CHAPTER XIII

RANCH ACTIVITIES

Big as it was, the ranch was only a feeder for the open range.  Way down in southeastern Arizona its cattle had their birth and grew to their half-wild maturity.  They won their living where they could, fiercely from the fierce desert.  On the broad plains they grazed during the fat season; and as the feed shortened and withered, they retired slowly to the barren mountains.  In long lines they plodded to the watering places; and in long, patient lines they plodded their way back again, until deep and indelible troughs had been worn in the face of the earth.  Other living creatures they saw few, save the coyotes that hung on their flanks, the jackrabbits, the prairie dogs, the birds strangely cheerful in the face of the mysterious and solemn desert.  Once in a while a pair of mounted men jog-trotted slowly here and there among them.  They gave way to right and left, swinging in the free trot of untamed creatures, their heads high, their eyes wild.  Probably they remembered the terror and ignominy and temporary pain of the branding.  The men examined them with critical eye, and commented technically and passed on.

This was when the animals were alive with the fat grasses.  But as the drought lengthened, they pushed farther into the hills until the boldest or hardiest of them stood on the summits, and the weakest merely stared dully as the mounted men jingled by.  The desert, kind in her bounty, was terrible in her wrath.  She took her toll freely and the dried bones of her victims rattled in the wind.  The fittest survived.  Durham died, Hereford lived through, and turned up after the first rains wiry, lean, and active.

Then came the round-up.  From the hidden defiles, the buttes and ranges, the hills and plains, the cowboys drew their net to the centre.  Each “drive” brought together on some alkali flat thousands of the restless, milling, bawling cattle.  The white dust rose in a cloud against the very blue sky.  Then, while some of the cowboys sat their horses as sentinels, turning the herd back on itself, others threaded a way through the multitude, edging always toward the border of the herd some animal uneasy in the consciousness that it was being followed.  Surrounding the main herd, and at some distance from it, other smaller herds rapidly formed from the “cut.”  Thus there was one composed entirely of cows and unbranded calves; another of strays from neighbouring ranges; and a third of the steers considered worthy of being made into beef cattle.

In due time the main herd was turned back on the range; the strays had been cut out and driven home by the cowboys of their several owners; the calves had been duly branded and sent out on the desert to grow up.  But there remained still compact the beef herd.  When all the excitement of the round-up had died, it showed as the tangible profit of the year.