interpretation.

Sometimes a lone steer ranging the sod came suddenly upon a trace of
blood. Like a hound he paused, snuffling the earth. Then with wide mouth
and outthrust, curling tongue, uttered voice. Wild as the tiger's
food-sick cry, his warning roar burst forth, ending in a strange, upward
explosive whine. Instantly every head in the herd was lifted, even the
old cows heavy with milk stood as if suddenly renewing their youth,
alert and watchful.

Again it came, that prehistoric bawling cry, and with one mind the herd
began to center, rushing with menacing swiftness, like warriors
answering their chieftain's call for aid. With awkward lope or jolting
trot, snorting with fury they hastened to the rescue, only to meet in
blind bewildered mass, swirling to and fro in search of an imaginary
cause of some ancestral danger.

At such moments we were glad of our swift ponies. From our saddles we
could study these outbreaks of atavistic rage with serene enjoyment.

In herding the cattle we came to know all the open country round about
and found it very beautiful. On the uplands a short, light-green,
hairlike grass grew, intermixed with various resinous weeds, while in
the lowland feeding grounds luxuriant patches of blue-joint, wild oats,
and other tall forage plants waved in the wind. Along the streams and
in the "sloos" cat-tails and tiger-lilies nodded above thick mats of
wide-bladed marsh grass. Almost without realizing it, I came to know the
character of every weed, every flower, every living thing big enough to
be seen from the back of a horse.

Nothing could be more generous, more joyous, than these natural meadows
in summer. The flash and ripple and glimmer of the tall sunflowers, the
myriad voices of gleeful bobolinks, the chirp and gurgle of red-winged
blackbirds swaying on the willows, the meadow-larks piping from grassy
bogs, the peep of the prairie chick and the wailing call of plover on
the flowery green slopes of the uplands made it all an ecstatic world to
me. It was a wide world with a big, big sky which gave alluring hint of
the still more glorious unknown wilderness beyond.

Sometimes of a Sunday afternoon, Harriet and I wandered away to the
meadows along Dry Run, gathering bouquets of pinks, sweet-williams,
tiger-lilies and lady slippers, thus attaining a vague perception of
another and sweeter side of life. The sun flamed across the splendid
serial waves of the grasses and the perfumes of a hund