One day a wind came down out of the north. It carried fine snowflakes which swirled along the ground and curled upward on the lee side of rocks. Toward night the storm thickened until it became a driving blizzard riding a shrieking wind. The horses turned their tails to the lash of the storm and drifted slowly south, led by one of the old mares. That night they bunched close together in a deep canyon. They crowded under a projecting lip of sandstone where the wind and the snow did not strike them. Fine white particles sifted down, covering their shaggy coats and making them look like white horses as they stood with their heads down waiting for the blizzard to blow itself out. The shelter they had found had been formed centuries before by the action of wind and water on the layers of rock forming the crust of the desert. The upper layer was hard and did not weather away as fast as the lower layers. Thus a great, projecting roof was formed with a ceiling that sloped back under the cliff. A thousand years earlier, brown men had passed that way. They had halted in the bed of the canyon and looked up at the great cave. They had held a council and decided to build a city under the rim. Those brown cliff dwellers had built houses of hewn stone, room upon room, like apartments. Their masonry still stood, back under the rim. The ceremonial kivas built under the ground in circular form with laced log roofs had caved in but the tiers of houses stood against the cliff, their open windows staring into the canyon. The brown men had vanished, down into the canyon, south toward the plains, and west toward the great ocean, but their homes remained. The wild horses saw the houses piled story upon story, the staring windows and the heaps of broken pottery decorated with strange designs. They were not afraid of the dead houses because the man smell had long since vanished, carried away by the wind and the heat, toward the south and the west. At night an old lobo wolf halted his bachelor pack on a high rim above the ancient city. The wind lashed and tore at the gray bodies as though trying to tear them from the rocky cliff. The old lobo bared his fangs and lifted his muzzle. He sounded a savage paean of howls and high, dismal calls and his sons joined in the chorus. Their howls rang down the wind curling along the face of the cliff to where the wild horses stood. The mares jerked up their heads, and the big chestnut snorted savagely. But the howls of the pack had none of the savage cry of the kill. The gray ones were defying the storm, daring it to sweep them from their lofty crag. They were answering an age-old urge to challenge the elements, to dare them to do their worst. After a while the old lobo led his sons in a wild chase down the ridge. They leaped along, riding the fierce wind, snapping and snarling eagerly.