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This was agreed to be an excellent plan, and, accordingly, the stock having been tethered out amidst the bunch-grass, the packs were unloaded, and the work of getting a camp in shape proceeded apace. In that part of New Mexico, although it is warm enough by day, nightfall brings with it a sharp chill. It was decided, therefore, to rig up the tents and sleep under their protection.
When the Rocky Mountains are entered, the only vegetation found is bunch-grass, so called because it grows in tufts, and the artemisia, or wild sage, an odorous shrub, which sometimes attains the magnitude of a tree, with a fibrous trunk as thick as a man's thigh, but is ordinarily a bush about two feet in height.
"I'm goin' with you and Peter," she finished. Something came to relieve the tenseness of the moment for Jolly Roger. Peter, nosing in a thick patch of bunch-grass, put out a huge snowshoe rabbit, and the two crashed in a startling avalanche through the young jackpines, Peter's still puppyish voice yelling in a high staccato as he pursued.
"He's the most durable rider on the range," remarked Hi Wingle, incident to one of his late assistant's meteoric departures from the saddle. "He wears good." One morning as Sundown was jogging along, engaged chiefly in watching his shadow bob up and down across the wavering bunch-grass, he saw that which appeared to be the back of a cow just over a rise.
He shortened his pace to a hand gallop, then to a mincing trot, and finally lowered his head and moved unobtrusively to the side with an absorbed interest in the first knot of bunch-grass that came his way. To force battle on such a foe was beneath the dignity of Alcatraz, but the whole herd had stopped, every bright eye watching him; perhaps there might be others more ambitious than the bay.
Dusty, well-beaten trails led down through these wide canyons, trails which undoubtedly gained the top of the level, rocky plateau a few miles back from the river. As is usual in a cattle country at the end of the summer season, the bunch-grass, close to the water supply which in this case happened to the river was nibbled close to the roots.
She flushed and looked straight ahead of her at the unfolding vistas that their passage revealed: at the undulating plains, green with bunch-grass that the rain of the night before had washed and reinvigorated; into gullies where weeds grew thick; peering into arroyos visible memories of washouts and cloudbursts; glimpsing barrancas as they flashed by; wondering at the depth of draws through which the trail led; shivering at the cacti a brilliant green after the rain for somehow they seemed to symbolize the spirit of the country they looked so grim, hardy, and mysterious with their ugly thorns that seemed to threaten and mock.
This was grave, and he knew it. But he could not or would not help it; he never knew quite which it was. But he did not eat. Instead of moving about with the other horses, nose to ground, mouthing the bunch-grass, he would mope by himself well away from the other horses, standing with head hanging and ears inert, all in motionless silence.
Throughout all this region from Glenora to Cassiar the grasses grow luxuriantly in openings in the woods and on dry hillsides where the trees seem to have been destroyed by fire, and over all the broad prairies above the timber-line. A kind of bunch-grass in particular is often four or five feet high, and close enough to be mowed for hay. I never anywhere saw finer or more bountiful wild pasture.
Long, rolling stretches of grass, topped with rocks and alkaline sand, gave back a blinding glare like the reflection of a summer sea, from which arose a haze of gray dust like ocean mists over distant reaches. Far to the South, a lone butte lifted its corrugated front in forbidding majesty. Beyond the summit of the butte was a greenish-brown plateau of sagebrush and bunch-grass.
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