hidden desolation.
Closely together they grazed, lips fairly touching lips, without protest
or impatience. As they grazed, they moved on to the north, and the
rhythmic _tear-tear_ of grass interspersed with rhythmic footfalls was
the accompanying cadence of their half-unconscious flight.
Some four miles from the range, they slept for the night on a low round
hill and when dawn came they found the earth covered white with frost.
The sun rose, putting a slight tinge of red into the whiteness, and
Queen was so curious about it she went looking for the spots where it
was thickest and licked it off the sage or rosebushes.
To warm up they raced for half an hour, following the old buckskin to
the north, then spent the rest of the morning grazing and moving
leisurely. It was well on toward the middle of the day when an open
triangle of honking geese, high in the air, made them look up. The old
mare watched the geese move across the sky till they were lost in the
south and was just about to return to her grazing when she saw two small
objects appear on the horizon. They were so far away that they were
indiscernible, but she did not wait to make certain what they were. With
a call that frightened the little herd she turned north and fled.
For several hours they raced on toward the heart of the wilderness; then
complaint on the part of the little ones, who did not like this endless
running, stopped them. But they had rested only a few minutes when they
discovered the rancher and his assistant rounding a hill about two miles
behind them. The frantic mothers, remembering yesterday’s struggle, fled
at top speed, never slackening for a moment till, nearly twelve miles
farther north, the little ones deliberately hung back. When, however,
half an hour later, their pursuers surprised them by coming up on top of
a hill only half a mile to their rear, the colts fully realised the
danger and from that time on they sped along without a murmur.
The afternoon wore along toward evening and though, as the shadows began
lengthening, they felt that their pursuers had abandoned the pursuit,
they did not cease running until the thickening darkness gave them a
greater feeling of security. Even then their rest was a nervous one.
They grazed with ears pricked and when they felt that their little ones
would follow they started off again, going at a steady trot.
They came, late in the night, to a hollow in the middle of which was a
huge shadow, which they recognised was a stack of hay. There were no
lights about anywhere, nor was there the slightest trace of man in the
air. A cold wind had blown up from the west and their wet bodies were
made uncomfortably cold. Lying down on the open plains in that
condition, they knew, would not give them much rest. They felt the need
of rest even more strongly than that of food and the haystack offered
protection against the wind. So they approached very cautiously.
Something white at its base seemed to have moved as they neared it, and
the whole herd stopped to look and to sniff. The old buckskin mare, who
was now, as she had been all the time, in the lead, took a few steps
farther and sniffed again. She smelled rotten hay and with that smell
came the smell of warm bodies of horses. She called out inquiringly.
In answer to her call, the white object at the base of the stack, raised
itself laboriously from the ground and replied with a lazy, sleepy
whinny. Immediately the little herd started toward the stack. She found
the white object to be a white mare and in the rotten hay lay her jet
black colt, complaining impatiently because his mother had disturbed him
by getting up, and he felt disagreeably cold.
The hay was very old and very rotten, but they had not come there to
feast. What they wanted was shelter from the hard wind and each one went
looking for a good place to rest in. The buckskin mare almost stepped on
the leg of an old work-horse. In spite of her annoying him, he whinnied
so good-naturedly that she decided to stay right there near him. Queen
pushed herself into the hay beside the old work-horse and her mother lay
down in front of her. Protected against the wind on all sides she was
soon very comfortable and cosy and fell fast asleep.
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