Wild Cow Tales (14 page)

It took me another week to drift down into the far southwestern part of the hill country to the Marion pasture. This pasture had about 9,000 acres in it laying east and west the long way. The east end of the pasture joined the river. More than 7,000 acres of this trace was in two long, deep, rough canyons that joined at the river and ran back up into the pasture toward the prairie. About 300 acres on the west end of the tract was cut off from the main body of the land by a country road. It was up on a high prairie and had a windmill and an old shed-type barn about twenty feet long and twelve feet deep facing south that was built out of rock with a tin roof on it. There were some small corrals there around the windmill, and this shed was where I made my camp.

This old rock shed hadn’t been used in a long time, and I could tell at a glance that there was several wasp nests and maybe some other kind of varmints in those old rock walls. The rock walls had been laid in wall fashion and were about two feet thick, but they weren’t put together
with any cement. I had had experience in campin’ in old barns, and knew that I might have some company there, so first thing I did was to gather some loose dry lumber and take my ax and cut some green live-oak limbs and small bushes and build up a smoke fire on the south side, which was the front of this old shed. There was a little breeze blowin’ and I fanned the smoke back up in under the shed. I drove out a wad of wasps and bees about as big as a full toe sack. I went around on the back side and killed two rattlesnakes as they crawled out of this rock wall; I saw a coon leaving off at the east side. With this little job of house-cleanin’ finished, I made my camp in under the shed, scraped the coals up from this first fire, fed and watered my horses and cooked some supper, and went to bed a little after dark. I needed to get some rest and get myself located ’cause tomorrow I intended to see that $1,000 worth of cattle that I owed for.

Next mornin’ I saddled a horse and decided to ride the outside fences of the big pasture and get the lay of the land before I begun to outsmart this bunch of outlaw cattle. De Witt was right when he told me it was rougher country than I was used to workin’. The canyons had a rimrock around the top of ’em where they broke off from the prairie, and then a deep sloping wall that disappeared under a dense growth of live oak, mesquite, and cedar. As I rode down the canyon wall on the south side and started around the east side, I ran into an awful lot of dead timber, some standin’ and some that had fallen. This was goin’ to add to the roughness of the rock and canyons
that I was going to have to ride over to catch wild cattle.

I saw the brush shake in front of me a few times during the mornin’ and just caught a glimpse of some great big cattle. They were sure wild and stayed out of sight in the dense underbrush of those great big canyons. This was going to be a rough job ’cause these cattle didn’t have to leave the canyons to come to water. Water was plentiful up and down the river and there were springs up and down the canyons, so there was going to be no central point that I could wait for and trap or rope these cattle. It seemed that they had been run and hunted a lot and were allergic to the sight of a man on horseback.

I topped out on the northwest corner of the prairie and rode back to my camp to fix dinner and try to get some bright idea about how to catch these wild cattle.

That afternoon I went down in the pasture and made lariat-rope snares over the most common traveled trails. I took time to wrap grapevines and other leaves around the lariat ropes and hang the loop open over the trails with limbs and string, then run the main rope back to the trunk of a tree and took a big double half hitch on the trunk of a tree. That would be a knot that I could undo and it would be one that the steers couldn’t get away with the rope on. I made seven of these snares before sundown and went back to camp. Of course the cowboy is subject to wishful thinking, and I just thought that I could nearly catch enough cattle out of this pasture in a few days, with snares, to pay back the money and the rest of them would be profit.

I rode out on the edge of the rimrock by sunup the next morning and studied the brush in the canyon below. I did see the color of hair mingled among the trees on some different bunches of cattle, but by the time I could ride to them they would have heard me and would be long gone. I saw some bushes moving where one of my snares were, so I kicked my horse off the edge of the rimrock and started to that particular spot. I heard some bawlin’ and carryin’ on before I got to my snare and I could just imagine that I had a big one. I rode up a little cautiously to find a fat suckin’ calf that weighed about 350 pounds. This discovery messed up my plans. I had a bill of sale on steer cattle; nobody up to now had mentioned any cows or any calves or anything else in that pasture besides steers.

It was plain to see at a glance that this calf had never been branded, and I had caught him in my snare and it had bawled and bellered and spread the alarm and put the wild cattle on notice that there was something up.

There was a cow standing back down the canyon about two hundred yards with her head stuck out of the thicket. She hadn’t called to the calf, but she was watchin’. I stepped down off my horse to untie the calf from the tree and try to lead it down out of the thicket. After all, I didn’t see much point in turnin’ it loose; it belonged to somebody and it didn’t belong to my steers. I thought it would be smart to at least take it up and put it in that little pasture across the road.

This little pasture across the road had a high net-wire fence around it and was going to be a place to hold whatever
I caught to put in it. About the time I stepped off my horse, this old cow came out of the brush and bawled and started after me. I got the rope untied and dallied around my saddle horn just as she horned my horse in the side.

This old horse was named Mustang. He was a well-bred horse and had no mustang blood in him, I am reasonably sure. I had caught him as a two-year-old in northern Arizona out of a bunch of mustang horses, which accounts for his name. He was a blood bay, 15 hands 2 inches tall, and would weigh about 1,150 in hard-usin’ condition. He was one of the most willing horses that I ever owned, and he knew that calf was tied to him and he had determined not to get in a storm by flinchin’ from that old cow. She raked him across the side with her horns and knocked a little hair and cut a little hide, but didn’t really do him any serious damage. The calf began to bawl and run when we pulled ’im and drove ’im and jerked ’im over little brush, medium-size rocks, and drug ’im around a few big ones. By the middle of the morning I pulled him across the road and took the rope off of ’im in the little pasture. The old brindle nondescript common kind of a cow didn’t follow us out of the timber. When she hit the opening she turned back.

I rode the rest of the day. I could see a few cattle in front of me, but I never could get them in the proper angle to force them out of that canyon. I had thought if I could push some against the fence that maybe I could booger them into comin’ out to the top of the prairie. About all I got out of that day’s ride was somebody else’s calf and more than a common amount of discouragement from these brush-wise steers.

In about two days this old cow began to bawl and came to the fence and begin to try to get across the road to her calf. When I rode out to pull her through the gate, she would go back to the canyon. I wasn’t hankerin’ to put a rope on this old cow because she had long, sharp horns; the calf hadn’t sucked in two days and her bag was pretty sore and she was beginning to get real mad. I just got to thinking that I was tryin’ to get cattle out of that pasture and keepin’ that fence up by the road wasn’t too smart, so I put in about half a day takin’ the fence down along the road from the north corner about a quarter of a mile and from the south corner about a quarter of a mile. After all, if I ever did drive some cattle up that fence line, I ought to make it handy for ’em to get out of the pasture. But I didn’t take down the fence that was parallel to the gate to the little pasture. If I ever got anything in that lane I wanted the gate on the other side of the little pasture to be the only thing open.

That night the old cow came up, found her way out in the road, and was smellin’ her calf through the fence the next morning. It was easy to open the gate to the little pasture, ride into the big pasture, and go around her and ease her up to where she would go in with her calf. That was the fourth day, and I had caught one cow and calf that didn’t belong to me and wouldn’t pay on that $900 I owed.

I rode after and aggravated these cattle for several days, and I had begun to get some in about three bunches, but the harder I rode the smarter they got and the farther they got away from me. I kept ’em so busy in the daytime that they had to graze at night. We had some
moonlit nights and a few of these cattle came up on the prairie where the grass was better than it was in the canyon. I had sneaked around behind ’em when the wind was right and they couldn’t smell me, and I had managed to rope three steers in the moonlight in three nights. It was almost an all-night job to rope one steer and get ’im across the road in the little pasture before the moon went down and the night got dark again. Two of these steers that I had caught would weigh over 1,200 pounds apiece and were great big ole yellow Mexican-looking longhorn kind of cattle that would bring about $50 apiece on the Fort Worth market. This, in cowboy arithmetic, meant that there might be $2,500 worth of cattle in that horse-killin’ canyon if I could just figure out some way to bring ’em out on top of the prairie.

There was an old man that had a little farm and a small pasture that joined this place at the river on the northeast corner of the fence line. I rode down one day and got acquainted with ’im. His name was Eness Jarrera. He had been a great old cowboy that time and hard work had overtaken. All he did now was to raise a few sheep and goats and he had three or four cows and raised a little crop of feed stuff for his stock and for himself.

He knew right off that I was the rider that had been in the big pasture tryin’ to catch the steers. He was very friendly and interested in how I was getting along. I told him about the cow and calf. He brightened up considerably and told me there were two more cows with calves; that these had gotten away from him when they were heifers, and, since he was too old to fight the brush and
ride horseback, that he had just had to let them go and didn’t know that he would ever get them back. Well, I told him I had one cow and calf caught for him and he was welcome to ’em. He was pleased about this, but he said they were too wild to bring back to his small pasture, that they wouldn’t stay, and that if I would keep ’em and ship ’em with my cattle, that he would rather have what money they would bring than to have the cattle back. Well, this was all right with me, and I was glad that I had at least caught some of his cattle. I knew that he probably would be glad to have the money that the cattle were worth.

He told me much about Mrs. Marion, who owned this pasture, and that he had worked for her husband when they operated the old ranch. He said that she lived in Austin and was a grand lady, and that sometimes he got a letter from her and that she always sent him something for Christmas. I had already begun to worry about my time runnin’ out at gatherin’ these steers, and I asked him if he thought she might lease me the pasture for a few more months if I needed it. He didn’t venture an opinion, but he did say that she was a fine and reasonable woman. This was some consolation, but it didn’t exactly fit my plans to camp there under that rock shed all winter to catch these cattle.

About two weeks later I took stock of my situation. I had five good horses and four of them were crippled. It took about half of my time every morning and later every afternoon to doctor my crippled horses, and the one horse that was able to carry me was a light-boned, small, good
traveling horse but not big enough to rope big steers. I had drug a steer on ole Beauty, my standby, one night that was so big and rough and heavy that it had bruised her withers where the saddle sat, and she was so swelled and sore that I was afraid to ride her, thinking I might make it worse. I had caught a steer on Mustang just as it leaped off of the rimrock and started down the canyon wall. Mustang set all four feet and kept his balance and let that steer drag him halfway down the canyon and never flinched. When he finally got on level ground he stopped the steer and we drug ’im back out. I had roped him around the horns and he didn’t choke, which left him with an awful lot of fight in ’im. I began to notice a little blood on the rocks and I saw the steer wasn’t hurt, and I knew Mustang must be skinned somewhere. After about a three-hour battle I got the steer in the small pasture and got my rope off of ’im, and I stood and looked at Mustang. When he slid down the canyon wall the rocks had torn the hide off of the back of his hind legs from his ankles to his hocks. He could have bounced forward and saved his legs and maybe got jerked down, or maybe let the steer get away, or have gotten us both hurt, but his nerve and his “know-how” had gotten us out of the storm with the steer, but he was goin’ to be laid up with sore legs for a good while.

I ripped the sleeves out of a duckin’ jacket and cut ’em open a little wider at the cuff and slipped ’em over his back legs up above his hocks and tied ’em with a string. I kept some salve rubbed on ’em, and these jumper sleeves kept the flies and the dirt and the trash off of ’em. I dressed them twice a day. I washed the sleeves at night
when the insects weren’t workin’ and put them back on in the morning before fly time.

Another good horse named Charlie had dived into a deep thicket tryin’ to help me rope a steer when a snag of a dead tree laid his brisket open. My fourth horse had clawed a shoe off in the rocks and took part of the foot wall with it. I had to cut an old hat up and lace it around his foot in order for him to stand the pressure of moving around a little bit, to eat and drink, on that foot.

When a wild cowboy in a rough country after wild cattle gets most of his horses crippled, he’s about out of business. That note I signed was drawin’ interest and the lease on the pasture was runnin’ out. I laid around camp and doctored my horses and rested and looked at the nine head of cattle that I had caught out of the sixty, seventy that were in that pasture; it seemed to me like that I was losin’ so fast that time was goin’ to keep me from breakin’ even.