The Pastures of Beyond (12 page)

The ZX was then owned by Kern County Land and

Cattle Company down in Bakersfield, California, and butted up to my uncle's ranch. It was a big tradition-bound outfit with a million and a half acres of land, including the twenty-three-thousand-acre Sycan Marsh ranch. I rode down out of the hills to Sycan headquarters and was greeted by the sight of over a hundred fine registered broodmares that had all been bred to a jack and were nursing mule colts.

I fed my horses and found an empty cot in the bunkhouse. One by one cowboys kept drifting in and, tired from a long day's work, lay on their cots rolling Bull Durham cigarettes and waiting for supper. A few of them did leatherwork, mending tack and splicing reatas that had been broken in the day's work. We washed carefully in enameled basins filled from a hand pump and threw the gray wash water off the bunkhouse porch into the dust.

There were several beef carcasses hanging in a shed near the cookhouse, and I wandered over as the cook took a canvas off one of the beeves and commenced cutting it all up into great piles of steak. To cowboys everything was steak, and no other cuts were edible. There was no meat rationing here on the ZX, and the war seemed very far away.

Before daylight, we went out into the chill of morning, ate breakfast at the cookhouse, saddled our horses, topped them off, and rode out across the Sycan River to gather up a big herd of ZX cows and calves. These we herded up into a fence corner so that the buckaroo boss could work the herd for dry cows. Not trailed by suckling calves, these cows tended to be in better condition than wet cows nursing babies, and were slated for market.

My uncle's cows had all been dehorned as calves and were uniform in color and body. The ZX cows had long sharp horns and were big, rangy cattle as wild as deer. It took good cowboys and fast horses to keep up with them, but we were a skilled crew even if most of us were too old, too young, or unfit for military service. For part of the morning the work went slowly but well. We sat quietly on our mounts, holding the herd until the boss came at us with a dry cow, and then we would let that designated animal slip by and hold the rest.

Midmorning a rider came out from headquarters, riding a fancy horse and outfit. It was one of the big bosses who had just arrived from Bakersfield on an inspection trip and wanted to help. The cowboss stuck the man out on the edge with the rest of us waddies to hold the herd and went back to cutting out drys.

To the big boss, however, cutting out the drys seemed like a lot more fun than holding the herd, and pretty soon he spotted a dry cow and rode into the herd to get it. The cows were nervous and melted away before his strange horse, but soon he got the dry cow started out of the bunch. At the edge of the herd, however, the cow refused to leave and ran back to the others.

Again and again, the man tried the cow, and each time the cow would make a fool of him. By now the herd was getting restless with all that activity, and we were having a hard time holding them. I could see that the cowboss was getting a little red in the face over this breach of cowboy etiquette. It was his job to cut the drys and no one else's. The herd was getting ready to explode when the cowboss rode over to the boss from Bakersfield, touched the brim of his hat politely, and said, “Mr. Smith, why don't you just hold on to that cow and let us boys drive the herd away.”

A few months later, in an act of corporate fiddling, the management in California sent up a young man named Ray Stansfield to take over from the old boss, Buster Vaughn. Ray was short, handsome, a graduate of Cal Poly, and had a good understanding of the cattle industry. He was teamed up with Rich Bradbury, a big, tall beanpole of a man who had been a cowboss on the ZX since before I could remember.

In areas where heavy auto traffic passes through fences, ranchers put in auto gates or cattle guards, which are often made of railroad irons placed over a shallow pit. Cars can drive over the rails, but cattle hooves slip between the gaps in them. On dirt roads, the pits beneath the rails require frequent cleaning. I was digging out a cattle guard one day east of Yamsi when Rich and Ray came along, driving a ZX pickup. I had the road blocked and made them wait. They sat bemused, watching me make the dirt fly. I might have been running my uncle's outfit by then and was sweating hard, but they were bosses of a really big outfit and didn't do physical work. I tried to con them into giving me a little help, but they didn't even have a shovel in their pickup. It reminded me that on a small outfit, one did everything; on a big outfit, you were highly specialized.

Bradbury must have said a few good words about me to Ray, for he invited me over to his house in Paisley for dinner. He and his wife, Ocie, lived in a great big ZX house. I arrived for dinner and nearly froze to death in the dining room. All I remember was that the wind blew so hard through the house, it kept blowing out the lanterns, and there were whitecaps in my coffee cup.

The ZX was famous for having a bunch of cranky, spoiled old saddle horses that were a pain to ride. They could kick your overshoes off in the stirrup, buck you off miles from anywhere after a hard day's ride, and were just as dangerous to a cowboy on the ground as in the saddle. Paying extra to have those horses ridden didn't make much sense to Ray Stansfield, since there were too many good, honest, gentle horses to be had. The former boss, Buster Vaughn, was still there helping with the transition of power when Ray ordered that every sour old outlaw of a horse on the ranch be sold. He contacted Mac Barbour, a rodeo stock contractor from Klamath Falls, and arranged to sell the horses.

When Ray mentioned to Buster Vaughn that he had a deal with Mac Barbour, Buster looked at him and grinned. “That will be something to see,” he said. “There's no way a man can do business with Mac Barbour without getting taken. Absolutely no way!”

Ray Stansfield bridled a little. “That remains to be seen,” he said. “I appreciate the advice, but Bradbury and I will watch every move the man makes, and we'll weigh up the horses ourselves on ZX scales. How's the man going to cheat us?”

Buster Vaughn just leaned back in his chair and grinned. The next day, Mac Barbour showed up with his stock trucks and a group of cowboys. Barbour was a little, short, bustling man with pink cheeks and a nervous laugh, who knew as much about bucking horses as any rodeo promoter in the country. He would sell out his string to someone like Gene Autry, then come up with horses just as good within months of the sale. He got some of his best horses by lending Indians on the reservation money, then collecting the debt in horses.

He climbed out of his fancy car and shook hands with everyone. To Mac no man was a stranger.

“Ray,” he said to Stansfield. “Your boys are awfully busy, and I've brought my boys with me. They all have their saddles with them; if you'll just lend us some saddle horses, we'll do all the work and run those spoiled horses in for you. When we get them in, you and Bradbury run the scales. We'll weigh up, then I'll hand you over the cash, and we'll be off down the road.”

Ray flashed a triumphant look at Buster Vaughn, who sat on the corral fence and watched the procedure without saying a word.

The Barbour cowboys were mostly kids off the reservation and a good bunch of hands. They borrowed some ZX horses, saddled them up, and soon had the bunch of outlaws to be sold trotting toward the corrals.

Bradbury and Stansfield stood at the gate, counted the horses into the corral, cut bunch after bunch onto the scale, weighed them carefully, and balanced the scale after each and every draft. Everything went smoothly. Barbour paid for the horses in cash, and pretty soon the horses had been loaded and the trucks disappeared down the road toward Lakeview.

“Well, sir.” Stansfield grinned as he approached the old boss. “That whole operation went smooth as silk. Rich and I watched that little scoundrel like hawks and made sure he

couldn't get away with a thing. I told you we were too smart for him!”

“Oh, everything went fine,” Buster Vaughn said, “up to a point. While you were weighing up those horses so carefully, Barbour's men loaded up the saddle horses his men had borrowed, and by now they are safely in California.” According to some, Mac Barbour sold those ZX outlaws in Los Angeles as gentle horses, and for a time, you could see dude riders flying clear up over the skyline of the city.

As for the ZX, with the selling of those horses, the operation succumbed to modern times. A few months later, they decided that work teams were obsolete. I bought their draft teams just to give them a home, and used them to feed cattle. Their old wooden-wheeled freight wagons, that had once freighted supplies from Lakeview to Paisley across the desert, I bought for twenty-five dollars each. The wagons were considered junk by the new managers, but they still stand on the ranch at Yamsi. To us they are a precious bit of history.

Chapter Twelve

I
F MY UNCLE WAS PROUD OF THE WORK I DID
, or the way I handled horses, he was damned careful not to let it show. Sometimes he would be standing on the street corner on Main Street, Klamath Falls, talking to his friend and banker, Ernie Bubb, and would be bragging on me as I approached behind him. I would catch only the tail end of a compliment before he saw me and froze up. Likely he would restart the conversation with a statement about how worthless my generation was, and how I had rodeos on the brain and was bound to get crippled for life even while my father languished in a wheelchair, a millstone around my mother's neck.

It was not that my uncle hated rodeos. He just didn't want me involved in anything but ranching. He thought Jerry Ambler was great. In time, Buck came to visit the Montgomery Ward's saddle department with increasing frequency and talk to Jerry about balance riding, a style where a rider rode loose instead of gripping the swells of the saddle with his knees. It took balance, not strength.

The old man never got on a horse himself, but he decided that he'd have Jerry design a saddle that would make a balance rider out of me. I was pleased that he thought of me, but when my uncle came over to the corral one day and dumped the new saddle on the grass beside me, I had all I could do to keep from laughing. The saddle had a nineteen-inch tree, in other words measured nineteen inches between the swells in front and the cantle behind. When I sat in it and brought up my knees to grip the swells of the saddle, I missed the swells entirely. I should have had it out with the old man right then and there, but he jumped into his Chrysler and was gone in a cloud of dust.

I was breaking some seven-year-old colts at the time which were a little old to train easily. When I could, I kept them from bucking, since they were big enough and strong enough to put me on the ground. The task was tough enough without riding a saddle that I couldn't grip. But my uncle was the boss, and I put my saddle in the barn and dropped the new rigging on a big bay colt that was my favorite in the bunch.

The leather was stiff and new, and the colt took an instant dislike to the noise it made, but in time the horse settled down. After a half hour of riding in the round corral, I rode out onto the range, intent on putting some miles on the colt to tire him out. It was just beginning to snow as I started up the ridge toward Taylor Butte and the Sycan country.

Halfway up the hill, the colt suddenly went insane and blew up. He bucked under trees, over windfalls, getting better at bucking with every jump, squealing in anger every time he hit the ground. Sometimes I would get him stopped, but as soon as I urged him to walk he would start again. I was riding on balance because I had to; there was no way I could grip that plunging saddle with my knees.

Just then the colt smashed into a tree, and the branches smacked my face, temporarily blinding me. In a split second I was on the ground, and as the colt whirled to kick at me, he jerked the lead rope from my hands and galloped off through the trees.

The snow was falling fast and furious as I trailed him through the woods. Moments later the colt circled and came up from behind me, following his own tracks. I tried to stop him and grab my lead rope, but I missed and the animal was gone, nickering wildly to the horse he thought was ahead of him. Soon snow obscured the tracks entirely, and I walked back to the ranch rather than be trapped in the woods by darkness.

The colt had been born on the BK, and it was natural for a horse to head back to the range where he was born. I called Paddock at the BK and told him to leave gates open so that the horse could come in on the ranch, but the animal never showed. Years later, a logger found the bones of the horse and the remnants of that saddle at the base of a fortyfoot cliff, over which the animal had plunged in the snowy darkness.

I dreaded facing my uncle. His first words to me were, “How do you like that new saddle?” I had to explain to him that the horse had bucked me off and neither the saddle nor the horse had been recovered. He might at least have asked me if I'd gotten hurt, but instead he went storming off to town. It wasn't hard, the next time I saw him, to tell him that I was joining the army.

I had hardly given him notice when we were scheduled to move several hundred steers from a pasture in Fort Klamath to the railroad stockyards in Chiloquin. To get to the yards we had to cross the tracks and had been given clearance by the stationmaster. We were delayed in crossing the bridge over the Williamson by some Indian boys who demanded ten dollars before they would get out of the way and let the animals pass. An unscheduled wartime freight train roared down from the north and smashed into the herd just as they were crossing the tracks, killing sixty of the animals. I felt sorry for the old man then.

Waiting to hear from the army, I helped ship some four thousand cows to California and planned to drive them through the town of Williams west into the hills, where Buck had leased several square miles of pasture. Buck loved fresh eggs and had a pretty flock of Rhode Island pullets just ready to lay. As I loaded the ranch pickup and got ready to drive to California to receive the cattle, I crated the hens for him and placed them on my load. Somewhere along the way the door of the cage came open in the darkness, and when I got to Williams there was not a single hen left.