The Navajos knew every water hole in the desert. Like the tawny cougar and the savage lobo, they knew the wild bands must drink, that sooner or later they must slip down to the water hole. So they stalked them near the water holes and swarmed after them, riding in relays, keeping the band moving, keeping them from drinking or resting.
The chestnut stud considered all these things in his own way and met the problems with sharp wits, keen eyes, and keener sense of smell, keeping a constant, alert watch for enemies. He kept his band in the broken country where mesas dropped away in sheer, steep slopes to the depths of the sand washes. From the top of such a mesa the band could easily thunder down into a canyon at a moment’s warning.
Lady Ebony accepted the hard life. She liked the sudden, wild charges, the long runs under the white stars, the savage freedom which was so costly. When the chestnut stallion sounded the alarm she always led the rushing charge, flying ahead of the reaching, pounding hoofs of the mares and colts, slowing her speed to allow them to overtake her. The band foraged for grass at dawn or in the first grayness of dusk, coming out of a canyon to spread over the mesatop. Then as she pulled the scant grass she remembered the high mountain mesa where the grass grew knee-deep and cold, crystal streams rushed over gleaming rocks. She remembered the red and the yellow and the purple flowers, the solid masses of blue lupine, the flaming orange of acres of daisies.
This silent, terrible land was in such sharp contrast to the mountain country that the chestnut’s desire for it seemed foolish to her. Fear of man grew but slowly within her. Man had always been her friend and protector. Sam with his lumps of sugar and his petting, Tex riding up in the fall with the rest of the major’s boys to take her down to the winter pastures. The savage anger of the big stallion when he smelled man scent, the mad charge down the rocky slopes, these were confusing to her, but she accepted them and began to snort and shake her head when the scent came to her.
The desert was a mass of broken mesas, eroded hills, and deep-gutted canyons. There were many rivers, but no water. The eyes of the band could see far, but the scene was the same always. And yet this vast world was filled with a silence that was calm and restful. The desert was a canvas of shifting, changing color. Under the white-hot glare of the day the reds and yellows flamed. At dawn and at sunset it was purple and mauve and steel blue. And always to the north stood the shining mountains, etched blue against the sky, with the white snow line gleaming like a crown above the deep blue of the forests. Lady Ebony often stood and stared through the haze at the ragged outline of the Crazy Kill Range.
Summer slipped past, and fall rains woke the short grass to life, a brief and hurried growth before the cold and the snow came. The wild ones cropped avidly, pulling the tender shoots from their crowns, tasting them eagerly before swallowing them. The chestnut stallion kept the band moving south, down off the higher benches to the deeper canyons where blizzards would not rage so fiercely.
Indian summer slipped away and the purple mists lifted from the cathedral rocks and the spires of the ship rocks. The air cleared and the mornings were cold, with white frost covering the ground. The colts frisked and bucked and raced in little circles until the sun warmed their shaggy coats. Even the mares became spirited when the white frost was on them. Lady Ebony slipped into the slower, less wild way of the mares. She did not run except when the band took alarm, but she still ran at the head of the thundering herd.
One day a wind came down out of the north. It carried fine snowflakes which swirled along the ground and curled upward on the lee side of rocks. Toward night the storm thickened until it became a driving blizzard riding a shrieking wind. The horses turned their tails to the lash of the storm and drifted slowly south, led by one of the old mares. That night they bunched close together in a deep canyon. They crowded under a projecting lip of sandstone where the wind and the snow did not strike them. Fine white particles sifted down, covering their shaggy coats and making them look like white horses as they stood with their heads down waiting for the blizzard to blow itself out.
The shelter they had found had been formed centuries before by the action of wind and water on the layers of rock forming the crust of the desert. The upper layer was hard and did not weather away as fast as the lower layers. Thus a great, projecting roof was formed with a ceiling that sloped back under the cliff. A thousand years earlier, brown men had passed that way. They had halted in the bed of the canyon and looked up at the great cave. They had held a council and decided to build a city under the rim.
Those brown cliff dwellers had built houses of hewn stone, room upon room, like apartments. Their masonry still stood, back under the rim. The ceremonial kivas built under the ground in circular form with laced log roofs had caved in but the tiers of houses stood against the cliff, their open windows staring into the canyon. The brown men had vanished, down into the canyon, south toward the plains, and west toward the great ocean, but their homes remained.