HORSES

Roger Pocock's book is in many ways remarkable. It affords evidence of far more erudition than seems compatible with the unsettled and busy life of a frontiersman. In some parts it is highly speculative, deals with problems rarely discussed or even mentioned by hippologists, in others it is severely practical, and affords evidence of the close study of horses and horsemanship in all parts of the world. The more the reader knows of cosmic changes and of the origin, history and habits of horses, wild, feral and tame, the more he is likely to be fascinated by "Horses." The chapters on the History of the horse and on horsemanship are highly suggestive and interesting, but at the moment those on the Pleasure Horse and the Soldier Horse claim and deserve most attention. We soon forgot about the loss of over 300,000 horses in the Boer War, with the result that when the World War broke out in 1914 we were as deficient in horses as in men and munitions. If the suggestions made by a horsemaster who knows more about Range than Indoor or Pleasure horses—suggestions as to the breeding, rearing, and management of military horses—are duly considered we may have an ample supply of suitable horses for our next war.

J. COSSAR EWART.

UNIVERSITY, EDINBURGH,
September, 1916.

INTRODUCTION.

In the world where the horse lives there is one god. This god is only a human creature, soldier by trade, stockrider, groom, or drayman, but from him all things proceed. So far as the horse knows his god made the girth gall and the harness, the oats and the weather, and most certainly provides a lump of salt to lick, a canter over turf, or any other little scrap of Heaven which falls into the world. So he hates his god or loves him, fears or trusts him, trying always to believe in him, even if he has at times to kick the deity to make sure he is really divine. His religion, his conduct, his whole value, depend upon that poor god, who is usually well-meaning enough although wont to practise a deal of ignorance. To get better horses one must improve the strain of gods.

As a god to horses I was never quite a success, however hard I tried to live up to a difficult situation. I attempted, for example, to learn about my horses from scientific books, yet found the scientific writer rather trying. He calls an animal who never injured him by such a name as Pachynolophus. This may be safe enough behind the animal's back, provided the philosopher makes quite sure that it is really and truly extinct. But suppose he met one, would he call it a perissodactylic ungulate to its face? Not at all! He would shin up a tree and use worse language than that.

So if the Reader finds me ignorant, I beg him to lay the blame on men of science who have dug up dead languages to make them a trade jargon lest any education should reach the vulgar.

In his "Tropical Light," Surgeon General Woodruff, of the U.S. Army, makes no mention of horses, but opens up a new field of thought. Professor William Ridgeway, in his "Origin and Influence of the Thoroughbred Horse," commands the respect of every horseman by his researches in history. Professor Cossar Ewart, by far the greatest living authority on hippology, has, apart from the teaching of his books, most generously granted me his private criticism. For the rest, burning my books behind me, I have ventured to write about horses just because I love them. An old rough-neck of the American ranges, who, living with horses, has tried to understand them, sets down a few ideas which may be of use to horsemen.

CHAPTER I.
THE ORIGIN OF THE HORSE.

The material used in making a horse consists of grass and water. We cannot make one because we are too ignorant. We know that for such a making wisdom is needed beyond the last conception of our hearts, knowledge far above the scope of our pretentious little sciences, power omnipotent. Such attributes of wisdom, knowledge and power are divine.

The Almighty made the horse out of grass and water. From the generating engine which we call the sun He used certain energies dimly perceived by our science, the chemical, physical, electrical and psychical forces which evolved, moulded and coloured the mechanism of a creature strong, swift, enduring and beautiful, which is inhabited by a pure, courageous, generous spirit like that of a human child. It only remains for man to shut this creature up in a box, and then cut off his tail.

HORSE ANCESTORS.—To find the origin of the horse, one must trace back to the Sixth Day of the Creation, a period known to science as the Dawn of Times Present. The lands and seas were not arranged as in our maps, for there was a Continent on the site of the North Atlantic, and broad seas rolled over the areas now filled by Europe and North America. The climate, too, was different, for except along the Equator, the skies were rarely clear, but very cloudy, with enormous rains. The air was that of a hot-house, and, even at the poles, trees such as the magnolia slept through the winter night, and flowered in the warmth of the summer day. Except to leeward of big continents and mountains the lands of the whole earth were a continuous forest.

The forest ages

That was the closing phase of the long Age of Dragons. The principal beasts of the sea, the land and the air were reptiles who laid and hatched eggs instead of giving birth to living children. Few of them were so large as the elephants and whales of our own time, the greatest were already extinct, but still there were enough uncouth and monstrous beasts to make life exciting for the creatures on which they fed.

Longtails

Hidden away in the forest there were little animals, of reptile descent indeed, but quite free from family pride. These converted reptiles were filled with the first divine quality which ever appeared in the world, that mother-love which suckles the young at the breast. We will call them the Longtails.

We humans often feel that there is not enough food to go round. We find it hard to make both ends meet. We have to defend ourselves or run from our enemies. So it was with the Longtails, who were always hungry, hard up, and bound to fight or run. To put it roughly, some tribes of the Longtails took to hunting, and became the ancestors of all beasts of prey, some took to the trees as a refuge and feeding place, and so became the ancestors of apes and men. But our business is with those who took to a vegetarian diet and a habit of hiding or running. These stood on tip toe looking out for danger, or ran to escape being eaten. For such purposes the five-toed foot of the ancestral reptile, most useful on soft ground, became somewhat clumsy and awkward. For running they were better off without a widely splayed foot, so with the passing of many generations their needless inner and outer toes shrank up the leg, became useless, and finally withered away, until no trace remained. Here came the parting of the vegetarian running animals into two big families. One family ran on the middle pair of toes, thus becoming the ancestors of the cloven-hoofed pig, deer, antelope, sheep, and ox. The other family ran upon the middle or third toe, and became the ancestors of the rhinoceros, the tapir, and the horse.

Horse ancestors

In the dense forests some of the vegetarian tribes of animals had on the face two little bags or glands, to hold a strong-smelling liquid. This perfume dropped on the herbage helped the members of the herd to scent one another's trails, and so keep together for company or defence. On the skulls of some kinds of horses there may still be seen the hollow where the sac used to be.

The bald skin of the pig is boldly painted in splashes of pink and brown to imitate the lights and shadows of forest undergrowth. The forest ancestors of the horse were bald, and painted just the same way; and their forest colouring may still be seen under the hairy coat, especially at the muzzle, where the hair is thin.

Of direct ancestors to the horse the earliest known was a little fellow called Hyracotherium, coloured no doubt like the pig or the hairless Mexican dog, and not bigger than a toy terrier. His range extended from England to New Mexico, across the old Atlantic continent. In him the original five toes had been reduced to four on the front foot, and three on the hind, as with the tapir, who is the very portrait of a horse-ancestor, although of larger growth.

The tapir

The tapir was ever a staunch conservative preferring death to reform. So he remains, one of the most ancient of all living animals, and relic of the long forgotten ages when the world was one big forest. Nowadays the tapir range which covered all the northern continents has shrunken to three districts widely sundered: Brazil, Mexico, and the Malay Peninsula. In all three he is dying out, and in a few more years will be extinct.

From the tapir's habits we may reason that the horse ancestors were creatures not only of the deep glades of the forest, but also of closely wooded mountain ranges. They were shy and harmless, feeding at night on buds, leaves and the tender shoots of bushes, not on grass. To this diet the horse reverts quite readily in times of famine, and in spring before the new grass sprouts, while the stable vice called cribbing develops when there is not enough bulk in his forage. The ancestors were fond of bathing, and when hunted would take refuge in the water. It will be noted that although wild horses do not bathe, the tame stock are excellent at swimming. The dappled skin of the tapir had grown a coat of hair, dark brown in the Americas, their original home. The long tail had shrunk, and in the tapir is reduced to a mere bud.

But the main interest is in the tapir's snout, which, like the elephant's trunk, has wonderful powers of holding and tearing down branches, of feeling, sensing, and handling. The horse-ancestor had a tapir snout of which the horse's upper lip is the survival. Play with any horse and you will notice how the lips try to curl round and grip one's fingers, to bring them within reach of the teeth. They will curl round, grip, and tear the bunch grass or pampas grass of the wild ranges. They are softer than velvet, delicate as a baby's hand, sensitive as the fingers of an artist, will caress like a woman's lips. The short hairs have an exquisite sense of touch, the beard bristles are used to sense grass with in the dark, and the whole instrument is wondrously designed to select sweet grasses, rejecting poisonous or unwholesome plants, so that feeding goes on through hours of total darkness.

The earlier world

Had the Earth remained an unbroken forest under a roof of cloud there had been no change since the Age of Dragons, no mighty drama of Creation lifting man and horse out of the shadows to work together as master and servant in the conquest and taming of the wilderness and final subjugation of the World.

The one great factor in Earth's history is the lessening of the sun's heat. Through long revolving ages the heat which the Earth received from the sun diminished. Ever less vapour was lifted from the Equatorial seas, the world-roof of cloud thinned out and disappeared; direct sunshine poured down instead of the endless rains; there was no moisture left to nourish the worldwide forest. Little by little glades opened in the woodlands caused by drought, savannahs replaced the timber, of tall jungle grasses, the openings widened into prairies, and vast grassy steppes, thousands of miles in breadth, evolved at their centres an aching core of desert. So we have reached the phase when forest, prairie and desert each claim one-third of the land surface. We are passing on to the phase, which Mars has reached, of world-wide desert, and beyond that is the far future when, like the Moon, our Earth will swing dead through the great deeps of space.

The changing climate

As the slow tremendous change of the Earth's climate narrowed the forest, there was no longer food for all the woodland animals, and some of them ventured out into the open glades. Here was a final parting of the ways between the tapir who stayed in the woods and the horse-ancestor who went out into the open. He was as yet no bigger than a sheep, and still wore three toes on each foot, but the grass diet agreed with him, for his tribe soon grew to the size of an English donkey. The firmer ground no longer needed a wide tread to the foot. Slowly the second and fourth toes shrank away up the leg, and hung there like the dew claw of a dog, sometimes surviving more or less even in human times, as with Julius Cæsar's charger. The next ages evolved an animal the size of our ponies, running on one toe hardened to the hoof we know to-day. The snout diminished, while the tail became a fly whisk.

Varieties of the horse

So we have the beginning of a group of animals the tarpan (Prejevalski) zebra, quagga and ass. They are so much alike that one cannot easily tell from the bones to which kind a skeleton belongs. We must think of them, then, as varieties of the horse.

CHAPTER II.
THE ORIGIN OF HORSE VARIETIES.

PROPOSITIONS. In the study of any subject, if we can only begin by clearing our vision, we shall have a sporting chance of avoiding muddle.

The horse, like man or any other animal, reflects his environment in times past and present.

1. If all countries had equal lighting, all horses would reflect one colour.

2. If all countries were equally warm, all horses would grow the same thickness of coat.

3. If all countries had equal moisture, all horses would show similar endurance.

4. If all countries had one type of landscape, all horses would show the same markings.

5. If all countries had one soil, all horses would be of one build.

6. If all countries had one weight of forage to the acre, all horses would have one bulk.

7. If all countries had one quality of forage, all horses would have one strength.

8. It follows that the study of light, heat, moisture, landscape, soil, and food should explain the origin of the wild types of horses. Our breeds are got by crossing from these varieties.

If, therefore, the facts which we find out by study shall correspond with the reader's own experience of horses, no further proof is needed; but if they fail to appeal to the reader's sense and judgment, no balancing of proofs upon a point of falsehood will save a useless book from the flames which await waste paper.

PART I. COLORATION BY SUNLIGHT.

Coloration by sunlight

The best way to train one's sense of colour is to dabble in landscape painting. At first, one feels that there must be a personal Devil, but with luck the colours begin to clear, showing that the tones of night and the deep sea are based on indigo, while those of the day are blue, red and yellow variously mixed. The blend of blue and red is violet; the mixture of blue and yellow gives us green; and if we want an orange we use red and yellow. The blending of all seven is sunlight in theory, but makes mud in practice.

In nature there are permanent colours like those of the night, and transient hues like those of the sunrise or sunset. So the blue of the sky and yellow of the earth make the green of living plants which seems to be permanent until, in decay, the blue turns out to be transient, and passes away leaving the herbage yellow. It is odd that the natural food of the horse is dried herbage from which the blue has faded.

And so it is with man. We may eat green salads, containing transient blue, but the permanent colours of our food are free from blue, and based on red and yellow. Neither horse nor man would fatten on blue food.

Magic of sunlight

Sunlight shining through blue glass will stop the growth of plants. The various actions of coloured light upon the human body are being studied in many hospitals.

Climate and colour

The blue indigo and violet, or actinic rays, appear to have a special mission in burning bad microbes, such as the germs of disease. A green forest, for example, despite the permanent yellow in its colour, is said to be partly transparent to these rays which kill germs lurking in the soil. The flesh of men and beasts is red and yellow, save only for the blue tinge of blood from which the oxygen has been exhausted. Yet even despite its colouring, the tissue of the flesh is partly transparent, so that actinic rays may kill bacilli, and sunshine is used as a medicine for the sick. But the rays which begin by killing germs may be strong enough in time to burn the living tissues. For that reason man and the greater animals are armoured by red and yellow liquid paints in the layers of skin, which vary in strength and volume with the degree of sunlight in each climate, from pale hues in cloudy districts of low sun to an intense black in the tropics.

Stocks native to forest shelter such as men, elephants and pigs are guarded only with skin body colour. Those exposed to direct light—horses, cattle and sheep, have also a coat of hair as a second armour against the actinic rays, and this also varies in colour with the strength of sunshine, from white in the regions of snow to the golden dun of lions and tigers, the dun and bay of horses and the black of many species in regions of strong light.

In men and other animals there is little red flesh covering for the brain, the spine and the great ganglia of the nerve machinery. So many animals like the lion and bison have manes as an extra shield for the nerve centres. The human head and neck, for instance, grow hair, not to encourage barbers, but for the prevention of sunstroke, and this varies in colour with the degree of sunlight. So all natural breeds of horses have a dark forelock and mane with a streak of strong brown or black colour from the withers to the root of the tail, thus guarding the whole length of the spine. This armour and shield defines for us two primitive types:

The Bay of the Desert produced in fierce light the year round.

The Dun of the Steppes produced in fierce light limited to the summer.

Protective colour

And here the need of clear thought leads to a new definition of "protective" colour.

The dun Siberian tiger, largest and fiercest of all cats, hunted the Dun pony of the Steppes. The dun lion of Africa hunted the Bay horse. Had both cats and both horses been painted sky blue, their relative chances in the chase would be exactly the same. They do not owe meat or safety from attack to their body colour. Both species would have perished under the actinic rays of sunlight but for their equal shield of non-actinic colour.

The purpose of body colour is defence from actinic light. Only the markings are protective as concealing animals from one another.

So far I have not been able to find in books about horses these applications of facts accepted by men of science, which are of use to horsemen. In the light of such evidence the close hogging of horse's manes needs reconsidering.

PART II. THE GREAT ICE AGE.

The great Ice Age

Unless a fellow can swim he has no business to go out of his depth; but if he minds his business, he loses all the fun.

It is the application of these two principles which leads me to a problem in the history of the horse which nobody has solved.

The species is native to the Americas, where it became extinct. One theory of this extinction imagines a germ, like that of horse-sickness, whose range covered all latitudes from tropic to sub-arctic. Such a hearty microbe as that would seem unusual.

The other theory relates to a disagreeable change in the climate, which overwhelmed the drainage basin of the North Atlantic with a field of massive ice. That seems conclusive until one reflects that the Pacific slope of the United States and the continent of South America remained as warm as ever. The cold of the Great Ice Age does not explain the wiping out even in North America of the camel, elephant, tapir and horse.

The Ice Age

It has been my good fortune to make a series of voyages to Bering Sea and Norway in the winter, and in summer along the flanks of both the St. Elias and the Greenland ice-caps. In these journeys by sail and steam, in boats, in canoes, with many landings and scrambles across county, I was able to test the theories of Glacialogists against the actual facts of the Great Ice Age.

The Croll theory makes the orbit of the Earth to change at regular intervals into a long ellipse. By roasting one entire hemisphere it provides vapour to cover the whole of the other hemisphere with snows which do not melt. Evidence is scratched up and made the most of for previous ice ages. An imaginary series of cosmic cataclysms is invoked to explain one merely local unpleasantness.

Another theory sinks Central America—politically quite a good idea—and throws the Gulf Stream into the Pacific, leaving the North Atlantic to be frozen. It does not explain the American lobe of the icefield which brushed the foothills of the Rocky Mountains in a region outside the influence of the Gulf Stream.

It was never the business of Glacialogists to notice that under the inland ice and the great lava floods of Greenland lie pressed magnolia leaves in the high Arctic. These tell me of cloudy skies saving the summer's warmth all through the polar night, of a vast cloud sphere sheltering the whole Earth from a sun much hotter than we know to-day. The Ice Age to me is an incident in that clearing of the skies which dried the world-forest, made the grass steppes and deserts, and evolved the horse.

The Ice-field to-day

The Glacialogists make the Ice Age an episode of the past. Without the slightest relevance to any obliquity of the Orbit, or vagaries of the Gulf Stream, the Ice-cap persists to-day as a living fact. I have been there, have seen it, and cannot be persuaded otherwise. The forces which created the Ice-cap are still at work, and as they merely strengthen or relax, the Icefield grows or shrinks. These forces made the Ice flood to plough the fields and train the folk for seeding a crop of human empires—British, American, Russian, and German world-powers. The ice which prepared town-sites for Moscow, Petrograd, Berlin, London, and New York, may come again to sweep them all away. We are not behaving ourselves so very nicely.

I have no theory as to what forces enlarged or contracted the ice flood. The theme of this study is the horse, a creature of grass and water constructed by the forces in sunshine and fresh air, and coloured by the skies. To the skies we must look if we would trace his origin, to the mechanism of the Ice-cap if we would know how his varieties were specialized out of the general type. So let us have a look at the machinery which made and maintains the Ice-cap.

PART III. THE SOU'-WESTER.

The Sou'-wester

We have to study four regions of one great Sou'-wester wind, which is known to navigators as the South-west Counter-Trade.

WESTERN REGION. The tropic sunshine lifts masses of hot, tremulous vapour from the surface of the Equatorial Pacific. This vapour lifts to a great height and there condenses into clouds. The clouds are swept by the south-west wind and form their floor at a height above the sea of about two miles. The Rocky Mountains reach up bare and stony hands to clutch at the flying moisture and bring down whirling snowstorms. On sweep the cloud fleets across the Canadian Plains with rarely a drop of rain to spare through the summer for the thirsting grass beneath. But slowly the cloud-floor slopes downward until at last the cloud-fleets come to ground, and the breath of the sou'-wester becomes visible as the Northern Forest. Beyond that forest the wind trails its cold vapours over the sub-Arctic tundras of North-Eastern Canada, lashing bleak rains on Baffin's Bay, to spend the last of its moisture in the form of snow upon the Greenland Ice-cap.

Central region

CENTRAL REGION. From the eastern part of the Equatorial Pacific, about the neighbourhood of the Gallipagoes, a second echelon of the sou'-wester brings its immense load of flying clouds high in the air across the United States to slant down out of the skies and brush the Atlantic in the Forties. Strong gales trail their clouds along the Gulf Stream, taking a deal of warmth out of that current. Exposed trees in North-western Europe are slightly bent by the stress of Atlantic gales, while all the trailing clouds discharge their cargoes of warm rain across the Baltic Region. The British Isles, for example, get an annual ration amounting to thirty cubic miles of water fresh from the Equatorial Pacific.

These two large echelons of the sou'-wester carried the vapour which once fell as snow to form the Icefields of the Great Ice Age.

The Ice-cap

The skies were clearing. The planet was being stripped of its cloud roof, so that its warmth from the sun was radiated at night and in winter directly into Space. Except to leeward of the Gulf Stream, the lands of the North Atlantic are still sub-Arctic as in Labrador. These lands were more extensive then than now, forming a bridge about a thousand miles wide from Arctic Canada across Smith's Sound to Greenland, and thence by way of the Faroes to Scotland, which was part of the European main. On this bleak bridge which spanned the North Atlantic permanent snows heaped up to mountainous heights forming the nucleus of the giant Ice-cap. Its western lobe touched the Rocky Mountains and the Missouri Valley, its eastern wing covered the Russian plains as far as Moscow, and southward flooded the German Empire. It may be that the North Atlantic bridge, remnant of an elder continent, sank slowly until it foundered under its load of ice. So the sea melted the ice and the climate began to mend.

EASTERN REGION. A third echelon of the sou'-wester comes from the equatorial belt of South America down to 15°S. This does not take up any great load of moisture, for the wind blows nearly dry across the heights of air which overhang the Atlantic. It has little moisture to spare for the Mediterranean summer, none at all for the levels of the Sahara, Arabia, Persia, and the deserts of Central Asia. The lands to leeward of Brazil are deserts.

FAR EASTERN REGION. In Asia, the movements of the sou'-wester are complicated by the south-west monsoon, and the immense ranges of the Himalaya. Eastward lies one more echelon of the South-west Counter Trade. Just as the sou'-wester in the North Atlantic is warmed by the Gulf Stream, so the sou'-wester of the North Pacific is warmed by the Japan current. Before the uplift of the St. Elias Alps, the region of Alaska, and of Bering-Sea was a warm and well-watered lowland. Alaska still grows gigantic timber in latitudes where North Scotland and South Norway have only scrubby bushes.

PART IV. THE STORY OF BERING LAND.

Bering land

Any reader who is really and truly interested in tapirs will remember that some live in the Malay States, and the rest of them in South and Central America. Between these countries there is a slightly flattened facet of the planet filled from remote ages by the Pacific Ocean. Nobody with the slightest liking for tapirs would suspect them of swimming across, and since their family existed there has been no land passage round the southern edge of the Pacific. So, if we would find the ancient tapir range which once connected Malaya with Mexico and Brazil, we are driven to search for a pathway round the North Pacific.

The map of the ocean floor shows the Pacific Deep as reaching northward to the sixtieth parallel. Beyond that lie the new shoals of Bering Sea, with a ground-swell so terrific in winter that I have seen a hard-bitten middle-aged seaman driven mad with fear. This is the site of Bering Land, an ancient country about the size of Scandinavia, which joined the mainlands of Asia and North America. The latitudes of this land were those of Norway, and it formed the basin of the lower Yukon.

Before there was any polar cold on Earth, when the magnolia blossomed in Greenland, this cloudy rain-swept country was warm enough for tapirs. As the sky cleared it managed to harbour camels, and became a pasturage for animals of the horse family. Let us see then whether these were of the actual species we call the horse.

The landscape

THE LANDSCAPE. Warm lands with little sunlight, such as Ireland, have green turfed grasses. The polar summer which is one long day covers all pastures with a blaze of flowers. The bushes also yield a bounty of blossom and wild fruit. The mosquito season is the great event of the year.

So we may see the meadows beside the lower Yukon, green pasture starred with flowers, bushed, wet, mosquito-stricken range for the bearded Celtic pony, utterly unlike the sun-baked golden steppe of the Dun horse. We must cast back to earlier times when Bering Land was clouded, torrid, range for ancestors of our modern horses, the pasture which changed the brown tapir of Brazil into the skewbald tapir of Malaya. At that time pre-glacial America had seven species of three-toed horse-ancestors, some of which may have ranged westward across Bering Land into Asia, and there given birth to the stock of the Old World.

With the onset of the Great Ice Age the growing weight of the American Ice-cap seems to have strained the loose skin of the Earth, which, in the Columbia Basin cracked, pouring forth floods of lava to overwhelm a region nine hundred miles in length, eight hundred wide. A series of rock waves folded, forming the coast or island ranges from California northward and culminating in the stupendous Alps of St. Elias. There gathered a lesser Ice-cap, pouring its glaciers down the Alaskan and British Columbian fjords.

It was this barrier of ice which put an end to all migrations of animals. The Alps of St. Elias closed the path-way between those two groups of continents which so far had been the common breeding ground for beasts and men. Within the narrowed breeding ground of the Americas the horse together with the camel, and many other species, became extinct.

The deluge

Old Bering Land had become sub-Arctic, the home of the Mammoth, a maned roan elephant. Then the Pacific flooded the plains of the Lower Yukon, and formed the shoals of Bering Sea. Both in Asia and in America faint memories remain of a drowned world. In Assyria and in British Columbia the legend tells us of a hero, and of rescued folk in a fleet of three hundred canoes.

So the two groups of continents were finally cut apart at Bering Straits. And now a ring of flaming craters girdles the Pacific, the fit finale to a tremendous drama.

PART V. THE MARKINGS OF THE HORSE.

Markings

Darwin wrote of the probable "descent of all existing races from a single dun-coloured, more or less striped primitive stock to which our horses occasionally revert."

The stories of the Great Ice Age and of Bering Land have shown us a variety of swiftly changing climates in which the original three-toed dun striped ancestors begat a special type of horse for each kind of habitat. The high lands and high latitudes, the low lands and low latitudes, the tall grasses, the short grasses, the open woodlands, the northern downs and valleys, bred each their special type of the wild horse.

EVIDENCE OF THE WIND. It is not so very long since the last clumps of timber vanished from the steppes. Still on the North American range one finds the trunks and roots of forest trees, which silicate swamps have changed into masses of jaspar onyx and chalcedony; and these have not had time to sink as stones do into the soil. In a seven hundred mile ride across the Canadian plains, I found a living clump of three pines distant a hundred-and-fifty miles from the edge of the shrunken forest. Such shelters have indeed so lately disappeared that the horse has not yet learned the trick of wind endurance. If his ears and nostrils were not so fearfully sensitive, he need only face up wind, and the hair of his body would be blown down flat to protect him. As it is, the extreme sensitiveness of his face compels him to stand or drift with buttocks turned to the gale, tail tucked, head down. It is only in that position that the hair is blown up from the skin and fails to give him protection. We may conclude then that he was inured to torrid summers and even to polar winters before he had to encounter strong gales away from shelter. Long after the three-toed ancestor had become a horse, the steppes had abundant tree clumps for wind breaks in heavy weather.

African bays

THE AFRICAN BAY. In every striped horse it seems a general rule that the body stripes are curved in such a way as to point to a spot on the ground midway between the four legs. The leg bands merely cut the upright lines of the limbs so that these disappear. Some natural process of colour photography has made the body stripes a bold copy of the upward and outward spread of the tussock grass. It was for concealment then among the rich forage of the tussocks that some of the parent species wore a gorgeous livery which passed on to the Zebra.

The Saharan range

From all accounts the Sahara is the bed of a recent sea, but, possibly along its eastern side, a horse range extended from the Soudan to the shores of the Mediterranean. Such range had not less than ten inches a year of rainfall, carried by the sea breezes from surrounding waters. There was moisture enough for trees, and there are abundant traces of quite recent timber.

The winds were drying, the clouds were burned out, the light was increasing to a terrific strength, and the tussocks began to fail. On the American range I have noticed that these tall grasses, abundant only thirty years ago, have become quite rare since the pasture was overstocked. As the tall grasses perished and streaks of naked desert crept into the dying pasture, all hope of concealment for horses was at an end, the brilliant striping ceased to have any value, and the need for speed outweighed the need for sleep. Three and a half hours for sleep, standing, suffices the modern horse.

And as the cover vanished, every possible military precaution became imperative against surprise by lions. The gay striped painting had become a danger, and whole colour was the last chance of concealment for purposes

of rest. Close herding by the stallions, a single line formation with vedettes and flankers, signals by cries and stamping, and, above all things, speed, were needed to save the horse under the new conditions. The arched markings on the face of the striped horse changed to a star, the leg bands to stockings: white marks to identify members of the herd on the darkest nights. Such markings are very common among horses of desert descent.

Painted horses

As the deadly actinic rays of light poured into the body between its bars of painting, the natural dye secreted in the skin began to fill the bright streaks with strong colour. So the striped Dun became the desert Bay, with black points and white markings, gifted with the intelligence needed in family and tribal life, but above all things endowed with a speed which was the despair of lions and is the glory of all honest horsemen. So entirely was the danger from lions overcome that the Bay horse has forgotten the art of bucking, which once was needed in fighting beasts of prey. Speed has given the steel-hard hoofs, the steel-strong limbs, delicate modelling to cut the resistance of the air, the tail set and carried high for the finest steering, and almost every other trait of our Barbs and Arabs. So intense is the light in his native pasture that even the refracted glow from the ground has had to be met by dark colouring of the under surfaces, wherein he differs from the horses of higher latitudes.

Zebra, quagga, ass

ZEBRA AND QUAGGA. Southward from the great Desert the forest of Equatorial Africa is bordered to the eastward and the south by grass lands. In these a few patches of jungle and tussock grasses have preserved the colouring of striped horses down to our own time. Their painting is most brilliant towards the Equator, fades in the higher latitudes, and in Cape Colony only the neck and shoulder stripes remained in the Quagga breed. The land does not continue into the latitude of the Dun horse. It is quite possible that with the coming of the Boers tame cattle ate off the Quagga pasturage, but rifles have put the wild stock to an end with the advance of human settlement.

THE ASSES. These creatures of mountainous deserts are coloured like the boulders of a hillside, but rely for their safety rather on high intelligence and sure-footed speed. Being desert animals of course they are dry inside, so that their efforts to produce the most beautiful music merely rub leather against leather like the sole of a creaking boot. They should be petted like operatic tenors, and indeed there are no animals in the world who improve so rapidly in response to decent treatment.

There is a legend that the ass who carried the Cross of our Lord Christ upon the way to Calvary had ever afterwards its shadow on his back, still worn by the African breed as a special badge of honour. It is called the endurance mark, and this with the same leg bands is the special brand of the Dun horse of Asia.

Dun horses

THE DUN HORSE. It was in the Yellowstone Park that I paid ten dollars for a thirteen hand pony called Buck, a bright Dun with the endurance cross and leg bands. Below the black knees and hocks he wore white stockings, and had black mane, tail and points. He taught me the real protective colour for short grass. His upper and lower body lines were the curves of prairie ridges, while the limbs were so cross-coloured that the upright lines became invisible, save when he moved, at about two hundred yards. It was lucky that he always came at my call, because so far as my poor eyesight went, he was lost to me every evening so soon as I sent him off to graze. His wall eye and game knee were acquired from meeting Christians, but an odd trick of carrying the lower jaw sideways while he was thinking, an unusual sweetness of character, and most uncommon pluck, may have been primitive traits. He trotted with my pack a thousand miles, until in Utah I gave him to a cowboy rather than take him on into the desert ahead, where he might die of thirst. I did not know in those days that he was a desert horse who knew a deal more about finding water than ever I shall learn.

Wild species dying

The horse became extinct in the Americas, the Quagga in South Africa, the wild Bay in Northern Africa. The numbers of the wild asses and of the zebras are shrinking rapidly. The wild Dun, or Tarpan, whose range was the whole steppe of Russia and North Asia, is now represented in three small districts of Mongolia by the Prejevalski herds. So far, then, as wild horses are concerned, the species is dying out.

Among tame horses, to judge from what one sees in the larger stables, there must be at least one hundred Bays, Browns and Chestnuts to every real Dun. All breeders select from the Bay type as distinguished from the Dun, whose only special value is in endurance. In the run-wild or feral herds, however, the Duns have a fair chance, and form a large proportion of the stock. They are not only hardy but also fertile. If man became extinct, the steppes and prairies would breed Duns, and gradually kill out the other types.

Dun and Bay

From the fierce dry heat of the Gobi Desert to the utmost rigors of Siberian cold, the Dun will thrive wherever there is grass. His coat is warm and cool for any climate, greasy enough to shed rain, and proof against every weather except wet driving snow or a strong gale. Through the longest winters he keeps alive by grubbing through the snow to get at grass. The droughts of summer may so increase the journey between food and water that he gets very little time for rest, but somehow he manages to pull through, the last of all horses to yield to difficulties. Lacking the speed and beauty of the Bay, he lives where the Bay will die. In danger or difficulty the Bay is a fool in a panic, while the Dun keeps cool, reasons, and uses common sense with a strong, hearty valour. One would select the Bay for pleasure, but the Dun for serious work under the saddle, for road endurance, for long and rapid marches, and all that makes mounted troops of value in campaigns.

Just as the working man may be rendered irritable and even vicious by unfair treatment in our social life, the working horse is made ill-tempered and dangerous to handle by bad horse-mastership. So the Dun has a terrible reputation, and in his defence I am a sort of Devil's advocate. He is the typical range horse whose manners and customs will be the theme of the next chapter.

PART VI. CLOUDLAND.

Cloudland

We have seen the close resemblance of warm winds and seas between the North Atlantic and the North Pacific; but it was only in the North Atlantic region that the great Ice Age, in long pulsations, widened and shrank its Icefields. Ten thousand years ago (Wright) in the Niagara District, and seven thousand years ago (de Geer) in Finland, the edges of the Icefield were withdrawn for the last time, and the climate began to get warm and comfortable.

In America and in Europe, as the ice retreated, a belt of tundra crept closely in its wake, and in the rear of that a belt of green turfed grasses.

In Eastern Canada, and North-western Europe these green turfed pastures are varied with woodlands of such trees as cast their leaves in winter. Amid these changes the horse had vanished from North America, but survived in Asia, and slowly extended his range as the ice retreated from Europe. In Europe as in America, man also widened his hunting grounds in the wake of the melting Icefield.

In the big region of the south-west wind the lands which surround the North Sea and the Baltic are different from all others, being under a low sun, cloudy, with only one day's sunshine out of seven. And Cloudland breeds a special type of man with blue eyes, a ruddy skin, and hair of chestnut, bay, brown, or dun, colours like those of horses.

Under the grey skies of Cloudland, man lacks the protective colour which in all other regions of the world defends the body from actinic light. I think we shall find this true of the horse also.

The original striped colouring of the Bays and Duns never developed in Western Europe with its climate of cloudy skies and verdant pastures.

The white horse

THE WHITE HORSE. Now let us study the conditions following the Ice Age in Southern Russia. Here the Dun horse has a white coat for sunny snowy winters. Rumour says that foals are not born white, and it must be remembered that snowy winters are recent even as grassy plains.

This whiteness is not, like the summer colouring, a paint issued by the body to tint the hair, but a mere absence of any colouring matter. It is as though the animal saved his stores to paint his inside to a warm red during the cold season instead of wasting it in mere vanity upon his outer clothing. At the same time nothing could be more reasonable than a white coat for concealment against a snowy background. Hares, Eskimo, and lots of other tribes are most particular in this matter, and among the best people of all snowy regions a white suit is the correct mode for winter. It may be that some tribes of ponies neglected to change in the spring, and so became conspicuous in summer, a fatal error where there are wolves about. These were not likely to prosper and raise children except under man's protection, so one suspects that white coats for summer wear date only from the human period. Men had a feeling, too, that the white horse was so beautiful that he must be sacred, a special gift of the gods. Without any special merit, being indeed of lower stamina and endurance than any other horses, the white stock were favoured by breeders. Left to themselves, they would die out rapidly in any sunny climate. One notes, however, that the Persian wild ass has a silvery white coat, the hue of his native desert. There are many animals whose dark hair is white at the tips, so that they are really brunettes who masquerade as blondes.

Bearded horses

BEARDED HORSES. The ancient horse-eating artist-savages of France have left us portraits of ponies strongly bearded under the lower jaw. In the earliest portrait we have of the Celtic pony (Ewart), Odin's eight-legged Sleipnir shows the coarse bearded cut of jaw. The Celtic pony types are bearded to the northward, clean-shaven towards the southward parts of their wide range. The Prejevalski, who is the Tarpan of Asia, is slightly bearded. So is the Kiang or wild ass of Asia. One finds the beard bristles in all the northern breeds of horses, not in the desert stocks to the south. Why then should northern horses want to grow a beard?

A horse has so small a stomach that his day's work to get sufficient grass is seven hours. Up to about fifty degrees of north latitude, he gets seven hours of daylight even in mid-winter. Northward of that he needs beard bristles to aid him in feeling and selecting grass in the darkness. Southward of that, if he is hunted by wolves or tigers, he needs a few beard bristles for night grazing except in cloudless regions where there is always starlight. So, roughly, the range of bearded horses is that of long dark nights.

Size

THE REGISTER OF SIZE. The size of horses varies with their nourishment.

On the scattered but rich bunch grasses of the desert, where there is much travel for a little food, the pasture registers the stature of the Bay as about fourteen hands two inches.

The scattered but rich bunch grass of the American steppe makes horses prosperous in summer but famished in the winter, so that the pasture registers a smaller horse than that of the desert—up to thirteen hands. Under the same conditions we may take the register of the Dun in Asia as up to thirteen hands.

The poor grass of the British moors registers a pony of ten to eleven hands.

Strong feeding of grain and hay registers stabled horses up to nineteen hands.

The great abundance of green turfed grass the year round in North-western Europe should, under its best conditions, register as large a horse as either steppe or desert.

The three pastures

THE THREE PASTURES. The Bay pasture and the Dun pasture are each of continental size, whereas the green pasture is only a small province. In the same way, the rock formations of the Bay and the Dun pastures are each continuous for several thousands of miles. In sharp contrast is that little ragged edge of a great continent known as North-western Europe, a district which has many times been flooded by the sea, each bath making new beds of rock.

The lowlands of Great Britain, for example, have been frequently submerged, and the island shows samples of almost every rock formation known upon the earth. This European pasture then is not only small, but also varied in its rock formations, its soils, and its landscape. One may get a standard horse of registered size in the Bay range or the Dun range, but would expect to find on the green range of Europe not only many colours, but also many types derived from the primitive stock, strains of all sorts and sizes. A glance at three formations will show how much the build and size of a horse is varied by the rocks.

GRANITE. In North-western Europe the granitic or speckled formations form upstanding moorlands. The poor but abundant grass maintains ponies both light and heavy of build, derived from several kinds of ancestors. They are so secured from attack by beasts of prey that they do not need to run far and fast on ground where running would be dangerous. These are grouped under the general name of Celtic pony.

Limestone and clay

LIMESTONE. Allowing for some districts, like the central plain of Ireland, where the Ice-sheet has left the country very badly drained, a limestone formation usually makes dry soil. The vegetable mould may hold a little water and make mud, as on the chalk downs, but the rock is so porous that most of the rain soaks down, and the waters run mainly underground. Moreover, the vegetable mould gives chemical qualities to this water, which is enabled to dissolve the rocks and form caverns on the underground water courses. At the same time the water becomes 'hard' with lime in solution, so that the springs will petrify moss and twigs.

The dryness of the ground tends to make horses sound of bone. The carbonate of lime in the water supplies them with the material for bone. As the result the bones are very light in proportion to their strength. So this pasture registers a well-built and very light horse. If such an animal is of Bay blood, he is larger and swifter than the Arab, lacking only in soundness and in travel endurance.

CLAY. As clay holds water, its soils provide abundance to the grass roots, and so produce thick turf with a great weight of green forage to the acre. Such heavy feeding without any exercise in search of water, would, after the killing out of the wolves, tend to produce a large, heavy, slow-going gentle horse with steady nerves such as our draught stock, lacking in that soundness of feet and legs which is limited to the breeds of arid regions.

Horses of Cloudland

So far, the argument presents for the green pastures of cloudland horses of several colours; and, for the varied rock formations in the North Sea and Baltic basins, horses of many types.

Forest varieties

Professor Ewart traces among the ancient wild horses of the forest species three very distinct types:

1. At the time when the glacial drift of the Rhine and Weser valleys had a climate like that of the Outer Hebrides of to-day, the conditions of cold and damp matured the Diluvial horse (Equus Caballus occidentalis). This animal stood fifteen hands, had a longer face than the general forest type, was coarsely built, had heavy fetlocks, a short upright pastern, a broad round foot. This is the cart horse breed.

2. The Grimaldi Grottoes in the Riviera preserve remains of a forest-upland horse, large, coarse, heavy in build, with a short, broad face, and a flat profile.

3. The Solutré Caverns of France preserve paintings made by ancient savages of a small stout, chunky, bearded horse, rather like a long, low Iceland pony, with a short broad face, elk-like nose, and low-set tail, rough-haired towards the root. He stood from twelve to thirteen hands in height.

From these three forest varieties our draught horses are mainly descended; but there were also in Ancient Europe two other species besides that of the woodlands.

A. Siwalik type. A fifteen-hand horse, lightly built like the modern thoroughbred. The forehead recedes at an angle from the line of the face, and there is a prominence between the eyes. The limbs are long, withers high, and tail set on high.

B. Prejevalski Tarpan steppe type, the Dun of Northern Asia. The face is long, narrow and straight. The nasal chambers are large, causing a Roman nose. The limbs are clean, with close hocks and narrow feet. Height twelve to thirteen hands.

We must think then of such types as the Forest and Siwalik adapting themselves to the soils of North-western Europe.

PART VII. THE CHANGING LAND.

The North Sea is only a recent flood in an old river valley. We must consider it not as a tract of permanent water, but as a lost hunting ground of our own ancestors, a pasturage for horses not very long ago.

A valley in Cloudland

In the year 5200 B.C. the Scandinavian glaciers, shrinking at the rate of about one mile a year (the rate of shrinkage in the Alps of St. Elias), withdrew from the province of Finland and the Baltic Lake. Let us suppose that, in that year a traveller from civilised Egypt made his way down the Rhine, and so entered the valley of North River, which is now flooded by the North Sea. At first this river wound its level way between low chalk downs, but presently the Thames came in from the West, and forested swampy clay-lands extended northward. Abreast of Aberdeen came the last chalk downs, and beyond that lay Arctic tundras where the delta widened to an ice-drifted sea nearly abreast of Faroe.

The whole valley was as varied in rock and soil as Eastern England, with little lakes, ridges of boulder clay, and downs of gorse and bracken. Northward across this verdant land crept succeeding waves of the fir, the oak, and the beech.

Out on the delta coast, far to the right, beyond a deep sea channel, rose the white Ice-cap of Sweden, whose Ice-flood filled the Norway fjords with berg-breeding glaciers. Far to the left rose the ice-clad Grampians.

The Delta people and those of the Baltic Lake were poor savages living upon shell fish, and making mounds of shell refuse round their hearths. Inland were stronger peoples who had lake villages or trenched encampments on headlands of the downs.

Cloudland horses

As the grass followed the advancing fir woods, the primitive stock of Cloudland returned to pastures from whence it had been driven by the cold. These were not Duns, Bays, or striped, but native Cloudland horses adapted to this region of little sunshine. Strong Dun was not needed to guard them from the actinic rays of sunlight, so their dull colour had yellowish, brownish and reddish tones which blended with the landscape, such colours as are worn by the Celtic ponies of Britain and other Atlantic isles.

The wild horses were evolving three utterly different types. On the chalk downs, and on the limestone tracts north of the Humber, there were lightly built, slender, graceful horses of fair height. On the clays there were horses, heavy, coarse, and slow. On the Breton, British and Scandinavian moors there were Celtic ponies.

The deluge in Cloudland

It needed but little sinking of this land to flood the Delta, and open a long channel up the North River valley. The sea washed out the clay foundations of the forests. The sea breakers wielded boulders of the glacier-drift and hurled them like battering rams against the dissolving limestone of low cliffs. The tide swung gravels to tear out bays in the foreshores. Winter frosts cracked the headlands, and summer rains melted the ice cracks so that the capes fell into the sea in landslides. Thus the sea widened, biting its way deep into Europe until men began their losing fight with dykes for the saving of doomed netherlands. The North Sea cut its way through chalk downs into the English channel. The tribes who held fortified headlands of the chalk downs and set up temples at Stonehenge and Avebury on the mainland of Europe, about 1800 B.C. found that their country had become an island.

The old horse pasture of North-western Europe was split into sundered provinces by the advancing sea, but the breeds, native to a lost valley are still almost identical on either shore. The Breton and British moors have one type of Celtic pony whose ancestral range extended across the Straits of Dover. The clay fens of Lincolnshire and of Holland still have draught horses alike in build and in colour. The limestone districts north of the Humber have the same tall horses as the similar provinces across the water in Schleswig, Holstein and Jutland. The granitic lands of Scotland and Norway have one type of the Celtic pony. (Low's Domesticated Animals.)

It is none of my business, but I cannot help feeling that the flooding at about the same period of the Lower Yukon and North River Valleys is something more than a coincidence. The Geological people are always cocksure that the sea cannot rise, that an hemisphere—the Southern, for example, cannot be flooded, and they assume quite blandly that lands have sunk, without explaining why. Their theories never seem really to fit that mighty wilderness, to which I have seen them come as visitors or strangers. Science will never understand until it learns to love.

PART VIII. THE HUMAN INFLUENCE.

The human influence

We have now reached a stage of the argument which shows for Europe no continental type like the Bay or the Dun, but a horse stock of varied colouring, of diverse heights and builds, and most curious dispersions as native to the green pastures of Cloudland.

Shuffling of the horse pack

The problem in nature was intricate as a jigsaw puzzle, before man's interference broke that puzzle into little pieces. Our ancestors were not such fools as to import Duns from Asia for purpose of breeding, but in their wars and migrations drifted Asiatic Duns and South Russian white horses across the face of Europe. No wars of invasion brought Bay horses out of Africa; but as each tribe needed a better strain of horseflesh, the Bays were carried in the courses of trade to Europe.

THE HUMAN INFLUENCE IN CROSSING HORSE STRAINS.

Scale of colour values

THE CHESTNUT. This colour is possibly bright Bay from African blood crossed with a slight proportion of golden Dun. Both in the humans and the horses, chestnut hair goes with a certain temper described as sanguine, generous or fiery if we happen to be in a good temper, or untrustworthy and vicious if we dislike the person. Setting aside the cold sorrel, or light chestnut, which in my own mind is associated with commonplace horses and with one or two very bad women, the real chestnut, with its red-gold glory, makes most of us catch our breath with its beauty. In human hair it so appeals to artists as to be generally reserved for the most sacred portraiture. In horses, it so appeals to horsemen as to rank next bright Bay in the scale of values.

THE BROWN HORSE. This is a colder, washed-out tone of Bay.

THE BLACK HORSE. Among feral and range horses, those of the very darkest bay and brown become brown-black under the summer sunlight. True black is unknown among outdoor horses, and can only be due to special selective breeding.

THE GREY HORSE. All greys are obviously crossed between white and the various whole colours.

The primary horse colours are Dun and Bay.

The secondary colours are white, black, grey, chestnut, and brown, whole colours shared by human and horse folk.

The tertiary colours are crosses of white with Bay, Dun, black, chestnut, brown, which produce the various roans. Beyond that the human hair withdraws from competition.

The quarternary colours are crosses of white with whole roans, producing strawberry and cream roans, and roan-balds; while a peculiar mixture of white with black, bay or chestnut, gives us the piebalds and skewbalds.

The white horse has been saved from the wolves by man, but the secondary, tertiary and quarternary colours are also very largely the result of man's work in crossing the primitive strains of Europe with the imported African Bay within the last couple of thousand years.

MIGRATION. The Romans imported millions of negro slaves who have not left a trace of their blood in Europe. Wave after wave of Blonde Migration from the Baltic has conquered the Mediterranean states, but left no fair descendants. The negroes become extinct in Europe. The blondes become extinct on the Mediterranean.

Correcting by sunlight

And so with horses. Imported horses fail to breed healthfully in the damp provinces of India and Brazil, while horse sickness makes a clean sweep of them in many parts of Africa. It is probable, with horses as with men, that no sudden importation to regions outside their native zone of sunlight results in permanent healthy breeding. The imported strain dies out unless it is constantly renewed. Hordes of Asiatics with Dun horses have swept from time to time into Europe, and into India, but Dun horses are scarce in both regions, and do not exist in large numbers except in Scandinavia and in Katywar.

So the strong action of man in sudden floodings of Europe with Bays from the desert, Duns from the steppe, is outweighed by a stronger law of nature. With strains of horses as with tribes of man, the penalty for sudden migration from their native zone of light is gradual extinction.

Yet is there one difference between Bays and Duns. The Dun is not worth renewing, and so dies out unnoticed. The Bay is worth breeding and so persists.

PART IX. THE BRAND OF EUROPE.

The brand of Europe

In nature's immense and gentle processes, throughout the amazing story of the Europe horse, the bewildering actions of forgotten tribes of men, and the sun's own slow adjustments, a single force persists in branding the stock with a sign of ownership.

A partial eclipse of the sun had made his figure that of the crescent moon. Standing under some oak trees, beside the road puddles made by recent rain, I noticed that the bars of reduced sunlight which came down through the leafage shone upon the little patches of water. The image of the crescent sun was reflected upside down.

The bar of sunlight coming down through leafage acts as a lens to the sun's image. The woodland glade is a camera. The coat of a woodland animal is coloured by the direct action of light, is sensitive to light, is a sensitized film for colour photography. To the peculiar reversed and condensed rays shining through leafage into the woodland camera, the coat of the horse responds, forming rings of deeper colour limited to the parts of the animal which are exposed to direct light. In the course of many generations, the rings become permanent and are known as dapples. The dappling in the dappled light of woodlands gives concealment both to hunting leopards and to hunted horses.

Since dapples have not been traced to any other country, and may well be native to woodlands of Western Europe, it seems fair reasoning which gives that special quality of colour to a type we will now define as the European horse. I do not contend that the woodlands were more extensive than the open downs, or that any large proportion of European horses developed dapples. I do contend that a certain stocky build and well conditioned heaviness of type more or less dappled is characteristic of Western Europe, just as a more or less striped Dun is typical of Asia, and more or less striped Bay typical of Northern Africa.

Professor Ridgeway's theories

I am nothing more than an old rough-neck. My poor little theories about the Europe horse have the impudence to contradict a great authority. Professor Ridgeway brings historic proof that the Tarpan, who is the Prejevalski, the wild Dun of Asia, inhabited the green pasture of Europe, that he was a small scrawny and foul-tempered person unfit to ride, and that his crossings with the slender imported Bay produced our gigantic sturdy and gentle draught horse. I have ridden so many Duns, packed so many, loved them so much, that I am sure they would agree with me in bucking hard against Professor Ridgeway. I do not believe that the Dun wore his tawny colour in green pastures where he would be a target. I do not believe that the wild Dun in an average district was small, scrawny or vicious. I do not believe that a horse of the Dun type could be an ancestor to draught stock. History is the lens through which we see the past—out of focus.

Against the evidence of history and the proofs of science, I have nothing to offer except the common heritage of sight and reason, with that experience which trains a fellow to interpret landscape and to care for horses. I cannot expect others to ride as I have through the green pasturage of Cloudland seeing as I do under the combed, trim countryside of to-day the fierce rough wilderness of prehistoric times and of outlandish frontiers. It is not by asking the way or reading sign-posts that one reasons out the route of a day's journey, but by a vivid sense of light, form, colour and atmospheric distance, the old familiar structure of the rocks, the slopes of drainage, the course of running waters, the shape of woods and trees as fashioned by the wind, the ancient dangers deflecting trails and roads, and the phenomena which result in forts and churches, villages and towns.

Sensing the country

So one senses the radiant perfumed land and sees how it shaped and coloured its native horses. It was from that raw material the breeder wrought just as a sculptor models clay into his statuary. Under his hands the wild traits disappeared, the short-sighted pony grew into a long-sighted hunter, sound hoofs and limbs were softened to unsoundness, the language of signs gave place to understanding of human speech, while discipline of the harem and the herd became obedience in the fields of sport, of labour, or soldier service.

The dapple sign

I would not have my reading take the place of thinking, but rather use books to inspire thought and be thankful to them for correcting blunders. Thus, aiming at the truth, no matter what I hit, I see in Western Europe a horse-currency which is of striped extraction, and, like a coinage in bronze, silver and gold, has evolved its moorland ponies, its lowland draught stock, and its upland running breeds. The measure of Bay blood stamps out its values; and, where one can decipher a device, it is to read the dapple sign for one of the sun's own kingdoms.

CHAPTER III.
HABITS OF OUTDOOR HORSES.

I. THE RANGE.

The North American range of the run-wild herds enlarges northward out of Mexico and covers the region between the Mississippi and the Pacific Ocean up to the edge of the Northern Forest in Canada. This gives an area of three million square miles, a range much the same size as Europe, the United States, Australia, Brazil, or Canada. The eastern half is a prairie, the western a desert shaped like a swell of the sea about eight thousand feet high at the top, and laced all over with a skein of mountain ranges thrown like fisherman's net and broken all to pieces. Moreover, the southern or higher half of this desert is cleft to the roots by sheer abysmal chasms known as the Cañons.

It has been my good fortune to ride from the edge of the Canadian forest along the general line of the Rocky Mountains to a place just twenty miles south of Zacatecas in Mexico, which is the southern boundary of the Stock Range, on the Tropic of Cancer. I have also ridden from Regina in Saskatchewan to Red Bluff in California. These two routes cross the grass from north to south, and nearly from east to west, making a rough total of seven thousand miles.

The wilderness

The land as I knew it first had just been stripped naked by the hunters who swept away almost the whole of its native stock of bison, deer, and antelope, wild sheep and goats, together with the hunting animals, such as wolves and panthers who earned a living there. The land as I saw it next was overstocked with ponies, cattle and sheep, so that the grass was poor. The land as I saw it last was being fenced, watered and ploughed by pioneer settlers. In thirty years I witnessed the passing of the wilderness and its frontiersmen.

A meadow gives a totally false idea of the herbage which built up the strength and vigour of the ancient pony herds. It is a mixture of many grasses and other plants all closely turfed together so that a horse cannot readily select what he likes best. The grass contains a deal of water, stays green throughout the year and tastes sour between the teeth. One finds turfed pasture in forests and their outskirts, and usually where there is rainfall enough for crops, as in Western Europe and on the eastern half of South Africa. That, I think, is not the pasture which made the hardy range horse.

The natural pastures

Where there is less than eight inches of rain one finds the range grass, of separate plants with the bare earth between. The three American kinds are the bunch grass of the hollows, a tall tussock with tap roots reaching down to moisture; the little buffalo grass from two to four inches high; and the gramma grass of the same size which inhabits Mexico.

One may presume that the tussock fed the oldest herds and that, as it failed, the pony took to eating the shorter grasses.

The horse in a meadow pasture does not eat the ranker growths, but grazes the shorter, smaller kinds of grass. From this we may reason that the little buffalo grass of the ranges is the typical food of the species. The leaves of this plant are green in the spring but soon cure to a golden tawny colour, which changes to brown in the autumn, and a washed-out, greyish brown in winter. As they cure, the leaves curl downwards one by one until the plant becomes a ball or tuft exceedingly springy underfoot, sweet as a nut in taste, and equal in food value to standing oats.

Conditions of the stockrange

As one approaches the desert the land is sprinkled with bushes which protect themselves from being eaten with a very strong nasty taste, or deadly thorns. Of these the sage brush comes first, a thousand miles wide followed by a thousand miles of greasewood and acacia varied with forests of cacti. The grass becomes more scanty as one forces a way onward into the heart of the desert, where there are regions of naked rock and belts of drifting sand.

As the annual rainfall varies from year to year the desert tracts expand or shrink by turns. As the winds swing from side to side, or wax or wane in their supply of moisture, a fertile region is made desolate for a few centuries as Palmyra, or a desert shrinks before the spreading pasture. In cycles the desert blossoms or withers, but with the millions of years it slowly widens.

Such, then, were the conditions of the stockrange to which the ancient herds had to adapt themselves, learning to dispense with the shrunken meadows, and make the most of varying crops of bunch grass.

The taste for green pasture is so far forgotten that range horses will swim rivers and break fences to escape from the richest of meadows and get to the desert hillsides which seem to grow nothing but stones. Where sheep tear the bunch grass out by the roots and leave stark desert, the horses' lips and teeth are so delicately adapted to this feeding that they never uproot the plant.

The grazing rules

It is a sound rule that range ponies do not travel beyond their necessities of grass and water. Leaving the water, they graze outwards, forming a trampled area which widens daily as they feed at the edges. So, riding across the rich and untouched grass lands of the south-western deserts, I have come to a line where the pasturage ended abruptly, and beyond were innumerable pony tracks leading from six to ten miles to a water hole. The wild horse looked upon that ring area as the tame horse does a stable, with water and feed conveniently arranged. That was his home, and if man or the storm, or wolves drove him a couple of hundred miles away to better feed and water, he would always break back at the first chance, travelling steadily with little delay for grazing.

A horse's neck is exactly long enough for grazing on level ground, but I never saw one try to graze downhill. Neither does he readily graze directly up any steep place, preferring to quarter along the hillside, rising very slightly.

Rules in grazing

His first rule in grazing then is to crop uphill.

But the moment the air stirs he applies his second grazing rule, which is "feed up wind."

If he had the man's way of reasoning, he would argue thus, "If I graze down wind I smell myself, the grass, and the dust. But if I graze up wind I get the air clean to my nostrils, and can smell an enemy in time to fight or run."

His third rule is to graze if possible homeward or towards shelter.

If the grass is plentiful he feeds quickly, and has time for rest on warm sheltered ground or in the lee of timber. If food is scant, he gets no time for rest.

On the natural range there are hollows to which the surface waters have carried the ashes of burned grass. These alkali licks are needed to keep horses in health; but rock salt in the stable seems to meet their wants. Failing that they will lick brick walls. Even the licking of a man's hand is a means of getting salt from the skin rather than making love.

II. BETWEEN GRASS AND WATER.

The best way to measure the distance and the sort of ground which the ancient herds were accustomed to traverse between grass and water, is to study the conduct of a horse in dealing with steep places.

Horses on cliffs

I was dining with some friends at Gibraltar when the story was told of long ago times when a couple of mad midshipmen rode ponies for a wager up the Mediterranean stairs. This is a stone stairway up the eastern wall of the Rock which is sheer and some thirteen hundred feet high. The story had special interest for me because my father was one of the two mad middies. He had told me that the ponies were not frightened, except at the last flight of all when the Atlantic wind was blowing into their faces over the summit. There a step was missing, the ponies reared, and both lads had to dismount, losing a wager for which the leader had undertaken the ride.

The ponies were Spanish, of the type which re-stocked North America.

I frightened an English horse into hysterics with such small rock walls as I could find in Wales, but have never known an American range animal to show very much alarm. My worst climb was made in twelve hours, with three horses up a 3,600 foot cliff where a trail would have been a convenience. The pack and spare horses pulled hard at times because, although ambitious animals, they would have preferred some other way to heaven. That is why the lead rope got under the saddle-horse's tail, which made him buck on a ledge overhanging blue space where there really was no room. A little later the led horses pulled my saddle horse over the edge of a crag. I got off at the top, and the horse lit on his belly across a jutting rock about twelve feet down. He thought he was done for until I persuaded him with the lead rope to scramble up again. Near the summit the oak and juniper bushes forced me to dismount, leading the horses one at a time under or round stiff overhanging branches on most unpleasant ground. They showed off a little because they wished to impress me, but I found out afterwards that horses or even cattle, held at the foot of that cliff until they are hungry, will climb to the top for grass. The place is known as The Gateway and leads up out of the Cañon Dolores in Colorado to the Mesa la Sal in Utah.

Much more dangerous was a 4,000 foot grass slope down from the Mesa Uncompaghre into the Cañon Unaweep. I managed that by leading the horses and quartering the slope in zigzags. I was much more frightened than they were.

Bad ground

Many times I have ridden along the rim rock of cliffs of any height up to a mile sheer, and so far from being afraid, I found some horses preferred the very edge. One may ride slack rein where one would never dare to venture afoot.

HORSES

PREFACE.

INTRODUCTION.

CHAPTER I.THE ORIGIN OF THE HORSE.

CHAPTER II.THE ORIGIN OF HORSE VARIETIES.

CHAPTER III.HABITS OF OUTDOOR HORSES.

CHAPTER I.
THE ORIGIN OF THE HORSE.

CHAPTER II.
THE ORIGIN OF HORSE VARIETIES.

CHAPTER III.
HABITS OF OUTDOOR HORSES.