THE winter was a hard one. The skies were persistently and monotonously dull. A few moments of sunshine were invariably followed by days of howling winds and leaden skies. Blizzard succeeded blizzard and the hollows filled so full of snow that it became dangerous for colts to wander off alone and they clung to their mothers’ sides.
During the short periods of daylight, the horses, the mares, and the colts broke up into groups and wandered away as far as the deeps allowed or hunger urged; but each night they congregated in the same corner of the valley. This nightly congregating kept the snow in one big spot firmly trodden to the ground and raised two walls with the rest of it, in the lee of which they obtained the comforts of an airy barn.
Many a night when the shrieking wind overhead poured shower after shower of dry snow over them, covering them as with a blanket, little Queen, lying close to the black colt and his white mother, indulged in a happy gratefulness for the comforts she experienced. Where man thinks and knows, animals feel. Experience had taught her in sensations and emotions, which she had not forgotten, what discomfort and disagreeableness were. The change in conditions which she now experienced brought into her mind sensations of a gratefulness which expressed itself in an ardent love for the colt and the white mare, a love which slowly overflowed toward and encompassed all the horses of the herd.
The nights were very long. The sun rose and set so far to the south and the arc it made in its daily course was so small that a drink or two of her share of the black colt’s milk and the procuring of a single meal on the deep, hidden grass, spent the day. When the shadows of one night, driven out by the dawn, came back so soon in the next night and there was nothing to do but sleep, sleeping became tiresome, and the necessary shifting from side to side kept the mind awake and active. Impressions made and forgotten rekindled like embers in the windblown ashes of a fire. These impressions, varied as they were, and so largely without order of time or place, were nevertheless as useful to her as experience is useful to us. It was out of this experience that she built the individuality of her character, and only those who are totally ignorant of animalkind can deny that they have character and individuality.
Often the phantom form of the old buckskin mare came to haunt the dreams of little Queen and always on the following day she pawed the snow less energetically and gazed wistfully away over the endless prairie snows, puzzled over the incongruity of her mother’s coming in the dark hours and never by daylight when she could enjoy her most.
She was comfortable and happy in her second fosterage and thrived well upon it; yet these persistent dreams of her nights haunted her wakeful days and in time left on her beautiful head marks of sorrow, vague and intangible, but unmistakably there, adding a charm to that head that it never lost.
Then the days began lengthening. The sun climbed higher in the sky and broke through the spell of winter’s clouds with a smiling kindness that stirred every cell in Queen’s body. Spring came upon the stern winter as a rosy dawn breaks upon an unpleasant night. The white-packed hollows began smiling to cloudless skies with a silent and radiating wetness and the snows shrank away, exposing brown spots. The earth began to emit intoxicating odours of growth and the valleys filled with cool, trembling water. Like living things born in the night these rippling pools appeared everywhere.
Birds came daily in greater numbers from the south and their songs augmented the nameless urge that the south winds bore and filled the desolate wilds with friendliness and goodwill. Before the snows had completely disappeared, a layer of thick green grass began carpeting the earth and myriads of delicate crocuses studded the green with colour-illumined stars.
Long as the days were becoming, the colts found them all too short for the full expression of the joy that spring was giving them. Nights came altogether too soon and the vapoury light of early dawn revealed them already romping over the plains, seeking to rid their joints of the sleepy feeling that the long winter had given them. In wide circles they ran, plunging through sloughs, jumping, kicking at the air, pretending to bite each other in violent anger, stopping only when hunger demanded it.
Changes met them wherever they looked. The earth itself and all life upon it seemed to have become an endless play of the forces of change. Just as each day was in itself a succession of changes, white light merging into the tinted colours of evening, fading out in night and breaking again into the colours and the light of a new day, so one day was different from another and they felt themselves each day changing from what they had been the day before.