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D. G.

Langmark, Alberta, Canada.

BEYOND ROPE AND FENCE

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ROLLING hills and shallow valleys—an ocean of brown waves with fast drying sloughs, like patches of sunshine on the surface of the sea—such was the Canadian prairie that autumn day—such were the miles and miles of Alberta range, bounded by a barbed wire fence that was completely lost in the unobstructed play of sunshine. It was an open wilderness, so vast that it seemed to stretch on almost endlessly beyond the horizon, which lay desolate and unbroken like a rusty, iron ring, girding the earth. Its immensity, by an inexorable contrast, dwarfed everything that crept over the surface of the plains into a helpless puniness.

The hundred horses on the range, scattered and grouped by their predilections for each other, looked, in the distance, like ants crawling over the surface of a rock. Within sight of each other, bound by the ties of race, they nevertheless had their loves and their preferences. Most of the mothers with their little colts grazed in a group by themselves; while a few mothers, as if they felt that their children were better than their neighbour’s children, kept themselves apart from the herd, though always within sight.