Hidden America

by Jeanne Marie Laskas

  But mostly he thinks about Revelation’s ear. He saved a notch from Revelation’s left ear. He sent it to the ViaGen cloning lab in Austin, and there it sits, on ice.

  —

  NOW, JEFF. Jeff used to work in a packinghouse and he hated it. “A whole lot of crazy dudes running around with sharp knives.” Unlike Donnell, Jeff is a free-floating cowboy without predicament or a predetermined set of lifelong goals. “I just wanted to be a cowboy ever since I was itty-bitty,” says Jeff. He doesn’t have a family ranch to inherit; in fact his father is an insurance salesman who long ago escaped the ranch of his ancestors and for years begged Jeff to grow out of his silly boyhood cowboy dream. It didn’t work. A man is what a man is. Jeff went to college to study agriculture, cowboyed part-time all through college. He got the job at the R.A. Brown Ranch two years ago and he’s building his cowboy résumé, getting his name out there.

  Jeff: “I’m sorry I keep talking about her. I’m really sorry, guys. But hey, it’s a big deal to meet a girl. We don’t see a lot of girls. . . .”

  Cameron: “Eight days, dude. Eight days!”

  Jeff: “I know—”

  It’s hard for your life to really gain traction without a wife. Jeff met the new prospect at church. He had been going to that church for nearly a year and was ready to quit. (“I’m, like, are there no girls here?”) She’s real nice and real pretty, but the main thing is she lives just thirty-six miles north. He wants a wife who won’t make him move anywhere he doesn’t want to move to. The main problem with wives, as he has seen time and time again, is that after they get the cowboy to marry them, they make him stop cowboying. Jeff will never stop cowboying, and neither will Casey or Cameron or any of the other dozen or so who work at the R.A. Brown Ranch. People who don’t understand, or who think small, wonder why a guy would choose to work twelve-hour days out in the constant Texas dust in a long-sleeve shirt and thick leather chaps on a sweaty horse for maybe $2,000 a month rather than, say—especially in Texas—off on an oil rig where he could make quadruple that with no experience and barely an education.

  It is a stupid question, to a cowboy. It would be like asking why a rattlesnake doesn’t go off and be a coyote instead. It’s who you are. It has nothing to do with money. (And listen—cowboys don’t do grease, or machines.) A cowboy is more like a poet: driven by a passion as old as the hills and the dirt, and one that has nothing whatsoever to do with the world’s economy. He will find a way to live the life no matter what. He will talk of individual freedom and America. He will understand that a man’s character is shaped by the landscape in which he rides—or doesn’t ride. He will smell the dirt and escape to his essence. He will look out into the tawny range under an endless sky and ponder everlasting life. He will listen to cowboy freedom songs on the radio and thank America. He will look forward to meeting Jesus. He will wake up each day at dawn, just like the songs preach, saddle up his horse, and ride.

  —

  “GET ALONG, GIRLS,” Cameron says, his horse walking so slow he could fall asleep. The cattle drive back to ranch headquarters will take two hours at this rate. It would be more fun if the cattle would act out some. To liven things up, Casey practices his roping using Jeff’s horse, Badger. Specifically, using Badger’s back leg as his target. Soon Cameron joins in the challenge, the two lassoing high and then snapping their wrists with a thwack. Neither Jeff nor Badger cares one bit, Badger calmly lifting and shaking his leg each time it gets snagged. Jeff has somehow moved on to singing “Twinkle, Twinkle, Little Star,” and Casey wants to strangle him.

  “Hogs!” Cameron shouts, spotting a group of perhaps ten wild hogs scampering between the mesquite, little black buggers, ugly and aggressive. Cameron reaches for the rifle he carries on his saddle, but the hogs are too fast. Wild hogs in this part of Texas are a menace, rampant. Cameron is by far the best hog shooter here, or so he claims, repeatedly. On a whiteboard in the saddle house they keep score and every year Cameron wins by a mile.

  “This year none of your hogs count unless you bring back at least a tail,” Casey tells him. “At least a tail. You have to have proof.”

  “You guys are such losers—”

  It’s nearly noon by the time they make it back to the ranch and steer the cattle into a paddock. Then, with whistles and whoops and their obedient horses charging and cutting, they separate the cows from the calves.

  To achieve uniformity and to maintain quality control, Donnell likes all his cows on the same estrus cycle. One at a time the cows come through a metal chute, Jeff tapping with a prodder from behind, and one at a time Cameron and Casey rectally insert the progesterone plugs. Each one has a blue string hanging out for easy removal in a few days. The progesterone will keep the cows from coming into heat. When Donnell says he’s ready, the cowboys will pull the plugs and give each cow a shot of prostaglandin, resulting in ovulation. Prostaglandin on, say, a Tuesday means each cow will be in heat by Wednesday from about 2:00 a.m. to 2:00 p.m., so one of the cowboys will put on his arm-length plastic gloves and insert a straw of semen carrying some 20 million sperm cells with an artificial insemination syringe called an AI gun.

  George, who has cowboyed here for fifty-seven years, is by far the best with the AI gun. “He has a gift with his hands to know how to feel rectally into a cow that most people don’t have,” Donnell says. George will expertly feel the reproductive tract with one arm, then with the other guide the gun through the cervical rings (the tricky part) and deposit the semen at the opening of the cervix. It takes maybe sixty seconds per cow, and every cow on the ranch, 1,300 in all, is bred that way, as many as 400 in a single day.

  The superstar cows—the genetically superior—are put on a different regimen. AbiGrace is the Browns’—and the breed’s—rock star in this category. She’ll be overstimulated for maximum egg production, inseminated with choice sperm. The resulting embryos, as many as a dozen, will be flushed and frozen. Those embryos could be sold for more than $1,000 a pop on the Internet if Donnell chooses, but usually they get put into surrogate cows—proven moms that don’t, let’s say, have the genetics to be worth breeding. AbiGrace can then be stimulated to make more embryos, and more still.

  Without scientific assistance, a mature cow will produce just one calf a year. With embryo transfer, AbiGrace can crank out twenty-five.

  In a week’s time, about 65 percent of the artificially inseminated cows at the R.A. Brown Ranch will become pregnant. A bull will be let loose to impregnate those that didn’t conceive the AI way. In nine months the newborn calves will drop to the ground, and the process repeats.

  All in all, as far as cowboy jobs go, Jeff likes this whole seed-stock gig well enough but is not too crazy about all the science. It’s not the disgusting part that bothers him, the insertions and goo and glops. It’s all the test tubes and the computers and all the shots and record keeping. Really? He dreams big. He dreams of working on a million-acre ranch, like in Nebraska or Montana or someplace, where they call the cattle in just twice each year and a cowboy is handed a can of beans and told to get on out and don’t come back until he’s got 1,200 head moved in for doctoring.

  It’s hard to know how a wife fits into a dream like that. Hard to know.

  —

  CLONING REVELATION is a big decision, and Donnell doesn’t know what to do. He has never cloned a bull before, never imagined himself stuck in the mud of such profound uncertainty. For about $20,000 an exact genetic replica of Revelation could be engineered in the lab and soon enough be out there grazing on the silver bluestem. Actually, technically, Donnell could order up two new Revelations, or twenty Revelations, or more.

  Donnell stares at the horizon a lot. All day in his truck, like so many days in his truck, hundreds of miles a day, sometimes, to look at bulls, pick up cows. “There’s the question of playing God,” he says about the cloning decision, “and there’s also just the business model to cons
ider.” His hair is cropped close, matted tight to his head from years and years of cowboy hats. He wears sunglasses on a neoprene strap, always at the ready. “Like I tell my dad, ‘It’s better to be on the leading edge than the bleeding edge.’”

  He’s just returning from a ranch in Coleman, Texas, where he transferred seventy valuable Red Angus embryos into some surrogates. He’s back at the ranch, headed down to the AI center to check on the action there. Lots going on today. Spring at the ranch is always nuts like this. He parks his truck. He notices a splotch of dried mud on his starched jeans. He takes out a knife he keeps clipped to his belt, unfolds it, and scrapes that mud right off.

  The AI center is a modest white tin barn surrounded by a catacomb of pens and clanking red gates. It’s positioned at the far end of the ranch, flanked by shady hills providing cool comfort to hundreds and hundreds of Black Angus bulls. Atop the hill, a lone oil derrick bounces its lunatic head, up and down, up and down, as if davening. Inside the main event is the mighty gray metal chute, a monstrous contraption that can calmly hold a cow or a bull and, with the benefit of hydraulics, squeeze and restrain it. Once in place, a cowboy can do what he needs to do: inseminate, castrate, brand, palpate.

  Today, a freelance cowboy who specializes in ultrasound technology is here with his machine, which is connected to a computer, which is connected to a thumb drive, which contains the information that will eventually be uploaded to a lab in Iowa. Technicians there will run a program translating the pictures the cowboy transmits into numbers.

  “Howdy, sir!” Donnell says, all smiles.

  “How’s your boy?” the cowboy says. “He’s playing ball next year?”

  “Yes, sir, Tucker’s looking to play quarterback,” Donnell says. “We’re mighty proud.”

  “I’m about through with these bulls,” the cowboy says, grabbing an electric shaver. “About a half dozen left. Seeing some good scores.” He shaves some hair from the back of a 926-pound young bull, squirts a shot of lubricating oil on the hide, then gently places his ultrasound wand over the spot he knows to be just between the twelfth and thirteenth ribs. The picture that emerges on his computer screen is unmistakably and perhaps unsettlingly an actual rib-eye steak. Clear as a plate of beef at Outback Steakhouse.

  “Nice marbling,” Donnell says. “Okay, real nice.”

  The cowboy takes pictures of the rib eye, then gets a shot of the bull’s back fat. All carcasses are trimmed at a quarter inch of body fat, the industry standard, so you’re hoping to see that score low and marbling high. The complete ultrasound takes less than five minutes, and when the cowboy is through he pulls a lever, releasing the squeeze on the bull. The bull roars out while another, with a great clank and clatter, thunders into the chute. Once processed into numbers, the data will go to the Red Angus Association of America, where anyone with a computer can look up the stats of any animal registered. Determining a cattle’s worth used to be more mysterious. Just a few decades ago, it was a matter of human cow-sense—a combination of showmanship, gossip, and excitement whipped up at the county stock show. A seller would fatten up his bull, scrub him, brush him beautiful smooth, apply hair dye and hair spray as necessary, and parade him in a circle and hope to win the blue ribbon. The winning bull would thus become famous and could command the highest stud fees for the year. That tradition continues today, but mostly for fun: What cowboy does not want to win the Fort Worth Stock Show and get his photo taken right there alongside his bull in front of a green velvet drape?

  Determining value now happens on spreadsheets. A cowboy like Donnell can pull them up on his BlackBerry: the ACC (accuracy) of the EPDs (expected progency differences) of one bull versus another and one cow versus another. A herd’s full set of EPDs reads like endless pages of NASDAQ offerings, a chart of numbers expressing the relative values of carcass weight, marbling, rib-eye area, fat thickness, maternal milk, cow energy value, calving ease, birth weight, weaning weight, yearling height, scrotal circumference—fourteen traits in all—that each bull’s progeny has been statistically predicted to achieve.

  EPDs can be difficult material for the weekend cowboy to master, but for a modern seed-stock producer like Donnell, the information is gold. Breed a better bull. Get a dam with the best EPDs for calving ease and cow energy value and breed it with a bull with the best EPDs for marbling and rib-eye area and maybe weaning weight times yearling height (an online “EPD Mating Calculator” can help with this task) and see if you can’t just produce perfection. Tweak with the next generation, try again, and again.

  And then one day you achieve glory: you find you have created something no cowboy has ever before created. Of course you name it Revelation. And of course, if it goes lame, you do everything in your power to save it. And of course if you lose the battle and have to send it to slaughter, you . . . clone it?

  To date, no more than a thousand cattle have been successfully cloned in the U.S., and the market reaction has been mixed. People aren’t sure they want to eat cloned beef. People just aren’t sure.

  But this is Revelation. This is a historic bull. Donnell would need the approval of all seven ranchers who own syndicate shares in order to clone the bull.

  Late one summer night, he sits at his computer, and he types an e-mail to all of them, and he reads it over to make sure it sounds right. He pauses awhile. Nothing to lose by just putting the question out there. Nothing to lose by just asking.

  —

  AND NOW IT IS OCTOBER, and a beautifully wet one at that. Throckmorton averages just twenty-six inches of rain a year, and so drought is a constant and real concern; all this precipitation feels like a tremendous blessing, providing green blankets of wheat and refilled water holes everywhere. It’s been a productive year. All those cows Jeff and Cameron and Casey and George inseminated last April have just been pregnancy-tested, and the results forecast a promising spring birthing season. The R.A. Brown Ranch 35th Annual Bull, Female & Quarter Horse Sale is just a few weeks away. The leadoff bull is Turbo, son of Destination, great-grandson of Cherokee Canyon, great-nephew of Revelation. He has impressive EPDs—the highest inner-muscular-fat score of any bull in the sale.

  “Turbo charge your program,” Donnell wrote, on page 67 of the 2009 sale catalog. “Thrust your program to the forefront of the fastest-growing breed in America with Turbo.” He expects the bull to bring $25,000, plus an average of about $3,000 apiece for the five hundred others.

  And if all that isn’t enough good news, the Throckmorton Greyhounds are once again in first place. Undefeated through seven games with Tucker Brown as quarterback.

  Donnell, Kelli, and just about everyone in Throckmorton is blissfully possessed by the victorious Dawgs, dressing in purple and gold each Friday night, waving banners, texting play-by-play action to relatives in faraway towns. Posters of individual players decorate the walls of restaurants, and in churches worshippers ask God for one more victory, one more, one more. Kelli is the kind of mom to wildly cheer her son on, but she is also the kind of mom to never count the number of points he scores. “I count his assists. When he comes off the field, I tell him how many times he helped other kids score.”

  And if all that isn’t beautiful enough, Jeff has a new girlfriend. Actually, two. No, the eight-day relationship did not work out. Whatever. Now there is Hannah and now there is Sara. Each knows about the other. Because Jeff is honest. He is honest. Hannah is pretty much perfect in every way, lives not too far away, but she’s busy as a tick. The Sara situation makes no sense whatsoever. She and Jeff have nothing in common. Sara lives off in the metroplex, goes to happy hours and movies. She has never even met a cowboy before Jeff. No sense! How is it that they talk forever on the phone? Forever. They laugh. They never want to hang up. She visits. He’s honest. He says: “There is Hannah.” He says: “I’m Christian and you’re a Jew. How would that deal work out? What would we do with our kids?” He says: “I’m not moving
to no Metroplex.” He says: “I’m a cowboy with cowboy dreams.”

  He thinks, No sense whatsoever, and finds himself calling her again.

  Sara drove all the way up from Dallas last night to visit Jeff and to bring him a present. This morning, up at the saddle house, Jeff is telling Casey and Cameron about it, while the three tack their horses, lifting, tugging, patting flanks with affectionate slaps.

  Jeff: “It’s not that I don’t like it! I’m just saying: What does a city girl know about a cowboy shirt?”

  Cameron: “You should have just told her thank you.”

  Jeff: “But I didn’t understand it. I was confused. I’m, like, ‘Huh?’ It had these shoulder-flap deals. I’m, like, ‘What are these for?’”

  Casey: “You should have just said thank you.”

  Jeff: “I told her it was soft. I said it was real nice fabric! It’s probably designer something. She said she got it from some top-notch store. Norbert’s?”

  Casey: “Nordstrom’s! They got a big piano playing all the time in that store.”

  Jeff: “A piano?”

  Cameron: “Guys, let’s just drop this whole stupid subject—”

  Jeff: “Well, I can’t wear something with no shoulder-flap deals sticking up—I feel bad. I think she thought it was plaid and so it must be a cowboy shirt. I feel real bad.”

  Donnell walks up.

  “Morning, gentlemen!” he says. “Ready to roll?”

  “Yes, sir,” Cameron says. “We’ll get her loaded here in a moment.”

  No matter how neat and tidy Cameron and Casey and Jeff look, Donnell always looks at least three degrees neater and tidier. He has on his dark dress-up jeans and a special starched shirt, solid beige, that bears the embroidered brand and insignia of the R.A. Brown Ranch.

  They’re headed to a rodeo, five hours away, for working cowboys only—not those flashy athletes you see on TV who rodeo for a living. This is ranch versus ranch, all the cowboys bringing to the arena the skills they actually use each day out on the range. Roping, doctoring, milking, bronc riding. (You would never find bull riding at a ranch rodeo, because no self-respecting working cowboy would ever have reason—or be stupid enough—to climb on the back of a bull.)