Horseclans 13 – Horses of the North – Adams, Robert

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 The prairies and high plains, huge and vast and always awe-inspiring they lie. To the untrained or

inexperienced eye, they seem mostly empty, devoid of the life with which they really, truly teem. The grasses—grama grass, blue grama grass, side oats grass, screw grass, tickle grass, buffalo grass and hundreds of other grasses—seem to roll like the waves of some endless sea with the gusts of the

untrammeled, ever-blowing winds. These hardy, long-acclimated wild grasses quickly choke out tender grasses loved by man as well as the frail, alien grain crops he was wont to cultivate when still his kind ruled this land.

Moving slowly across these grasslands, following water, graze and the dictates of the changing seasons, as did the bison before them, roam scattered herds of wild cattle. Each succeeding generation of these descendants of feral beef and milch stock is become longer of leg and horns, less bulky and more

muscular. In a few areas, they have interbred with surviving bison. Privation has rendered both strains rangy and more hirsute than their domesticated ancestors, while constant predation has favored the survival and breeding of the quicker-tempered, incipiently deadly bovines.

 Foremost among the predators preying upon these herds—as well as upon the herds of wild sheep on the high plains—are the packs of wild dogs that are metamorphosing into wolves a little more with each new litter of pups, being shaped by the demands of survival in a savage, merciless environment. Already become big, strong, fleet of foot and as adept at killing as any pureblood lupine, these packs follow the herds of wild cattle and bison hybrids in the long migrations from north to south, just as the long-extinct prairie wolves followed the huge bison herds that once roamed these same lands. The packs do the new herds the same service that the prairie wolves did the bison. They weed the herds of the old, the injured or maimed, the spindly or sickly, taking too the occasional calf.