IV.

The busiest periods of the sheepman’s year are the lambing- and shearing-seasons.  The first begins early in March, when the little mesquite-trees are of a feathery greenness and the brown gramma and mesquite grass are beginning to freshen, and lasts about six weeks.  It is an exacting time for the conscientious proprietor.  He says good-by to his cottage, and goes off to camp with a small army of Mexicans, who, proof against the toils of the day, make night crazy with singing, dancing, and uncontrollable hilarity.  He is as much concerned about the weather as a sailor or one in conversation’s straits.  His terror is the long, cold storm which covers the grass with a hopeless coating of ice.  The weakened ewe cannot graze, and the norther comes down with a bitter sweep to devastate the starved flock.

The camp is pitched within easy reach of the bed-grounds of two ewe-flocks, each of twelve hundred, who absorb all the attention of the superintendent and his numerous aids.  Each flock goes out on the range at daybreak under the charge of two herders.  The ewes that have dropped lambs over-night are retained in the corral with their offspring for about six hours, or till afternoon, when the lamb should be in possession of sufficient strength to move about; then the ewes go forth slowly to graze, followed by their chiquitas.  The unnatural mothers who deny their children are caught, with a lariat by a Mexican, with a crook by a Yankee, and confined in separate little pens alone with their lambs.  If necessary to compel them to acknowledge their maternal responsibilities, they are kept in solitary confinement two days, without food.  If still obdurate at the end of these two days, mother and child, marked with red chalk or tagged alike with bright cloth, are turned out, the herder in charge of the solitaries “roping” the ewe for the convenience of the lamb whenever the latter indicates a desire for nourishment.

The flock grazing out on the range will have gone by noon perhaps a mile from the bed-ground.  Here a little corral is made, and the lambs born in the vicinity, with their mothers, are penned here over-night, one of the two herders sleeping with them.  In the afternoon the remaining herder takes the flock grazing back to the bed-ground.  The next day, with many more to follow, repeats the routine of this and its incidents.  The lambs and good mothers of a period of twenty-four hours are bunched together and placed a little remote from the bed-ground, with a little pen and a herder to themselves:  they constitute a so-called “baby-flock.”  After five days the lambs lose their tails and have their ears punched and marked; on the sixth day they are still farther removed from their native spot, placed in charge of a strange herder, and become the nucleus of a so-called “lamb-flock,” which, fed from many sources, grows till it includes six hundred ewes, with their lambs, when it is a full