The pinto broke into the alder stand in answer to Midnight’s call as she reached the bottom of the canyon. They stood close together, watching and listening.
Up on the ridge Tex turned the bay and headed him back down to the long meadow. Night would soon settle and he would have no chance to trail the black after dark. His best course was to follow the mares and drive them into the lower country so that the black stallion would have to come down to round them up. He sent the bay galloping along the trail the fleeing mares had made as they raced off the bench.
Deep in the canyon Midnight was undecided what he should do. He was certain he could not stay where he was. The man would be sure to follow them. He finally followed his instinct, which was to put many miles between himself and the country which had proved so dangerous. He did not have a strong urge to follow the mares and round them up. His instincts for leadership were not strong enough to make him look for them. He knew of only one place where he had always found safety and where he had never been attacked. That place was the little meadow under the rim below the high mesa. With a snort he headed up the sloping side of the canyon.
The high mesa was far across the mountain on the southern edge of Major Howard’s range lands. The old mares had led the band along the backbone of the continental divide and down into the lower valleys. Midnight’s wild instinct led him unerringly toward the place of his birth and early colthood. All that first night the two horses moved steadily south and east, climbing upward, following the twisting course of the divide. At dawn Midnight and the pinto fed close to a stand of balsam and spruce. Five mule deer and a band of elk fed on the same meadow. Midnight had a feeling that the deer and the elk would take alarm if anyone approached, or it might have been his early friendship with the old timber-line buck that made him select the spot as a feed ground.
The deer and the elk paid little attention to the two horses. They recognized them as friends and harmless. Neither of them was tainted by man smell or the reek of a saddle blanket pungent with leather oil.
Midnight had learned another of the lessons of the wild, a lesson that had long since been mastered by the elk and the deer. He would feed at dawn and at dusk, when the dim light made rifle sights blur and when the eyes of the upright walking killer play tricks on him. All other wild things had learned that this was the law. The sunlighted meadows were death traps by day, but in the soft dusk of early morning or evening there was safety. The big killers obeyed the rule but they did it as much because their prey came out of hiding at that time as for protection.
The band of elk was headed by a lordly bull who was master of the ten cows by virtue of his power and savage willingness to battle any other bull who challenged him. As soon as his own sons grew to the age where their antlers began to spread into sweeping weapons and their desires led them to notice the cows he drove them out of the band. They were then lone bulls for a time until they were able to win a harem of their own. Nor was he satisfied with defense of his cows. He challenged the world to come and try to wrest supremacy from him. His battle moods came in midsummer and fall when his shoulder veins were swelling with hot blood, and his antlers had hardened to polished lances of bone.
The old wapiti bull was beginning to feel this pugnacious mood. For weeks he had been rubbing and polishing his antlers. They gleamed like the varnished surface of a piece of fine furniture. During the gray of dawn he had fed near the cows. Now that the white light from the sun-bathed peaks above was making the meadow bright he began to show signs of restlessness. The cows fed on, eager to fill their paunches before they sought deep cover to lie down. The old wapiti shook his horns and lifted his muzzle. He trotted to a little knoll well above his band. He was filled with courage and desire, proud of his fine antlers, conscious of the power within his twelve hundred pounds of weight. He halted and filled his lungs with air, raised his muzzle, and poured forth a guttural roar that increased in pitch to bugle tones, higher and higher until it was a blasting whistle which screamed through the still air of the mountainside. The high notes quavered and faded, ending in a half dozen savage grunts. The old bull seemed to know that he had just executed one of the most inspiring pieces of music in all nature’s mountain songs. He shook his head and listened intently.
From a ridge above the challenge of the lord of the band was answered. The challenger’s bugle was not so high and shrill nor so powerful, but it was eager and defiant. The bull on the knoll shook his head and grunted angrily, then he lifted his muzzle and sent his call ringing out through the high, thin air. Again the challenge was answered. A young bull was coming down the slope.
In a few minutes the challenger appeared, breaking out of the spruce at a trot, his head swinging back and forth. He was lighter than the old bull by a few pounds and his antlers were not so well filled, but he was big boned and young, a lone knight seeking the end of the lonesome trail, desiring to take his place at the head of a band of cows.