The belated summer evening was coming at last. The sun, very red and big, lowered on one side of her and high in the heavens the moon grew brighter. She came to a slough and drank. She gulped the water a moment, then raising her noble head, pricked her ears and listened, the water dripping from her mouth. It seemed to her that she had heard a coyote somewhere in the distance. She grew troubled and fearful again, running in her confusion beyond the hill where she should have turned.
Instead of going right back she turned south and when she ran into the trail of blood that his open wound had left on the grass, she was quite some distance away from him. But she was on his trail and with her nose low to the ground she trotted along hopefully till she was suddenly startled by the hideous cry of a coyote. She stopped, completely terrified, and listened. A cry of a second coyote, nearer, responded to the first from the other side of the hill before her.
With a few bounds she was at the top of the hill. Not a dozen feet down the slope sat a coyote over the lifeless body of her colt. He had eaten a great deal and was heavy with meat. He was so completely surprised that he could not move for a moment. It was too late to move. She was so close to him that he was afraid to turn. He bared his teeth in a feeble effort at defiance and snarled, but Queen was too furious to think of herself. With all the strength of madness she hurled herself upon him and over him, leaping away in terror and carrying with her the sensation of hoof crushing bone. When she was quite certain that there was nothing pursuing her, she thought he had run away and so nervously trotted back to her baby.
She came back cautiously a step at a time, her eyes gleaming like burning coals, her skin quivering with fear. She saw the black shadowy mass that was her colt and then she made out a second black mass beside it. A few steps nearer and she began to feel that she had rendered the coyote motionless, but when she got quite close she saw the beast’s hind legs kick backward in the throes of death. Queen did not know that he was dying, but she did know by the motionlessness of his head that she had him at a disadvantage and she approached with less fear and beat at him with her hoof just as she had many a time beaten a hole in the ice over a pond.
Finally she revolted against a task so foreign to her nature and turned as if with sudden realisation of something overwhelmingly terrible, to the almost unrecognisable body of her foal. But she only sniffed once and sprang away with a snort and cry. Round and round the hilltop she ran expressing the agony in her soul with loud and plaintive, fearful calls to which there was no answer in all the infinity of space.
The odours were maddening. The place became unbearable and in her soul the desire for the companionship of the herd flared up like a great light in the torturous darkness. It was as if she saw them somewhere in the gloomy spaces and running would bring her to them. So she loped and trotted northward, all night. At dawn, too weary to continue on her feet, she lay down to rest and as she rested she cropped the grass about her. A few hours of rest and she was ready to continue her anxious journey.
When toward noon she came to where the familiar woods appeared on the horizon Queen accelerated her pace. It was there in that woods that the beloved little thing had come to her, and she loped as if she expected to find it there again. Forgotten were all the aches in her muscles. What pain of body can outweigh the pain of mother mind at the loss of her baby? Deny the animal all the finer emotions you like! Mother love is too obvious a quality of the lowest animal life to be denied.
But the moment Queen saw the familiar trees, the moment she entered the shadowy, fragrant atmosphere of the woods where the little thing had been born, the image of it, wandering about elusively in the solitude, came plaintively calling into her soul and she turned back upon the trail of sorrow. Back over the plains she ran, as if her speed could save it, ran as if some evil man creature were carrying it away, running off with it, ahead of her, just out of sight.
An overwhelming sense of bodily weariness came over her at sundown and she lay down to sleep; and all through her heavy slumber, she pursued her elusive baby and struggled with monstrous man and hungry coyote.