From an aspen stand below the feeding mares leaped five shadowy gray forms. They ran with long leaps, their black muzzles lifting and falling with an even, graceful flow of motion. Red tongues lolled over white fangs and yellow eyes flamed in the moonlight. From shaggy chests came eager yelps. The chestnut blasted a shrill warning to the mares, but the wolves did not swerve to attack the colts. They raced across the mesa, running for the pure joy of giving play to their stringy muscles.
At the lower edge of the meadow they startled an old doe who had come out of the aspens to feed. One of the gray killers turned in along the edge of the woods, the others fanned out and their eager yelps changed to a chorus of savage howls. The old lobo at their head had sounded the cry of the kill.
The startled mule deer doubled her slim legs under her and bounded. She landed many yards down the slope, and bounded again. Her white rump patch flashed in the silvery light as she fled. Three of the wolves raced after her while two turned right and leaped away around the hill. The doe reached the edge of the mesa and bounded down the steep slope at a pace which rapidly outdistanced her pursuers. When they were out of sight she swerved and ran around the hill. She intended to return to her feed ground by doubling back, a trick used by both mule deer and big rabbits. She broke out on the mesa a little below where she had been feeding when the killers startled her. Behind her she could hear the faint yelping of the three following lobos. She suddenly planted her feet and tried to pivot so she could plunge back down the hill. Two savage, grinning killers had appeared, one a little above her and one a little below. They were cutting in on her as fast as they could leap over the brush and rocks.
The doe whirled back down the slope, but before she had taken three jumps she was met by the three killers who had stayed on her trail. They were fanned out, running well apart. She slid to a halt and turned to run around the hill, but she was too late. The killers swarmed over her, the two attacking wolves leaping in at almost the same instant. She went down bleating and kicking.
In a few minutes the night was filled with the snarling and growling of the feeding pack. Up on the ledge Lady Ebony crowded closer to the big stallion. He snorted defiantly and rubbed his head against hers.
That night the wild horses stayed on the mesa. The next day Lady Ebony loped down into the desert, one of the wild band, a willing member of the chestnut stallion’s harem. They traveled at an easy lope which their tough bodies could hold for many hours. They halted in little meadows to feed and sought streams and water holes when they were thirsty.
As they moved into the canyon-slotted, eroded world of the desert they left the clear streams behind, and had to depend upon the knowledge of the chestnut stallion or one of the old mares for the location of pools and springs. The grass was shorter, curly buffalo and gamma, growing in clumps that defied shifting sand and hot wind.
The world changed quickly. The spruce, the aspens, and even the scrub oak vanished and in its place there was juniper—dry, defiant of the heat, sending its roots deep into the yellow earth, down cracks in the sand rock. The canyons were walled with red and yellow sandstone. The washes were bedded deep with sand instead of water, and the wind made the sand creep along, piling it into the dunes on the mesas, knifing it out in drifts from the ledges of rimrock. The days were hot and dry, but the nights were cool to the point of chillness.
From sentinel buttes or rims they sometimes sighted copper-skinned Navajos riding always at a gallop, on lean, bony ponies. The Navajos were always hurrying, though they had no place to go and all eternity to get there in. Once Lady Ebony sighted a summer hogan with two Navajo women and four children sitting in the shade of a canopy of dry leaves and cottonwood branches. The women were patiently slipping colored thread across a loom, back and forth, back and forth, one thread above another. Below the hogan a sad-looking band of sheep and goats cropped at the short grass.
The chestnut stallion snorted angrily when he smelled the grass where the sheep had been. He did not like sheep taint. He led the band far from the pasture lands of that Navajo family.