93/03/11

SHORTGRASS COUNTRY

By Monte Noelke

     Once a lamb buyer of wide pasturage experience said the Middle Concho Valley in Irion County, Texas yielded the highest gains of anywhere in the state of Texas.  Brought closer to home, for years we've watched the herders up on the river do better than the rest of the county put together.

     The privileges aren't limited to grazing.  The best two-year-old ewe salesman in Texas winters his prospects in the area.  he and his partner sold $60 sheep when the rest of us were accepting collect calls, hoping for a $40 bid delivered in town.  Also, by far the leading real estate lady to ever hit the country lives up there on a ranch.  She brings about such sales in deserted townships that the thought alone of so much commission would make her colleagues over in San Angelo dump their pockets doing handsprings out on the sidewalks.

     Newest prodigy of the river neighborhood is an English guy who runs a restaurant in San Angelo successful enough to ranch on the side.  He, I suspect, has learned a lot from the sheep salesman and the real estate woman.  Every weekend the dinner menu features more items related to the fauna and flora of the Middle Concho than to the local supermarkets.  Doesn't take much of a detective to link catfish crusted in pecans, or hare amandin garnished in water cress to the shady banks or the rippling waters of the big

waterhole in his horse pasture.

     His patrons are lucky he trained in Montreal and New Orleans under French chefs instead of cooking under the tutelage of a Mississippi River hand, or some skillet and grease artist from Mobile, Alabama fishing camp, or he'd of been rolling everything in cornmeal from the mud catfish in the bottoms of the creek to the possums hiding high up in his pecan groves.

     Making a living off the river isn't the only advantage the valley offers, however.  Two weeks ago, when most outfits were measuring two tenths of an inch of rain, a rancher on the Middle Concho watershed had enough moisture that a brown pelican landed on his outfit.  He was already cleaning up in the rare game business.  But to show how smart he was, he called the game and fish folks of both the state and federal levels for directions on how to feed this rare bird and where to send him.  The Sheep and Goat Herder's Assn. backed his play.  And for the first time in decades, newspaper scribes in San Angelo covered the front pages chortling and clucking away how environmentally conscious and how noble all the ranchers are up on the Middle Concho in Irion County.

     All year long, they come on the ranch radio channel talking about rain delaying their work and how much grief it is to ranch around oil wells.  Their kids win stock shows and all it ever takes for one of their saddle horses to go sound is a small shot of penicillin and a few days' rest

     Southern cookbooks cover wide ranges of food from fox squirrel stews to fat raccoons stuffed in sweet potatoes.  The ones of us who don't fall over ourselves at the first word about an endangered bird, know how to handle the news of a brown pelican being lost in a thunderstorm.

     I fear the longer the Englishman lives under the influence of the citizens in the blessed valley, the better he's going to become at creating specials from the fruits of his lands...