The high mesa was far across the mountain on the southern edge of Major Howard’s range lands. The old mares had led the band along the backbone of the continental divide and down into the lower valleys. Midnight’s wild instinct led him unerringly toward the place of his birth and early colthood. All that first night the two horses moved steadily south and east, climbing upward, following the twisting course of the divide. At dawn Midnight and the pinto fed close to a stand of balsam and spruce. Five mule deer and a band of elk fed on the same meadow. Midnight had a feeling that the deer and the elk would take alarm if anyone approached, or it might have been his early friendship with the old timber-line buck that made him select the spot as a feed ground. The deer and the elk paid little attention to the two horses. They recognized them as friends and harmless. Neither of them was tainted by man smell or the reek of a saddle blanket pungent with leather oil. Midnight had learned another of the lessons of the wild, a lesson that had long since been mastered by the elk and the deer. He would feed at dawn and at dusk, when the dim light made rifle sights blur and when the eyes of the upright walking killer play tricks on him. All other wild things had learned that this was the law. The sunlighted meadows were death traps by day, but in the soft dusk of early morning or evening there was safety. The big killers obeyed the rule but they did it as much because their prey came out of hiding at that time as for protection. The band of elk was headed by a lordly bull who was master of the ten cows by virtue of his power and savage willingness to battle any other bull who challenged him. As soon as his own sons grew to the age where their antlers began to spread into sweeping weapons and their desires led them to notice the cows he drove them out of the band. They were then lone bulls for a time until they were able to win a harem of their own. Nor was he satisfied with defense of his cows. He challenged the world to come and try to wrest supremacy from him. His battle moods came in midsummer and fall when his shoulder veins were swelling with hot blood, and his antlers had hardened to polished lances of bone.