The sheer cliffs of Cuny Table and the harrowing ride down the Slide, now a vivid memory in the Young Rider’s mind, was of no help in deciding the next turn. Ole Roanie had magically or mysteriously found the remnants of the trail off the Table. The path through the knife-edged badland skirts of the Table permitted only one escape route. Now, the broad, rushing river forced a new decision. Which way to turn?
Roanie waited. “Which way will this kid decide to turn? I had to make the last decision,” Ole Roanie thought. “Doesn’t he know? Who let this kid have the reins?”
The guiding badland knife blades had petered out a few minutes ago. Choices unfolded in the river’s flanks. Some memory of a ride along this river still lurked in the memory of this 15 year old boy. He felt a sense of familiarity. He had been here before! When was that? 10 years ago? The memory had no date stamp on its back.
He reined to the right and said, “Roanie, we are going downstream. We will see what shows up.”
Sure enough, again after another interminable ride, a shack came into view. A corral and a wire gate made it appear useful for cowboys. The corral was empty, no horses in sight. The fence around the shack seemed unneeded. No garden had been planted. No cattle were in sight. Their presence tended to bring flies and other nuisances. The gate was closed. So, maybe cattle came by occasionally.
The Young Cowboy dismounted, and with stiff legs unused to walking, opened the wire gate and led Roanie through. Seeing no one about, the young cowboy tied Roanie’s reins to a fence post with enough slack that Roanie could at least nibble on grass, and walked into the cooler shade of the cabin, and waited.
After a while he heard the sounds of horses approaching. He was very glad to see that the riders were his Uncle Pete and his cousins, Ron, Rick, Rob and Randy. He had made it to the right place!
Branding season had come again. The calves were all born. The grass was growing in the summer pastures. It was time to brand and vaccinate and dehorn the calves before the herd was turned out to the big pastures. Dad had said, “Pete may need help. Take Roanie and some clothes and help Pete with branding.” The Young Rider was excited about the change of routine. Safely arrived, he was ready to learn the ways of a cow camp.
I don’t know how long my father thought I would be gone from home. I doubt that my mother thought I would be gone more than a day or two. I had no idea and hadn’t spent much time thinking about it. Anything was better than mowing hay forever. Turned out to be for more than a week. (No helicopter parents back then.)
The cowboys unsaddled the horses and turned them loose in a large corral that had green grass growing among the weeds that seem to sprout and shoot for the sun when the early spring rains come. The young cowboy gathered his roll of clothes and coat and walked with the other cowboys to the shack. They stomped the dust from their boots. They used a broken branch to scrape the mud caked between the under-side of the arch and boot heel. They slapped the dust from their pants legs with their hats and scraped loose mud splatters with their fingernails.
Mom would have said, “don’t go traipsing through the house until you clean up!” She had good reason. She would have felt compelled to clean the house. At the camp, the boys were assigned that task. They took more care to bring in less mud.
They poured a little of the water into a tin wash basin from one of several ten gallon tin cream cans sitting outside the door. Each took a turn washing off the dust and bugs and horse smell from their faces and hands.
Uncle Pete said, “Boys, you are going to get a treat for supper tonight. Pork and Beans. And spuds. And we have a little of that roast beef from yesterday. We are going to eat well tonight.” Rick said, “Dad, we had that yesterday, and the day before too.” Pete said, “Yep. You loved it then and you will love it again today. You are so lucky.”
While Uncle Pete worked over the stove, Rick took a damp dish cloth and wiped the dust from the oil cloth on the kitchen table sitting between the stove and the bunks covered with blankets and laundry. Rob kept the conversation moving. Ron fiddled with the battery powered radio and finally got a station to tune in from Rapid City. Suddenly the atmosphere brightened immensely. Smiles broke out and all the cowboys sang along with the radio. Classics like Ballad of the Green Beret, Last Train to Clarksville, Born Free, These Boots are Made for Walkin’, If I Were a Carpenter, Almost Persuaded, and other country tunes mixed with hippy music and rock and roll. But the music did not override the reason for the radio, that is, the weather forecasts. Ears perked up when the weatherman made his Pronouncements. The forecast included sunshine with a high of 90 with rain showers likely. Just like it had been for the last several days.
When the sun went down, Pete filled the lantern with coal oil or kerosene and lit the wick. He rolled a cigarette (no mean feat with his huge hands and fingers bigger than the width of the paper) and settled back into a hard backed kitchen chair, propping his boots up on the brace rungs of the next chair. Randy and I were delegated the job of washing the dishes in a wash basin much like the tin basin we washed our faces in. We dried the plates with a dishcloth but soon it was nearly as wet as the dishes and so the procedure was performed mostly for form rather than function. No matter. The wet dishes dried within minutes in the arid badland air.
We took our turns trudging out to the outhouse for one last pee before bedtime. The Montgomery Ward catalog still had pages for wiping if necessary. (The Yellow Pages in the phone book were softer, but seldom did people have phone books this far from town.) Soon we were stretched out on lumpy beds with blankets too hot for use now but which will soon be essential about sunrise time. The light from the lantern died and the darkness closed in. Clouds blanketed the stars and no moonlight filtered through. But heavy eyelids blocked the search for twinkling lights in the sky.
The rain fell in the night and made the morning trip to the outhouse a muddy trek before breakfast. Pete lit a couple of burners in the propane fired stove and fried up some bacon and made pancakes in a big black cast iron frying pan. A percolator coffee pot on a smaller burner burbled and sloshed. A nearly flattened, cone-shaped tin base covered most of the pot’s bottom and gathered water made boiling by the flames just below. The hot water bubbled up the narrow metal tube rising from the cone to the top of the pot. The tube spewed its hot water into a hollow glass knob on the lid (a part of the water’s transit that we as young children liked to watch) into a metal screen basket holding the coffee grounds above the water level. Five or ten minutes of perking produced a pleasant smelling, good tasting, morning boost with no coffee grounds to stick between the teeth. A great modern convenience.
Pete didn’t hurry to get his crew saddled up. The rain surely wetted the hair of the calves and the slopes would be slippery and the drainages would be running pretty fast and high. But the sun was shining and time was wasting. We herded the horses into a corner of the corral where we each could trap one between us and the fence. With calm voices and soothing murmurs we could get our horse to stand still for a moment. We could reach up high and get bridle reins over his neck. When he felt trapped, the horse would let us slip a bit between the teeth and slide the bridle strap over the head and past the tall ears. With the neck strap buckled under the horse’s jaw bones, we could lead our horses to the barn door. We had stacked the saddles and blankets in the dry interior of the tack room.
Sometimes it took persuasion to get the horse to stand still long enough to get the blanket smoothed over the horse’s back and then swing the saddle up almost as high as a young cowboy’s head and let it settle down on the round back of the horse and the smoothed woven wool Navaho blanket. The cowboy tried to always remember to keep an elbow in the horse’s ribs to avoid getting a boot smashed in case the horse flinched sideways when the stirrup flopped down on the far side.
To avoid surprising the horse and risking a sharp kick from a rear hoof, a cowboy slides his hand over the horse’s shoulder hair and then down behind the shoulder and under the chest and far across enough to grab the cinch dangling down from the saddle on the far side. The cowboy pulls the cinch up from the far side and snugs it under the horse’s chest, taking care that the cinch does not slide behind the chest and into the ticklish belly area. It is pretty hard to run along side and keep the saddle on the horse when he is hopping all around the corral after a tickle to the belly. An older horse learns to hold a big gulp of air in his lungs to puff up his ribs. After the cinch is tightened, he can let the air out and the saddle loosens considerably. Not many riders can hang on long upside down when the cinch slips loose, except maybe in a circus. The knowing cowboy tugs the latigo firmly and gives the ribs a good knee jab to make the horse exhale that extra balloon of air.
When everyone was ready, the cowboys give a good tug on the saddle horn to test the cinching job and then lead the horse around the corral a little, to gauge the horse’s “friskiness” and to test the cinch. On the first ride of the day a younger horse may be feeling pretty lively.
A cowboy grabs a hank of mane with the left hand and grabs the saddle horn with his right hand. He slips the narrow toe of his boot into the stirrup and quickly swings up and onto the saddle. He has a firm grip on the reins in his left hand and searches blindly and by feel for the right stirrup. Once both feet are secure he can better handle the crow hops and sidesteps all the while trying to keep the horse’s head up. Once the horse gets his head down between his own knees, the cowboy is in for a real ride. Usually, such rides do not last long, either because the horse has wrung out his own kinks or because the cowboy has decided to wait “for another cup of coffee” and to shake the corral dust from his shirt.
Once each of the riders was traveling around the corral in the same direction as his horse, Pete rode to the gate in the corral and leaned over the side of his horse and loosened the top wire on the gate post. He nudged his horse to walk through the gate now opened while Pete held the gate post in his hand. When all the cowboys were through the gate, Pete pulled the reins and his horse obediently backed up until Pete could again latch the gate shut, all without dismounting. A pretty well trained horse!
The cowboys trotted out to the pastures searching for a smaller bunch of cows and calves, a bunch that could be handled by the crew without the benefit of a corral. When a bunch was found, the cows were gently herded toward a cross fence if one was handy, gently so that the calves followed their mothers without being left behind. The fence made a part of a trap and a cowboy on each side could keep the cows loosely together.
Much quieter than seen at rodeos as depicted, a good roper could quietly ride among the herd and drop a loop over the head of a calf and pull the calf to a quickly built campfire burning perhaps a broken fence post or dried tree branches brought from the river. A couple of cowboys on the ground by the campfire would wrestle the calf to the ground. One reaches over the shoulder of the calf and lifts the front leg from the ground while the other cowboy grabs the calf’s tail and pulls the calf onto its side. The cowboy sits down behind the calf holding the calf’s top rear leg tightly and pressing his boot into the calf’s lower leg firmly so the calf cannot kick. The cowboy on the front places his knee on the calf’s neck just ahead of the shoulders and holds the top front leg curled back as though the calf was asleep.
The cowboy who is the vet for the day gives the calf a shot of medicine to vaccinate against Blackleg and other diseases. The vet uses his pocket knife, sterilized with a dip into a little Lysol to castrate the male calves and perhaps cut a notch in an ear as a marker. With a sharpened steel tube, the nubs of horns are scooped off the calf’s skull. Next the vet brings a branding iron from the fire and sears the hair over the hip of the calf, marking the calf for life with the ranch brand. All that is done in about two minutes. When the tasks are done, the cowboys jump up and the calf is released to find his mother in the herd for some well-deserved care and nursing. In the meantime, the roper had been “dropping a loop” on another calf and is already bringing the next calf to the fire.
When the herd is done, the cowboys count the ear notches thrown into a pile and count the testicles, divided by two, hopefully ending in a whole number. If the numbers make sense, the ramrod, the head cowboy, notes the numbers in his spiral bound notebook snapped in his shirt pocket using a pencil. The pencil is sharpened with the pocket knife to a point but not too fine because a man’s calloused grip is too firm for a fine shaved point, but shaved small enough that the numbers will be discernible at the end of the day. Then the cowboys mount up and go looking for the next little herd.
The cowboys gathered the tools, including the branding irons, which hopefully had cooled enough to handle. They mounted up and searched for another small herd. The cattle had scattered fairly evenly across the pasture. Water could be found in nearly every drain ditch and creek bed. The rains had made the grass green and lush and delicious. A cow could find plenty to eat no matter which direction she led her baby calf.
The sunshine was warm and the calves frolicked like kindergartners in a schoolyard. They jumped and ran. They practiced leaping over large rocks and practiced wading through muddy streams from the rains of last night. The exercise drained their small bellies of their morning breakfast. Sometimes one would sniff the grass that seemed so appealing to Mama but it did not tickle the nose like a good sip of Mama’s warm milk. Playing is fun, but now it is time to find Mama. “Which way did she go? Which way did I go? Mama! Where are you?” Of course, that all sounded like a “moo” to the humans. But it sounded natural and normal and peaceful, too.
At the end of the day, or when it rained or when the firewood supply ran out, the cowboys wended their way back to the corral. They tended the horses and then trudged to the bunkhouse for a less-than-thrilling but satisfying supper. Even though the sun took forever to set for the evening, the younger cowboys seldom waited that long before rolling up in a bedroll for a well-deserved night’s sleep.
