American railway bridges have no pathway, and when one leads a horse, stepping from tie to tie, he thinks he has five legs. With two legs down, and a train expected or a bear sauntering ahead, he looks so damned patient that one begins to realise an obscure trait in his character which needs explaining. It is easier to take him across bridges than to ride or lead him through a waterfall. He prefers a waterfall to a corduroy-timbered swamp road when it happens to be flooded and afloat. I have tried him with quicksands and moss {63} holes and glare ice on the mountain tops. Because I cannot swim I have stayed in the saddle swimming lakes, rapids, and rivers which run sand. Still worse are beaver swamps under a tangle of deadfall timber, and old avalanches. All these and sundry other kinds of evil ground a horse accepts as fate so long as he trusts his man. It is not his business. It is the man's affair. One begins to think that, like a savage, he lacks continuous purpose of his own and is merely the meek victim of his destiny. And that is exactly where the man is fooled. When a horse really wants grass, water, or to get home, he rivals the white man in sustained purpose, and does his own job with an intelligence and courage which he never gives to that of his employer. In other words, the difficulties of travel between grass and water gave to the ancient ponies the highest possible qualities of endurance, valour and skill. These qualities are latent in every horse. There is a more important lesson to be learned by practical study of wild range. The range has two types of herbage, the bunch grass and the thorned or aromatic bushes. The bunch grass is the staple food, the bushes a reserve in time of drought. The use {64} of the reserve food has taught the horse to adapt his stomach to a change of diet. [Sidenote: The trail to water] Compared with farm land the range has very little food to the acre, supports only a small population of grazing beasts, and, in its distances between food and water, has trained the horse to a deal of exercise as well as to endurance of thirst. On the other hand the needs of travelling for water and of grazing have reduced his time for sleep to about three and a half hours per day, which he takes standing, however weary, unless he is quite confident as to safety and kind treatment. In brutally managed stables horses are apt to sleep standing, because they are not off guard.