They carried food and fodder only for a week, so they dared allow but two days for the actual hunting.  At dawn they had finished breakfast and were riding up into the rolling hills to the west.  Brown hills against a pale blue morning sky, then a sudden flood of crimson against a high horizon line.  Against this crimson, a row of grazing horses!

“We’ll separate now,” said Charleton.  “Do like we always do.  Pick out one horse and ride him down.  They will be awful soft after such a winter.  Don’t get side-tracked from one horse to another.  They’d kill the Moose off at that.  He’s getting pretty old for this kind of thing.  I’ll see you at camp to-night.”

Douglas dropped into a valley which twisted under the hill where the wild horses were grazing.  Here he dismounted and, leading his horse, began to snake his way upward through the sage-brush which covered the hillside.  When he was within a hundred yards of the herd, he paused.  There were fifteen horses, of every kind and color.  Douglas selected a jet black mare with a wonderful tail and mane.  Then he turned to mount.  Charleton, at this moment, appeared on the far side of the hill.  The Moose nickered, and the herd tossed heads and broke.

The mare dropped over the east side of the hill as if she had been shot.  Douglas turned the Moose after her and they hurled down the steep slope with thundering hoofs.  For some moments, the Moose sought to turn hither and yon as different horses flashed across his vision.  But Doug held him to the black mare, and once the Moose realized that she alone was their quarry Douglas was able to give almost all his attention to watching her strategy.

She did not show fight nor did she double on her tracks.  Fleet as a bird, she flew over the hills, dropping into canyons, leaping draws, jumping rock heaps, until little by little she drew ahead of the Moose until she became no larger than a black coyote against the yellow hills.  But Douglas would not allow the Moose to break from his swift trot.  As long as he could keep the mare in sight he was content.

The sun was sailing high and the Moose was winded when the mare, cantering painfully along the ridge of a hill, stumbled and fell.  She was up again at once but her gait slowed, perceptibly.  In less than a half-hour Doug was within roping distance of her.  As the lariat sung above her head, she half turned, gave Doug a look of anguished surprise, leaped sideways and disappeared up a crevice in a canyon wall.  Douglas spurred the Moose in after her.  They were in a little valley, thick grown with dwarf willow.  The mare was not to be seen.

Now began a search that persisted till the Moose’s sturdy legs were trembling.  Douglas threaded the valley again and again.  There was no exit save through the one crevice by which they had entered.  He had all but concluded that the mare had been swallowed up by the earth when he found her trail, turning up the south wall.  He spurred the Moose upward, and there in a clump of cedars he found her hiding.  With a laugh he again twirled his rope and it slipped over the tossing black head.  As the Moose turned and the rope tightened, the mare gave a scream that was like that of a human being in dire agony.  For a moment she dragged back, then, head drooping, trembling in every muscle, she followed in.