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III--THE FIRST HORSEMAN
In the days before Ugh-lomi there was little trouble between the horses
and men. They lived apart--the men in the river swamps and thickets, the
horses on the wide grassy uplands between the chestnuts and the pines.
Sometimes a pony would come straying into the clogging marshes to make a
flint-hacked meal, and sometimes the tribe would find one, the kill of a
lion, and drive off the jackals, and feast heartily while the sun was
high. These horses of the old time were clumsy at the fetlock and
dun-coloured, with a rough tail and big head. They came every
spring-time north-westward into the country, after the swallows and
before the hippopotami, as the grass on the wide downland stretches
grew long. They came only in small bodies thus far, each herd, a
stallion and two or three mares and a foal or so, having its own stretch
of country, and they went again when the chestnut-trees were yellow and
the wolves came down the Wealden mountains.
It was their custom to graze right out in the open, going into cover
only in the heat of the day. They avoided the long stretches of thorn
and beechwood, preferring an isolated group of trees void of ambuscade,
so that it was hard to come upon them. They were never fighters; their
heels and teeth were for one another, but in the clear country, once
they were started, no living thing came near them, though perhaps the
elephant might have done so had he felt the need. And in those days man
seemed a harmless thing enough. No whisper of prophetic intelligence
told the species of the terrible slavery that was to come, of the whip
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