All afternoon they ran as fast as their strength would allow. The smell of man hung in the air before Queen’s nose, poisoning her blood with hate of him. She had little time to question, yet her whole soul, confused by fear and the urgent need to make distance, sought the why of this two-legged creature, always breaking in upon their peace and always hurting them.
At last they began to feel that no one was pursuing them and stopped to investigate. There was not the faintest glimpse of anything on hill or horizon and in the air there was no trace of man. In the evening they fed about a slough and at night they slept on the north side of it with their heads turned toward the south.
Early next morning White-black was seized again by an intense longing for his mother and braving the terrors of captivity, he started again in search of her. They were trotting and walking along leisurely, searching the spaces constantly when they came upon a hill from where they spied a number of horses galloping toward them. They got frightened and turned back north, but soon stopped again to ascertain who it was that was coming, and so these horses gained upon them.
They proved to be three of the colts and a big mare who had somehow broken free from the cunning little men. They were so excited that they would not stop to sniff noses. While they passed through the group they trotted, but as soon as they were on the other side they broke away in a gallop. Queen and White-black and all the rest caught the contagion of their fear, abandoned their search for those who were lost to them and ran with the feeling that danger of captivity had become imminent once more. And for almost a week they continued their desultory flight.
When the fear of the little men creatures had lost some of its intensity, White-black and Queen made several attempts to find the white mare. Her form seemed to flash across the prairies like patches of sunlight, seen only at the vanishing moment. Often they called loud and long trying in vain to pierce the unknown and waiting hopelessly for a reply.
But this, too, was the inevitable, and railing and fretting was no solution. In time the hunger for his mother shrank back into the depths of White-black’s limited soul and the full ardour of his love fell to the lot of Queen. And Queen felt in the touch and the presence of White-black a compensation for the aches in her soul, which, like wounds, had healed, but had left their scars for life.
CHAPTER VI
HOW MAN BREAKS THE SPIRIT AND THE BODY
THE summer days dragged along hot and enervating. Mosquitoes and nose-flies in countless numbers became more and more annoying as the sultry period prevailed. It made grazing during most of the daytime very disagreeable. All through these long days they stood dozing in small bunches, their chins resting upon each other’s backs, their tails switching mechanically. When a momentary gust of wind came along, they would run down to the sloughs for water. There they would drink till the stinging of the pests, who were always in greater numbers above the tall, wet, slough grass, would make the place unendurable, then they would gallop away to the hill tops for relief.