Covered with nature-made ruins and magnificent rock
structures, as this section is, it is not entirely without utility. It
is a grazing country. Great numbers of contented cattle, white-faced,
with red and white, or black and white patches of colour on their
well-filled hides, were found in the open spaces between the
sheer-walled cliffs. Dusty, well-beaten trails led down through these
wide canyons, trails which undoubtedly gained the top of the level,
rocky plateau a few miles back from the river. As is usual in a cattle
country at the end of the summer season, the bunch-grass, close to the
water supply--which in this case happened to the river--was nibbled
close to the roots. The cattle only came here to drink, then travelled
many miles, no doubt, to the better grazing on the upper plateaus. The
sage, always gray, was grayer still, with dust raised by many passing
herds. There was a band of range horses too, those splendid wild-eyed
animals with kingly bearing, and wind-blown tails and manes, lean like
a race-horse, strong-muscled and tough-sinewed, pawing and neighing,
half defiant and half afraid of the sight of men, the only thing alive
to which they pay tribute.
It is a never ending source of wonder, to those unacquainted with the
semi-arid country, how these animals can exist in a land which, to
them, seems utterly destitute and barren. To many such, a meadow
carpeted with blue grass or timothy is the only pasture on which
grazing horses or grazing cattle can exist; the dried-out looking
tufts of bunch-grass, scattered here and there or sheltered at the
roots of the sage, mean nothing; the grama-grass hidden in the
grease-wood is unnoticed or mistaken for a weed.
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