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.

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 the Body[75]
VII.The Conspiracy of Man and Coyote[87]
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]

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.