Beyond Rope and Fence

by David Grew

She bent down and drank at her feet. It was hard and disagreeable to drink with the wire-net on her muzzle and the iron bit in her mouth. She lashed the fast flowing stream with her muzzle in the hope that somehow the nasty basket would be washed away by the water, but she gave up the attempt and drank as best she could. Suddenly she lifted her head and stared away into the dark spaces. In the far distance a small shadowy form swooped from the top of a tall poplar, like a bit of shadow breaking away from the body of the night, and disappeared in the whiteness of the sky, leaving behind the melancholy echo of its cry. She followed it with her eyes till it was no more visible, then suddenly turned and ran for the open.

It was not only the open prairie she sought, because the open prairie was the world she knew and loved best; but something else was driving her. A fear that seemed to have been born of shadow and water and the lonely cry of the loon. It was the sudden realisation that though she had escaped from the detestable slavery of man and toil and dirty barn, she had carried away from her bondage man’s inescapable curse.

Her first act upon reaching the open was to search the shaded distances, then out of the depths of her embittered, fear-infested heart, she sent into the wilds she had longed for her earnest appeal for companionship; but only the mocking echo of her own voice came back from the motionless tree-walls on each side of her. She lowered her head to graze but raised it at once again. Now she knew what she had feared. Now she grasped something of the extent of man’s curse. The wire-net on her muzzle, like a trap, forbade her to eat until she returned humbly to man and submitted to his tyranny.

In a frenzy of fear and anger she loped about in a circle for the greater part of an hour, then she attempted to rub the cursed thing from her lips. But rubbing on the ground pushed back the levers of the rider’s bit and hurt her with every move. She stopped to think a moment, gazing helplessly about. She lowered her head, pushing it along between her hoofs, and pulling it forward, trying to rub it off that way; but all that she did was to bend the strong wire of the basket, which after that pressed painfully into her nose. She tried rubbing her muzzle against the bark of a tree. A small twig point pierced the skin of her lip and as she hastily pulled her head back the lever of the bit caught in some way and she struggled for some time before she freed it. Then she gave up, running off into space as if she were trying to flee from some fearful thing she had just seen.

The cinch was still tight and though it did not bother her much when she was up on her feet, it seemed to grow tighter and cut into her skin when she tried to lie down; and if, for want of rest, she lay down anyway, the stirrups always fell in such a way as to press into some tender spot as she lay upon one of them. She would endure that for a few minutes and then she would get up again with a groan.

The poplar woods about the Saskatchewan are not continuous. Patches and strips covering spaces of from one to fifty acres cut up the rolling plains. By running round about these she could keep herself invisible to approaching enemies. Her old power to detect man’s approach seemed to come back to her. Once that day she thought she detected some one coming, and hid in the trees without even making sure, then coming out on the other side and taking a roundabout run, left that section of the country. Yet as she hastily put distance between herself and this danger, she half realised that she might have to go back at last to the man from whom she had escaped, who she knew could save her from the iron grip on her muzzle. Two days later she saw some one coming on the eastern horizon. She was certain that it was the boy pursuing her and first going north to get under cover of a patch of woods, she fled west for many miles.

She came late in the afternoon to the pond in the wilderness where White-black had been trapped in the mud. She remembered clearly White-black’s floundering in the mud and avoided that side of the pond. She walked leisurely around it, gazing over the silent water from whose brightness she missed the remembered sight of ducks. Many a time in her slavery she had had visions of this bit of water with its reflections smiling up to the heavens. It seemed hard for her to believe that she was really there. She had longed so often to be there; yet, now, she experienced something like a feeling of disappointment. What it was or why, she did not know.

She was crossing a muddy spot when she slipped and fell on her side. She was not hurt but slightly stunned and remained lying down. As she lay there it occurred to her that the stirrup was not hurting her. She did not think of its sinking into the mud, but thenceforth when she wanted to lie down she came to that muddy spot. The pond came to her assistance in another way. She had gone in some distance to get a drink of clear water where the pond bottom was quite hard and as she drank, some of the lower rushes penetrated the basket through the meshes of the net. She lowered her muzzle carefully, keeping her jaws open; and when she felt some of the rushes in her mouth, she cropped them quickly, chewing them triumphantly as the water dripped from her muzzle.

The rushes grew tallest in the centre of the pond. She was afraid to go in very far, feeling constantly, as she would move inward, that this time she was going to stick there. It was not long before what rushes she could reach had all been cropped. She learned to get some grass by doing with the grass what she had done with the rushes, but though this was better food she could not get as much of the grass as she had gotten of the rushes. She managed in that way, however, to keep life burning in her bedraggled body.

The fear of being pursued and captured again left her as the days went by without a sign of man, but as this fear left came hunger. All day she struggled to obtain enough grass to keep her alive and when the stirrup resting on frozen mud kept her awake at night, she only thought of grass and how to get more and more of it. The sweetness of the wilds she had loved was gone, leaving them hollow and desolate and so cruelly unresponsive as to be almost mocking.