More short stories about cowboy work by one of my favorite authors. The accounts are always interesting, sometimes funny, engaging and well-told all around. In this case though, the focus isn’t horses, it’s cattle. The stories are from a time period when as a young man, the author frequently took jobs hunting wild cattle that had eluded roundups, hiding in thick brush and ravines. So a lot of the stories are about how he outsmarted them, which I really enjoy. Also about his dealings with other cattlemen, traders and bankers (so often about making a deal or outsmarting other people, too). About how he worked with his horses, treated minor wounds, camped out on the range, dealt with tough situations. Not for the squeamish- one time a bull got his leg with its horn, and it started to fester. Instead of going into town to find a doctor, he seared the wound with hot metal- held in the campfire. Yikes. Also sometimes the cattle are not treated too nicely– I understand these were different times, and it’s one man on a horse trying to outmaneuver and subdue a large, belligerent and dangerously strong bovine. Some of them had very nasty tempers and were very determined to avoid capture. It’s one thing to read about him tying them up short and sawing off the tips of the horns to make his job safer. It’s quite another to read about things like whittling little pegs and piercing holes in the cows’ eyelids to force them to keep their eyes open so they’ll be afraid to get near brush on the side of the road or trail, and thus become more docile and easy to handle. (He says he had no qualms about doing this because he knew well they would kill him and his horse in a flash if they got the chance, and the piercings healed up quick enough once the cattle were confined in the stockyards and the pegs removed. And I think he only did this once, with some particularly difficult and volatile animals. But still, hard to read).
Well, I found a lot of it interesting, reading how he would utilize the landscape, the weather, and his knowledge of bovine behavior to do his job, usually solo (sometimes he had assistants or other help, but often not). There’s also some musings on how the beef industry and cattle breeding changed over the decades, how mechanized equipment affected his job as a cowboy, and small details about things like what type of rope is good for what task, etc. I enjoy Ben K. Green for an easy, lively read any day- right on par there with Gerald Durrell in my book (delivery and subject matter a bit different, but my pleasure in reading them very much of the same quality). My personal copy has the cover show top left of this post, but I also like this one which I found online, and the many illustrations by that artist Lorence Bjorklund in the interior. Most of the stories in here are good long chapters, some are just a few pages.
2 Responses
Wow that eye thing… I know it’s a different time, but ugh. I think I would have had to skip that whole section or chapter, however far I needed to jump ahead. The rest sounds interesting though!
It was not the only brutal thing done to control cattle, but yeah. Made me squirm!