Yes, he did love this land. Even if he wasn’t pushing cattle, he enjoyed simply riding his horse up on the Fifty and gazing out at the scenery. He considered that entertainment and preferable to an afternoon at the movies or a ball game.
However, not the least of these agreeable afternoon activities was watching Ruby Nez go about her work. As the old timers would say, she was mighty easy on the eyes. Though she did her best to dress as a common wrangler, some things were impossible to disguise. The view from atop his dun, General Stepper, was indeed splendid. Roper didn’t mind one little bit taking a break and watching her go about her work.
As was her habit, Ruby always bound her raven black hair up with a red bandana, like the city gangs, though obviously she was not trying to imitate them. She then capped her head with a sweat-stained black felt Stetson. About her only concession to her well concealed, but ultimately insuppressible femininity, was a stunning Indian-crafted turquoise broach pinned to the right side of her hat band. Exposing a bit of black bra strap, her long-sleeved western shirt was ripped at the back, probably from ducking through strands of a barbwire fence. The oft-mended Levis were clean, wash-faded and pleasingly tight. Scuffed, dusty and worn thin at both the toes and heels, her fancy leather-tooled boots looked as if they wouldn’t last out the year. She looked just about as far away as you can get from a fashion model, Roper thought chuckling to himself, though she would look damn good on just about any runway. Ruby was one of those women who looked good not because of her clothes, but in spite of them.
A lot of women are pretty in a world where beauty can be bought in a supermarket or salon, or purchased at a plastic surgeon’s office for a price, but what impressed him about Ruby was her inner beauty, her physical strength, the way she managed her business, how she handled a horse or roped a calf. Though she had asked for his help, he couldn’t help but feel she could have handled today’s little operation fine by herself.
Here on the open range with no corrals or squeeze chutes, calves had to be individually roped and thrown to the ground with their right sides upturned. Not an easy task when you’re dealing with a six-month-old, hundred and fifty pound, frantic and bawling calf fighting you every step of the way. No question about it, a corral would have made life much easier, but even after repeated requests, the BLM had steadfastly refused him or Ruby any further corrals or buildings, hence the branding on the open range.
Once on the ground, a glowing hot branding iron was plucked from the fire and slapped on the calf’s side, searing a lazy N on the calf’s hide. Then, while he was still on the ground, a Barnes dehorner was paced over the horn bud and the handles were suddenly forced apart, thereby pinching off the nubbin. Instantly, a spurt of blood would gush from the severed central artery. Quickly, the cowboy would then smother a thick layer of black tar unguent on the raw horn bed and with luck this usually controlled the hemorrhage. If not, the calves bled until the muscle in the arterial wall spontaneously contracted and the vessel clotted. Very seldom, if ever, did a calf die from horn bleeding.
Lastly, while they had them roped, all males were gelded. Roper had watched the old cowboys do this with their teeth, taking only a minute or so, but not with six-month-old calves. He personally had never got the hang of using his own incisors though he wouldn’t admit that to the cynical old-timers. If the truth be told, he found the practice highly unsanitary and disgusting, preferring a sharp pocket knife instead.
Even though the testicles resided in separate compartments, if one made the incision in precisely the right place, over the midline scrotal septum, both could be removed through the single one-inch long incision. Leaving the spermatic chords untied and the wound open, always made Roper a bit nervous. But if you were not going to ligate the chords, then you damn well better not sew up the scrotum. Otherwise, the resulting hemorrhage with no accompanying drainage could make the scrotum swell to the size of a basketball in no time. In the past, Roper had seen that happen.
Though Roper worried about infection with an open draining scrotum, he wasn’t about to argue with the way cowboys had been doing things for hundreds of years. Not only had they been doing it, but doing it with very few complications. And on the positive side, the sutureless technique was considerably easier, faster and cheaper.
Like so many other things in his life, Roper continued to follow tradition in favor of new techniques or modern science, strange behavior for an educated man. Not that he was opposed to science or progress, but he preferred an unpretentious lifestyle, simply taking the time to enjoy a sunset or the companionship of a neighbor’s visit. Starting your day at 5:30 a.m. or 2:30 p.m., it was your choice as long as the work got done. To gaze at the majestic panorama of the jumbled, wind-carved canyonlands or the imposing solitary shaft of Chimney Rock or the strangely eroded toadstools called hoodoos and suddenly realize, this is my office.
This is the reason he had dropped out of school and moved back to Escalante though he knew the popular rumor circulating was that he couldn’t cut it. Maybe they were right though God knows he’d tried. Unfortunately, his academic passion, English history and literature, was not very marketable, even with a master’s degree. He had tried teaching, that was about all you could do with that particular degree, for two years as a graduate assistant at Southern Utah University. As home of the Utah Shakespearean Festival, SUU loved anything and everything English and they felt that his expertise in British history and literature would only add to the growing aura of authenticity of that Tony Award winning festival. But after a couple years, this Stratford-on-the-Desert seemed to lose some of its luster and seemed more than just a little incongruous, maybe even ridiculous. More and more, he longed for the life he knew as a kid.
His professors and colleagues had warned him that his ranching dreams were actually pipe dreams, nothing more than sandcastles precariously perched on the beach at high tide. As they pointed out, the family ranch was rapidly becoming extinct and nowadays cattle ranching was becoming almost as paradoxical as Shakespeare in the desert. Probably even more so and not half so likely to provide a livelihood, and certainly there was no associated benefit or retirement package. And now with Clinton creating this new monument—hell maybe they were right. Maybe he was a threatened species, just like the Desert Tortoise, the Mexican Spotted Owl or the Virgin River’s Woundfin Minnow, but there was one glaring difference, he had no Endangered Species Act to protect him. More and more, he was beginning to feel most Americans were okay with letting his kind disappear. After all that era had been abundantly preserved in celluloid for the western movie channel and that was enough. Roper sighed and leaned on the saddle horn.
“Doug!” Ruby yelled. “I could use a little help.”
Roper waved in acknowledgment then spurred General Stepper toward Ruby. She was kneeling on a bawling white-faced calf, but couldn’t quite reach the branding iron. Reining in General Stepper, Roper jumped down and snatched the hot iron.
“From the amount of work you’ve done, I can tell you right now, you haven’t earned much of that picnic lunch.” Ruby grinned as she watched Roper apply the fiery iron. Instantly, the scintillating heat waves rose accompanied by the pungent odor of burning hair and the frantic bellowing of the young bull. He lunged against the ropes but with a knee on his chest, Ruby held him fast.
“What can I say,” Roper shrugged with a grin, jumping back as Ruby released the calf. “Good help is hard to find.”
“I saw another one head into that clump of cedars,” Ruby said, pointing to her right.
“Me and Moses’ll go flush him out,” Roper said, his blue eyes following her gesture.
Effortlessly, he remounted General Stepper then clicked his tongue for his dog to join them. Moses, a spotted brown Catahoula Leopard hound from Louisiana, immediately took the lead, nose close to the ground,