But there is one peculiarity of horse nature which sometimes kills the best horse, not only in the wilds but in the pasture or barn yard, if no one is about to come to its assistance. Every horse loves to roll. He will lie down on a sandy spot or on the snow and roll over from side to side. It sometimes happens that he selects a spot that has a deep rut, or that is near a wall, a stone, or a straw-stack. He will roll over and strike the wall or the straw-stack or get caught in the rut in such a way that he cannot force himself back. He will remain helpless on his back till some one comes to his rescue. If he gets no assistance he will die in a very short time, sometimes within less than an hour.
But I am interested in the horse as a fellow being, subject as we are to limitations; and, to a degree less perhaps than we are, capable of joy and sorrow. In so far as these beautiful creatures are able to communicate to others an indication of the emotions out of which their lives are built, I have taken my story directly from them. My story, too, comes fresh from the prairies. I did most of its planning while riding on horseback over hundreds of miles of rolling Alberta plains, often coming upon hills from which I could see a perfectly circular horizon without a sign of human life, save perhaps some telltale arrangement of stones, laid on the hilltop by Indians whom fate had long since swept from the plains of their fatherland. At such times my pony, whose wild and exciting history forms the greater part of this story, seemed as much moved by the open vastness and the stillness as I; and, each in his own way, we held communion with the spirit of the wilderness.
D. G.
Langmark, Alberta, Canada.
BEYOND ROPE AND FENCE
CHAPTER I
FOR THE LOVE OF HER FOAL
ROLLING hills and shallow valleys—an ocean of brown waves with fast drying sloughs, like patches of sunshine on the surface of the sea—such was the Canadian prairie that autumn day—such were the miles and miles of Alberta range, bounded by a barbed wire fence that was completely lost in the unobstructed play of sunshine. It was an open wilderness, so vast that it seemed to stretch on almost endlessly beyond the horizon, which lay desolate and unbroken like a rusty, iron ring, girding the earth. Its immensity, by an inexorable contrast, dwarfed everything that crept over the surface of the plains into a helpless puniness.
The hundred horses on the range, scattered and grouped by their predilections for each other, looked, in the distance, like ants crawling over the surface of a rock. Within sight of each other, bound by the ties of race, they nevertheless had their loves and their preferences. Most of the mothers with their little colts grazed in a group by themselves; while a few mothers, as if they felt that their children were better than their neighbour’s children, kept themselves apart from the herd, though always within sight.