escaped in early times from the Tartars, and have held
their own ever since, over the grassy steppes of Russia and on the
confines of the plains of Tartary. Sometimes they live almost alone,
especially on the barren wastes where they have been seen in winter,
scraping the snow off the herbage as our ponies do on Dartmoor. At
other times, as in the south of Russia, where they wander between the
Dnieper and the Don, they gather in vast herds and live a free life,
not fearing even the wolves, which they beat to the ground with their
hoofs. From one green oasis to another they travel over miles of
ground.

"A thousand horse--and none to ride!
With flowing tail, and flying mane,
Wide nostrils--never stretched by pain,
Mouths bloodless to the bit or rein,
And feet that iron never shod,
And flanks unscarred by spur or rod,
A thousand horse, the wild, the free,
Like waves that follow o'er the sea."[11]

[11] Byron's _Mazeppa_.

As I followed them in their course I fancied I saw troops of yet
another animal of the horse tribe, the "Kulan," or _Equus hemionus_,
which is a kind of half horse, half ass (p. 393), living on the
Kirghiz steppes of Tartary and spreading far beyond the range of the
Tarpan into Tibet. Here at last we have a truly wild animal, never
probably brought into subjection by man. The number of names he
possesses shows how widely he has spread. The Tartars call him
"Kulan," the Tibetans "Kiang," while the Mongolians give him the
unpronounceable name of "Dschiggetai." He will not submit to any of
them, but if caught and confined soon breaks away again to his old
life, a "free and fetterless creature."

No one has ever yet settled the question whether he is a horse or an
ass, probably because he represents an animal truly between the two.
His head is graceful, his body light, his legs slender and fleet, yet
his ears are long and ass-like; he has narrow hoofs, and a tail with a
tuft at the end like all the ass tribe; his color is a yellow brown,
and he has a short dark mane and a long dark stripe down his back as a
donkey has, though this last character you may also see in many of our
Devonshire ponies. Living often on the high plateaux, sometimes as
much as fifteen hundred feet above the sea, this "child of the
steppes" travels in large companies even as far as the rich meadows of
Central Asia; in summer wandering in green pastures, and in winter
seeking the hunger-steppes whe