Wild Cow Tales (8 page)

My horses had begun to get acclimated to the high, light atmosphere, and the cattle had gotten wiser and wilder by the day—as the numbers dwindle, the work gets rougher in bad cow country.

I managed to get a couple of high-school boys to come out on Saturday and help me drive the carload I had gathered to the railroad. They were good kids, but it was the early fall and they had started to school and I wasn’t gonna be able to run my business with just a little Saturday help.

In all the cattle that I had gathered there hadn’t been one single pure-blooded Longhorn Scotch Highland cow. However, I had seen a few of them, but they were always at the front of the ones that were gettin’ away. They were a shaggy, brownish-red breed of cattle of medium size and were not the best beef cattle in the world; but due to their native Scottish breeding and their long hair they were good cattle for the bitter winters of the Rocky Mountains. The crossbreeds raised from Hereford and Durham crosses were wonderful cattle with lots of extra stamina gained from the cross with better beef qualities coming from the other side of the cross. The crossbreeds had more red in their color and were splashed about the head and neck and underbellies with white. All of them had a lot longer, higher-pointed horns than Herefords or Durhams, but nothing to compare with some of the Mexican-Texas cattle I had handled.

I began to set snares and push rocks around to stop up
trails and had resorted to ropin’ and draggin’ one cow at a time, which got into hard work for me and my horses and in the long run gathered a very few cattle. I followed this kind of practice for about a month and there were still a lot more than a hundred cattle left in Scotty’s Canyon.

Dr. Turner and I were settin’ in front of the mercantile on a bench whilin’ away the time one afternoon when a big, past-middle-age man with one peg leg started across the street.

As I watched his approach, I looked at the doctor, who must have known what I was thinkin’ and said, “Yep, that’s him.”

Scotty was over six feet tall. His entire body was well proportioned and in spite of a peg leg and his age, he still moved with grace—and there was an unmistakable pride in his carriage. It could well be said that he was a handsome man. He had an abundance of sandy hair and beard and medium-blue eyes wide set in a large face that was in keepin’ with his broad shoulders and body. However, the small lines of bitterness that had begun to form at the corners of his mouth and up through the middle of his chin were not appropriate on his handsome, expressive Scotch-Irish face.

I said a low tone of voice, “I’d like to meet him.”

When he got nearly even with us the doctor raised up and said, “Scotty, I want you to meet Ben Green from Texas.”

Scotty already knew who I was because as his home was on the road at the edge of town he had seen me drivin’ his cattle to the stock pens. I had stood up straight
and extended my hand, but he turned on his peg leg and did not offer to shake hands.

Instead he broke loose in his Scottish brogue and clipped his words hard and sharp and said, “I choose not to be friendly with the ‘hireling’ of a bank that would take a ‘Kattleman’s’ herd from his land—and to make it worse they send this slight lad from Texas mounted on ponies to do the riding of a man and horses. Then an old and trusted friend and the doctor that has tended to the needs of me and my family would call him ‘friend’ and heap more insult on Scotty Perth by suggesting that I make his acquaintance.”

With this blast at me off his chest, he turned and moved off so smoothly that I almost forgot he had a peg leg.

There were several people standing in earshot that began to turn and ease away. I was embarrassed to silence and the doctor started to apologize for Scotty and in a way was defending him.

I turned and started to the hitch rack to mount my horse and said in a whipped tone of voice, “I guess I would be better off out in the mountains.”

Dr. Turner said, “I’ll be looking for you back in town in a few days.”

His tone was friendly and kind. I said, “Thank you, I’m glad there is one Texan lives here,” as I stepped on my horse and rode out of town. Scotty Perth had embarrassed me before the doctor and the others listening, but the worst thing he done to me was that he had made some belittling remarks about the best band of horses that I had ever owned when he insinuated that “Texas ponies”
(as he put it) were not good horses. Second, I didn’t appreciate the tone of his voice or the look on his face when he referred to me as a “slight lad.”

I stayed in my camp and rode after cattle for about two weeks during which time nobody came around my camp, which was about seven miles off the public road. I had begun to understand even better why nobody found Scotty Perth when he broke his leg. Every day I rode the pasture hazing the cattle out of the high pasture into the pasture that sloped to the valley; finally I knew that I had all the cattle out of the high pasture. I was sure that there were a lot more cattle left in Scotty’s Canyon than it would take to make my total count of three hundred, including the cattle that I had already shipped. Three hundred was the number the bank had talked about.

In making the trade with the bank to gather the cattle, we had agreed that I was to be paid $3 a head to gather three hundred head, and that I was to gather all the rest of the cattle on the ranch for $1 a head. In the trade the bank was to pay me for gathering the first hundred and fifty head when I shipped them. And I had agreed to not draw any more money until all the cattle had been rounded up and taken off Scotty Perth’s ranch. This was the bank’s way of bein’ sure that the ranch would be clean of all cattle. The only part of the contract that was in my favor was that the bank had paid for shippin’ my horses from Texas and had agreed that when the job was finished they would pay for shippin’ my horses back to Texas.

The nights had begun to get cold and Indian summer had past, meaning that I was ridin’ against weather as
well as time because when winter set in I wouldn’t be able to ride and accomplish very much in deep snow. This meant that I had to gather the cattle in a much shorter time than the contract between the bank and Scotty Perth specified, which was the first of January.

It was time for me to make a trip into town to get some horseshoes, grub, and some feed for my horses. On these trips I would take three pack horses and tie each one’s halter rope to the next one’s tail and lead ’em single file behind my saddle horse. I’d pack these three horses with two hundred-pound sacks of oats, swingin’ one each side to the packsaddle. This would be about almost twenty bushels that I’d take back to my camp to feed my saddle horses.

I rode in behind the country mercantile and tied my saddle horse and untied the pack horses from each other and let them drag their halter ropes and graze on the vacant land behind the mercantile until I was ready to load them. It was early afternoon when I got to town and I went about buyin’ my list of supplies, and when I came to horseshoes and horseshoe nails, Dr. Turner had walked into the store and said to me, “I see you are buying some horseshoes. I noticed the horse you left in my stable one night had a good overreach when he walked. One of my horses travels that way, but I can’t get him shod to where he won’t forge and strike the heels of his front feet with the toes of his back feet.”

I was glad to show off a little as the doctor was the only friend I had in town, so I told him I’d be glad to shoe his horse where it wouldn’t forge.

I gave my list to the clerk at the mercantile to fill and
got in a model-T Ford with Dr. Turner and went down to his barn. He had plenty of horseshoeing tools and his horse was real gentle. Some of his kids rode the horse, and he kept him to drive in the winter when the roads were too bad to make calls in his model-T.

He sat in the doorway of the saddle room while I dressed his horse’s feet and shod him. We led the horse around the corral after he was shod and one of the doctor’s little girls rode him enough that Dr. Turner was convinced I’d shod him properly and that his front and back feet weren’t goin’ to interfere.

We were visitin’ while the girl rode the horse, and he said, “If you are not in too big a hurry I’ve another horse in Town Trap [Town Trap was the little pasture down on the creek that nearly ever’body used to keep town horses in] that I wish you would shoe for me.”

I told him I was sure I had enough time if it wouldn’t take too long to catch the horse. His daughter spoke up and said it wouldn’t be any trouble to catch the horse. She got a little feed out of the barn in a sack and an extra catch rope and jumped on the horse bareback and said she’d be back in a little while. In the meantime her daddy had been tellin’ her which horse to catch.

We went to the house and Dr. Turner’s wife fixed us some cake and coffee, and I took on a little hospitality while we were waitin’ on the girl to bring the horse back. The conversation was light; he hadn’t mentioned Scotty Perth and neither had I. The little girl was back in a few minutes and I went out to the barn to shoe the horse.

As we left the house, Mrs. Turner insisted that I come to town to church next Sunday. The church had a new
preacher who was coming to preach every other Sunday, and she was havin’ a church party after the meetin’ for him this comin’ Sunday and for me to be sure to come.

Both the horses were big bays of mixed blood, and you could tell that they were bound to be kinfolks. I said somethin’ about how much they were alike, and Dr. Turner told me the horses were full brothers. I shod this horse very much like the first one, and sure ’nuff he traveled good too.

This must have taken about an hour and a half, and it was gettin’ along past middle afternoon, so we went back to town and I finished gettin’ groceries and horse feed tied on to my pack horses while Dr. Turner stood around and visited with me. A few people went in and out the back door of the mercantile. Most of ’em spoke to the doctor, but none of ’em bothered to nod or even notice that I was there. I couldn’t quite get used to this kind of treatment. I was by nature loud-mouthed and friendly with ever’body, but the whole town seemed to resent me because I was roundin’ up Scotty Perth’s cattle for the bank.

I rode out of town rather late and put my pack horses in front of me so I could drive ’em a little faster than they’d normally lead in order to get back to my camp before night. I stayed around camp the next day, shod my saddle horses, did a little more extra cookin’ than common. The weather was sort of cloudy and disagreeable, and I didn’t try to work any cattle that day.

The next mornin’ I saddled a horse called Charlie that was a nice saddle horse and good to make wild cattle runs on, but he was not too trustworthy a horse to rope from. I
rode out on the side of the mountain and looked through the valley as I had done a number of times and sat there and gazed at Scotty Perth’s headquarters with all its big corrals and barns that he had refused to let anybody use to hold cattle while they were workin’ the canyon pastures.

I noticed a small bunch of cattle graze out into a clearin’ at the foot of the mountain. I’d tried lots of times to push little bunches of cattle down into the valley and out at the gate by myself. These cattle were so wild and the rocks so rough and slick under your horse that it seemed impossible for one man to ever get any number of cattle through the gate and out into the road. An extra bull grazed out from the timber and joined this bunch of cattle and the bull that was with them started a fight.

For the moment I forgot I was ridin’ Charlie who wasn’t a good ropin’ horse and I hurried down the mountain and charged these fightin’ cattle before they had time to realize I was there. I roped a big crossbred brownish-red bull; judgin’ from the length and size of his horns he must have been about five years old. Charlie didn’t get too excited, and I managed to drag and jerk the bull around while the other cattle bawled and ran off.

Then it dawned on me that wild cattle, the climate, and the anger of Scotty Perth must be affecting my judgment. What was I gonna do with one big bull on the end of a lariat rope? Situations like this cause you to make up your mind pretty fast.

He charged my horse a time or two, and I managed to rein Charlie out of the way and whirl him and stop the bull. Durin’ this wild bull play, the bull ran around a
good-size tree, with the lariat rope wrapped around the tree, which took the strain off of Charlie and stopped the bull from being able to run back at us.

When you’re not doin’ much of your own thinkin’, it’s nice to get a wild bull to help you out. I had him roped around the horns, and there was no danger of him choking, so I untied the lariat from my saddle horn and jumped off my horse and tied the other end of the rope to another tree that was about the right distance from the tree he was wrapped to. This got Charlie and me away from the bull, but he was still a long ways from the railroad stock pens.

I stood on the ground beside my horse and looked at the bull and decided that I ought to tie him to somethin’ light enough that he could drag, but heavy enough that he couldn’t run away with it. I knew where there was some dead logs up the canyon a piece that I had been jumpin’ my horse over. Any good cowboy that thinks he’s goin’ to get in trouble has more than one rope, so I rode up there and picked out a log that I thought was about the right size and tied on to it and drug it with my horse back down close to the bull.

The log was just about all a good saddle horse could drag to the saddle horn. By this time this mountain bull was sure mad. He had already pawed a good-size hole around the bottom of the tree, but he hadn’t learned to turn and go the other way, which would’ve gotten him unwound from the first tree. I untied the rope from around the tree, keepin’ an eye on the bull, afraid he might untangle himself before I got ready for him to. I worked the end of the lariat rope under this big log and
tied it between two knots on the log where I knew it wouldn’t slip off or come undone.

I got back on my horse, took my other rope, and rode up to the bull and whipped him around with the other rope and drove him around the right direction of the tree about three times. When he thought he was loose he made a wild run at my horse, and when the slack took up between him and the log it was quite a shock to him. It was some satisfaction to me to think maybe I was smarter than the bull.