mselves to the changed conditions. There was a veritable
plague of dogs. They devoured the corpses, barked and howled during the
nights, and in the daytime slunk about in the distance. As the time went
by, I noticed a change in their behavior. At first they were apart from
one another, very suspicious and very prone to fight. But after a not
very long while they began to come together and run in packs. The dog,
you see, always was a social animal, and this was true before ever he
came to be domesticated by man. In the last days of the world before the
plague, there were many many very different kinds of dogs--dogs without
hair and dogs with warm fur, dogs so small that they would make scarcely
a mouthful for other dogs that were as large as mountain lions. Well,
all the small dogs, and the weak types, were killed by their fellows.
Also, the very large ones were not adapted for the wild life and bred
out. As a result, the many different kinds of dogs disappeared, and
there remained, running in packs, the medium-sized wolfish dogs that you
know to-day."

"But the cats don't run in packs, Granser," Hoo-Hoo objected.

"The cat was never a social animal. As one writer in the nineteenth
century said, the cat walks by himself. He always walked by himself,
from before the time he was tamed by man, down through the long ages of
domestication, to to-day when once more he is wild.

"The horses also went wild, and all the fine breeds we had degenerated
into the small mustang horse you know to-day. The cows likewise went
wild, as did the pigeons and the sheep. And that a few of the chickens
survived you know yourself. But the wild chicken of to-day is quite a
different thing from the chickens we had in those days.

"But I must go on with my story. I travelled through a deserted land. As
the time went by I began to yearn more and more for human beings. But I
never found one, and I grew lonelier and lonelier. I crossed Livermore
Valley and the mountains between it and the great valley of the San
Joaquin. You have never seen that valley, but it is very large and it is
the home of the wild horse. There are great droves there, thousands and
tens of thousands. I revisited it thirty years after, so I know. You
think there are lots of wild horses down here in the coast valleys, but
they are as nothing compared with those of the San Joaquin. Strange to
say, the cows, when they went wild, went back into the lower mountains.
Evidently they