Jim Kane - J P S Brown (43 page)

The two men saved the best steaks and the meat of the
head, heart, liver, kidneys, and the little marrow gut to be eaten
fresh. They put the bucket of blood on the fire to boil. Later they
would fry the blood with onion. They cleaned the paunch and sliced it
up and put it with the meat of the jaws and tongue and cleaned
jellylike hooves with the outer shell removed. This would make
menudo, the drunkard's soup.

They lay live coals out evenly on the ground and
sliced liver, heart, and kidneys into long thin slices and lay them
on the coals to broil. They wrapped the steaks and ribs in several
layers of canvas tarp so they would be able to broil them later.
Finally, they boned all the rest of the meat and sliced it up in
large, nearly transparent sheets, for jerky. They would take a big
piece of pulp and start slicing on one side, extending the pulp into
a sheet. They salted it heavily, covered it with black pepper, and
hung it up to dry. The sheets hung so thin the sunlight could be seen
through them.

Three more of the cattle died during quarantine. They
had been too needy when they arrived at the stubble field. Kane and
the Lion, with vitamins and drugs, the soft loop of their ropes,
their eyes sore and red from the glare of the sun on the yellow
fields, cared for, and brought the remainder of the cattle through
the 60 days.

At the end of the quarantine the spotted steer had
strengthened and rid himself of his warts and ringworm. He had found
the bearded grain heads where they stood in bunches missed by the
combines or where they lay in piles of chaff the machines had
deposited in the fields. He also found his old sustenance, the
pechita
of mesquite
and the bark of the
palo verde
trees growing on the edges of the fields.

His companion, Old Bull, had not fared so well. The
teeth weren't good. He did well to survive, for he was getting past
his best ability to adapt to new surroundings and feeds. He didn't
take to the hard, bearded grain in the glaring fields. He preferred
to stay in the shade of the trees and pick at the
palo
verde
bark and
pechita
.

The cattle were driven to the railroad. They were
loaded on freight cars again. They traveled all one night and were
left on a siding at a junction to wait for another train that would
pull them to the border. The cattle stood on the cars the next day
and the next night. During the night at the siding the Old Bull tired
and lay down. The car was tightly filled with cattle. The old muley's
tired bones chilled. When the train lurched to a banging start in the
morning, cattle ground their hooves over Old Bull but he was able to
get to his feet. A big red ox leaned on him and Old Bull was unable
to raise his head from under the belly of the ox. Had he been blessed
with horns he could have made room to lift his head. As it was he
stood there stiffly tired and badly injured, his neck stiffening, his
head hanging more each mile. But he held his feet through the
swaying, staggering, aching day and when the train arrived at the
border he walked off the car unaided when the door opened onto a new
chute at new corrals in strange surroundings once again.

Old Bull tried to drink
the unfamiliar water but the pain in his sides and bones discouraged
him. He shuffled to the corner where his companion, the
brown-and-white spotted steer, lay, and chose a place beside him. He
knelt his sore knees and slowly tucked his hind legs neatly up under
his belly, lowered the old hind end softly, passively, to the ground,
and closed his eyes for the last time. During the night his head
slipped quietly over, the bug eyes half opened, the legs stretched
out, he lay flat on his side, and his tough old spirit left him. He
was no longer merchandise to anyone. In the morning Kane found him
dead that way and remembered when he had first seen the old
dome-headed thing at the El Naranjo roundup in the Sierra Madre. The
cattle had been two days without feed. Kane had closed the lids on
the water trough after the cattle had watered out on unloading the
day before. The cattle would not feed or water now until they arrived
on the American side of the border after being weighed for the
customs duties. The brown-and-white spotted steer was hustled into a
chute where boards were shoved in front and behind him, separating
him from the other cattle. Men in white coats scratched him over with
their fingers searching for warts, ringworm, abcesses, parasites. His
eyes were examined. He danced in the chute. He poked his nose through
the cracks between the boards of the chute searching for a way out.
After his examination he was weighed with ten other cattle. He was
dipped again, his last dip, and finally passed for export to the
United States.

That afternoon, he was loaded on railroad cars again.
The cars were still for hours. When they finally rolled they went
only as far as the American side of the border where the cattle were
unloaded again and weighed for American duties. In the American
corrals they were finally fed and watered. The cattle rolled again
after one night's rest. On the eighth day the cattle left the border,
the brown-and-white spotted steer was crowded into the corner of a
car. The deck was slippery there, and in one jolting start of the car
the massive press of the cattle lifted him clear off his feet in the
tired crush of their falling weight against him. He felt his sides
give, his hip bones slammed and were pressed into the side of the
car. A horn went in his flank, his brisket drove into the end of the
car, his head bent back to the hip. Mercifully the car jolted again,
backward, and the mass of cattle stumbled forward, releasing him. He
got three feet on the deck but one front foot hooked over the neck of
the steer that had gored him in the flank. The goring steer lost his
balance when the train started again and the spotted steer's hind
legs skittered on the slick deck. He fell on his side in the corner
where he remained in a state of trampled, stood-upon,
half-consciousness in a cold urined mud bed. He had become one of the
unfortunates. Later in the passive bovine enduring of his predicament
he smelled the pine country where he and his mother had grazed in
peace during the spring and summer months of his calfhood. Suddenly,
there were no hooves standing on him and he was aware he was alone in
the car.

Boy Decker had been standing outside counting the
steers off car 2168. According to his list there should have been 50
head of cattle on the car.

"
We're one short," he shouted to his
father, a stocky man in a Stetson hat, who stood on the loading
chute, a grave look on his face. He examined the list in his hand.

"
Look in the car, son," he said, watching
the cattle as they passed into the corral. I

Boy stepped into the muck of the car. He saw the
smudged lump of the brown-and-white spotted steer lying flat in the
corner. One dead, the boy thought. He walked over to the comer. The
steer's deep eye was clear. It looked at him. The boy called to his
father. The big man came stamping into the car. He stood over the
steer, his new boots buried in the sand, urine, manure slush. The boy
was passing his hand over the steer's eye. The steer blinked at the
hand. The big man pulled the tail out of the slop and lifted on it.
The boy picked up the head and without speaking the man and his son
tried several times to lift the steer to his feet. The steer could
not find his legs. Each time they cleared the deck the legs swung
numbly beneath him. The only life in the steer was in his eyes. They
kept blinking with the effort of trying to find the legs. The man
dragged the steer by the tail across the slush, out the door, and
down over the boards in the loading chute to the dry dirt of the
corral.

"
Well, there he is, the last of the thousand,"
the boy said.

"
Try to get him up," the cattleman said. He
went away to look after the feeding and watering of the rest of the
cattle. The boy bent the steer's knees up under his brisket and
lifted his hind end by the tail so that the legs rested under the
belly. In this way the steer could sit up with his legs under him,
his head off the ground. The head and horns wobbled heavily, barely
above the ground. The steer kept his head up. The ears investigated
the man above him. The dry muzzle, from which drained the residue of
pneumonia, sniffed the pine air. The tongue made a feeble effort to
clean the nostrils. The teeth ground in the head.

The boy pushed the steer over on his dry side and
rubbed the side and legs that had been down in the car. He worked the
legs, bending and straightening them briskly. He sat the steer up
again and lifted on the tail. The steer finally stood on his hind
legs. The boy lifted on the horns and the steer stood up. The boy got
away from him. The steer staggered a few steps, smelled the water in
a trough in the corral, and walked to it, the legs swinging fragilely
under him, miraculously not catching on each other. The steer drank
sparingly at the trough. He stood at the trough a long moment,
smelling the boards of the corral and looking around. Later the boy
came for him in a truck and loaded him with other weak steers.

He was unloaded in a large pen used in winter to
protect a haystack. The boy stuck him several times with a needle and
shoved large pills down his throat before he turned him loose in the
pen. The steer watched the boy drive away in the truck. When he was
sure the boy had gone he walked out into the pen. The grass in the
pen was two feet high. He did not know what the lush green at his
feet was. He smelled the over-whelmingly delicious aroma of tender
grass but he had never seen green grass in this abundance and did not
know what it was. He walked to the southern side of the pen and
looked over the barbed wire fence. This was the way back to the
Sierra Madre. The sun warmed his back and brought strength and
appetite to him. He bent his head to eat and found his muzzle nearly
smothered meadow grass. He swiped out a sticky feverish tongue to the
tender stems and began to chew. As he ate, his mouthfuls got larger
and the tongue and the jaws came unstuck, more vigorous.

The steer ate and rested in the pen for a week. The
boy watched his progress. Each evening he brought water to the steer.
He noticed the steer slept only on places he had grazed clean. He was
hoarding his groceries. He did not mess up his clean grass. Each day
by early afternoon he would be forced to lie down, his paunch full
and bulging on the ground, unable to pack the bulk around or to cram
in one more tongueful. He would lie there ruminating and chewing his
cud until he shifted the weight around in his stomachs before he
could go at the green grass again.

A week after they arrived at the ranch all the cattle
were gathered and weighed. They had filled an average of 80 pounds
per head above their duty weights.

When the brown-and-white spotted steer finished the
feed in the pen he was recovered enough to be turned out with the
rest of the Mexican steers in the big meadows. He had been in the
meadows two months, October breezes were bringing the first smells
and skies of snow when Jim Kane and Juan Vogel of the El Naranjo
ranch visited Wyoming at the invitation of Mr. Decker.

The day the visitors went out to see the cattle was
dark and overcast. The cattlemen drove around the meadows in a
pickup. The gentle steers paid no attention to the machine. They
moved reluctantly out of its way, too intent on eating. To Kane and
Juan even the older bulls and oxen appeared to have grown several
inches in height and breadth. The brown-and-white spotted steer
lowered his head and shook his horns in mock ferocity at the grill of
the pickup as it approached him. Mr. Decker stopped the pickup. The
steer's coat was growing with the change of weather. The coat was
spotlessly clean, the brown spots clearly distinct on the tidy white
of the coat. The black muzzle glistened with beads of healthy
moisture. The horns had filled with marrow and shone as if polished.
The dark crescents underlined luminous eyes that curiously watched
the men over the hood of the pickup. When the pickup began to move
again the spotted steer challenged. As the machine moved forward the
steer backed rapidly and lowered his horns to the grill. Then when he
couldn't back fast enough he whirled, kicked, and ran ahead of the
machine, bucking and twisting and shaking his horns.

 "
I remember when we gathered that steer,"
Kane said.

"
He was in the last bunch we shipped up here."