ery joy
of life.

Now as I strolled across the moor and watched their gambols, thinking
how like free wild animals they seemed, my thoughts roamed far away,
and I saw in imagination scenes where other untamed animals of the
horse tribe are living unfettered all their lives long.

First there rose before my mind the level grass-covered pampas of
South America, where wild horses share the boundless plains with
troops of the rhea, or American ostrich, and wander, each horse with
as many mares as he can collect, in companies of hundreds or even
thousands in a troop. These horses are now truly wild, and live freely
from youth to age, unless they are unfortunate enough to be caught in
the more inhabited regions by the lasso of the hunter. In the broad
pampas, the home of herds of wild cattle, they dread nothing. There,
as they roam with one bold stallion as their leader, even beasts of
prey hesitate to approach them, for, when they form into a dense mass
with the mothers and young in their centre, their heels deal blows
which even the fierce jaguar does not care to encounter, and they
trample their enemy to death in a very short time. Yet these are not
the original wild horses we are seeking, they are the descendants of
tame animals, brought from Europe by the Spaniards to Buenos Ayres in
1535, whose descendants have regained their freedom on the boundless
pampas and prairies.

As I was picturing them careering over the plains, another scene
presented itself and took their place. Now I no longer saw around me
tall pampas-grass with the long necks of the rheas appearing above it,
for I was on the edge of a dreary, scantily covered plain between the
Aral Sea and the Balkash Lake in Tartary. To the south lies a barren
sandy desert, to the north the fertile plains of the Kirghiz steppes,
where the Tartar feeds his flocks, and herds of antelopes gallop over
the fresh green pasture; and between these is a kind of no-man's
land, where low scanty shrubs and stunted grass seem to promise but a
poor feeding-ground.

Yet here the small long-legged but powerful "Tarpans," the wild horses
of the treeless plains of Russia and Tartary, were picking their
morning meal. Sturdy wicked little fellows they are, with their shaggy
light-brown coats, short wiry manes, erect ears, and fiery watchful
eyes. They might well be supposed to be true wild horses, whose
ancestors had never been tamed by man; and yet it is more probable
that even they