Apart from the brief storm which Rowdy had brought with him, there had been
no snow worth considering. Always the chill winds shaved the barren land
from the north, or veered unexpectedly, and blew dry warmth from the
southwest; but never the snow for which the land yearned. Wind, and bright
sunlight, and more wind, and hypocritical, drifting clouds, and more sun;
lean cattle walking, walking, up-hill and down coulee, nose to the dry
ground, snipping the stray tufts where should be a woolly carpet of sweet,
ripened grasses, eating wildrose bushes level with the sod, and wishing
there was only an abundance even of them; drifting uneasily from hilltop to
farther hilltop, hunger-driven and gaunt, where should be sleek content.
When they sought to continue their quest beyond the river, and the weaker
bogged at its muddy edge, Rowdy and Pink and the Silent One would ride out,
and with their ropes drag them back ignominiously to solid ground and the
very doubtful joy of living.

May Day found the grass-land brown and lifeless, with a chill wind blowing
over it. The cattle wandered as before except that knock-kneed little calves
trailed beside their lean mothers and clamored for full stomachs.

The Cross L cattle bore the brunt of the range famine, because Eagle Creek
Smith was a stockman of the old school. His cattle must live on the open
range, because they always had done so. Other men bought or leased large
tracts of grass-land, and fenced them for just such an emergency, but not
he. It is true that he had two or three large fields, as Miss Conroy had
told Rowdy, but it was his boast that all the hay he raised was eaten by his
saddlehorses, and that all the fields he owned were used solely for horse
pastures. The open range was the place for cattle and no Cross L critter
ever fed inside a wire fence.