There were, of course, petty quarrels now and then, since love will not come unaccompanied by strife, and nature is not always provident, or when she is provident, so often disorderly. There were some disappointments and the weak, helpless here as the weak are helpless everywhere, often had to give way to the strong; but the tragedy that follows love among ferocious and greedy animals never marred their happier relations; and even the weaker ones found love requited. Life on the rim of love was so rich, Nature beyond love was so lavish, hurts healed before the wounds reached the flesh.

But to Queen and White-black life was a game in which even tiredness had its delight. Strong and healthy and beautiful, admired by the rest and followed in their every whim, they played through the uninterrupted carnival of laughing spring and smiling, drowsy summer. When winter came again, they met it without fear, willing to wade through deep snows, accepting the violent lashes of wind and blizzard, warming their hearts in the expectant joy of another spring and another summer, looking upon life, in their innocence, as an endlessly interesting cycle in which winter was the greatest discomfort and spring its eternal retribution.

CHAPTER VII
THE CONSPIRACY OF MAN AND COYOTE

THEN came an early spring. Geese returned from the south. The sadness in their honking had given way to the exaltation of rebirth. The snows melted almost in a day. Hundreds of wild ducks populated the many sloughs in the hollows, and filled the delightful evenings with the soft calling of their love-making. In the still nights or as she lay through the rest periods which she now so strangely needed, Queen kept her ears pricked high to catch the last faint sound of every love call and the air now almost always vibrated with some one form or another of these calls.

White-black, still a playful colt, thrilled her with his presence or the touch of his lovely nose; but something sweet and remote was mysteriously laying hold upon the love in her heart. She liked to half close her eyes and doze, floating as she dozed, on the waves of this new emotion. It seemed a joyous feeling all her own and unlike any joy she had ever experienced before. It was a joy she felt within, a joy that expressed itself best in dreaming rather than in the activity that her other joys had always stimulated.

She liked to wander away by herself. White-black would follow her about a good deal and sought to arouse her old play spirit; but when he realised that he could not influence her any more as he used to, he learned to let her alone. She seemed to have lost her agility and preferred to be on the outskirts of the circle of the herd where she could move about with less excitement. She liked to wander around the small ponds and listen to the croaking of frogs, always lingering till the night shadows lay thick over all things and she heard the ineffable half murmur, half song of wild ducks, as they paddled along in the stillness of the night.

Often by day she would stop her shuffling gait and with her nose down among the blades of grass, she would watch the little sandpiper, wondering what he meant with his heart-rending pee-weet and his eternal seeking. Sometimes she would stand for a long time and watch the brown curlew and listen to his persistent, lugubrious complaint. All these sounds, these melodious cries of strange little souls, somehow responded harmoniously to voices and emotions in her own soul, and she looked upon them as fellow beings of the wilds she loved, knowing each by the sound of his voice.

So too the woods interested her, though she had never penetrated them very far, because the woods were confining and she loved the open where one could see and run in all directions. Yet she loved the trees because these new emotions which had mysteriously come to her made her more observant than she had been. She realised more fully than ever before that woods and plains and skies had moods in each of which they were different, and these revelations broadening her outlook upon her surroundings made her, in a way, more capable of joy.