February 5, 2004

Time for a herder to flee from his home range is the day neighbors start selling land without bothering to call. Next sign is a dead telephone on a rainy morning. It's too late to leave after the deer fences rise on tall posts and the big gateways hang the new owners' brand from a black iron arch.

In Texas, red-caps are buying land to stop paying leases. A big land boom is in full pitch. Prices rise every month, it seems. Instead of worrying if the neighbor's bull breeds your heifer calves, nowadays the problem is whether he is going to choose Russian boars over, say, bringing back the buffalo and the gray wolf.

Last week, we turned four Longhorn bulls into a pasture of heifers on the highway where cow brutes last grazed at the start of the dry spell in 1992. Before releasing the sleek, rambling oxen, the risk of introducing a new bloodline in the neighboring pastures had to be considered. Difficult to stay current on who runs ratites for feathers and who is into antler harvesting from African deer.

My son rode the outside fence. Whether the cattle escaped wasn't as much the problem as what beast might break into the pasture and eat my bulls. Every hunting season, hunters see huge mountain lions. Also, as fierce as wild hogs are, there might be a boar loose ferocious enough to gobble a Longhorn, starting at his forelock and ending at the switch of his tail. (Tempting as it is, I am not going to retell Uncle Mark's story about a boa constrictor in Brazil swallowing a Longhorn cow head first.)

The breeder tipped the bull's horns before delivery. After realizing we might be moving into a wilderness area, I began to wish he'd left the tips sharp in case the "Save the Gray Wolf" group moved to Mertzon or the "Free The Bengal Tiger Association" set up camp.

But if the horns were to be tipped, the work needed to be done in the breeder's chute. Ours are designed for working Angus cattle and proving how many times a piece of pine lumber can be patched. One of our chutes dates back to the horned cattle times, but the boards are so rotten, there'd be a danger of a bull poking his foot through a crack and spraining his ankle. (The status of downers changed after December 23. If cattle start limping, the safe thing to do is to shoot the cripple on the spot. My pistol is in the bank box at Mertzon. Be unhandy, but I guess I could run to town during banking hours to make a kill.)

I wasn't aware at the time, but a compadre of mine specializes in handling Longhorn cows for insemination. He is an old hand at wrapping wet chain on drill stem beneath the derricks of the world's oceans. Faced with helping to work Longhorn cows without a chute, he devised a rope and chain method to snub the cows' horns to a pipe fence rail. (Breaks my heart to have missed the sight of a Longhorn cow bucking and snorting snubbed to a pipe rail, especially if the most exciting event of your day is watching a black cow licking a yellow salt block.)

"Night Train" sired the last Longhorn bulls we bred to heifers. They were evil-tempered beasts unwilling to stay home at night and unable to remember the way back the next morning. Before we shipped those fence and corral hurdlers, we had the original cost of $600 a head, plus another 200 bucks' freight trailering horses to pick up the bulls on neighboring ranches. (Too sensitive a subject here to review how many grandsons of "Night Train" hit the ground in the neighborhood the next fall. However, if it hadn't been for calves on the neighbors' cattle, we'd have been unable to run a color test on the bull, such less a quality test, as we calved fewer than 10 head of his offspring.)

The only cattle joining the pasture were across the highway on my brother's ranch. To avoid the migration problem of Night Train's sons, we shot the heifers with lutalyse for estrus synchronization. Figured the bulls' attention needed to be on the heifers and not on the open road. With all the ranch traffic of trucks and trailers on Highway 67, be a big risk the bulls might catch a whiff of their home turf from the other side of the Pecos River, and head west.

My son didn't find any bristles or alien spoor along the fence. Prospects for Longhorn cattle sound good. I read in a journal the other day of a ranch cloning eight offspring of a $79,000 registered Longhorn cow for $59,000. Might be the reason behind my pal inseminating the cows on the fence rail. Sure is nervewracking waiting every day after the feed runs to hear whether those open range bulls are settled…

February 5, 2004

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