The Last Ranch

by Michael McGarrity

  “That’s mighty kind of you,” Dave Flack said as he shucked his sidearm. He was hot, hungry, and tired, but after all was said and done the day hadn’t turned out half-bad.

  ***

  Within a matter of weeks, on the recommendation of the US Army, a new writ was issued by a judge exempting John Prather’s ranch house and fifteen surrounding acres from federal seizure with the understanding the rancher would cause no further trouble. It gave US Deputy Marshal Dave Flack great pleasure to serve it.

  22

  For some time after their return from John Prather’s ranch, Matt and Patrick remained cautiously optimistic about their chances of holding on to the 7-Bar-K, if and when the army came calling with an eviction notice in hand. Although Prather’s victory had been small in terms of all he had to give up, it proved that sometimes one man with gumption and grit could thwart the power of the government. It gave them reason to hope.

  Toward the end of summer, Dale Jennings started living with Mary and Kevin in the T or C cottage so he could attend public school. Before he arrived with a satchel of brand-new school clothes, Matt had built sturdy bunk beds for the boys that fit perfectly in Kevin’s bedroom. Brenda was excited to have Dale attending school with proper teachers, but simultaneously sad about the prospect of no longer having him at home with her on the ranch. She was determined to follow Mary’s lead and buy a place in T or C so she could care for Dale and find work to help pay for the additional expenses.

  Al was sympathetic to the idea but much more immediately interested in using the continuing profits from the Jornada land he’d leased to a larger producer to get back into the cow-calf business, especially now that the drought had ended and the Rocking J high pastures were nicely greened-up. Additionally, they had started receiving cash compensation from the army under a program that reimbursed ranchers outside the proving-ground boundaries who vacated their property during missile firing. So far, they’d been paid for three test firings that had caused them to leave the ranch. The money went to catching up on unpaid bills. Also, he stood to take a larger cut of the profits as manager of the Rocking J and 7-Bar-K commingled herd. If beef prices held steady, in a year he might be able to swing a down payment on a house in town. All in all, Al was finally feeling upbeat about the future after a mostly dismal decade.

  So far, he’d been able to go against the tide that had forced most small, family operated producers to rely on steady, outside employment to survive. Matt and Mary were lucky to both have reliable, full-time jobs that allowed them to keep their ranch without going into the red. But they were college graduates with education and skills he didn’t have, and he had no desire to sell farm equipment, drive a livestock truck, repair windmills, or work in a feed store in order to keep the Rocking J out of bankruptcy. Ranching was all he knew, and he wanted no part of a six-day-a-week job working for somebody else.

  To town folks it may have seemed muleheaded, but for Al it was a way of life he loved, and he planned to stick with it through good times and bad. He hoped to raise his son to do the same once the ranch passed on to him, only to do it smarter and better than his old man.

  ***

  With the demands of his job pressing him for time, Matt was more than willing to relinquish the joint cattle operation to Al, who was by far the better stockman. He helped out with the cattle when time allowed and took on all the ordinary maintenance and upkeep chores at the ranch that Patrick no longer could do. During his time at the ranch, he soon came to realize the old man needed more looking-after than a weekend visit could provide. On top of growing deaf, Patrick suffered from chronic back pain, had frequent spells of forgetfulness, and was constantly plagued with pain in the leg he’d badly broken years ago in a crash while driving through Rhodes Canyon.

  It took Matt several months to bully Patrick into the idea of accepting the notion of a full-time housekeeper. He finally relented after Matt gave him the ultimatum of a housekeeper or a permanent move to town. Victory in hand, Matt hired Marge Crowley, a divorced, older woman from Socorro who was butterball-round, built low to the ground, and full of nervous energy. Happily, the two hit it off right from the start.

  Having Marge at the ranch quickly alleviated Matt’s nagging worry of leaving the old man alone with no help in case of an emergency. It also forestalled the guilt he knew he would one day face when the time came to move Patrick into a nursing home. Matt dreaded the thought of what that would do to the old man.

  ***

  Late at night, the day after Christmas, Al rushed Brenda from the Rocking J to the T or C hospital emergency room suffering from severe stomach cramps and heavy vaginal bleeding. After X-rays and overnight observation, the doctors performed a full hysterectomy.

  While Matt kept Dale and Kevin occupied at the cottage, Al and Mary maintained a nervous vigil at the hospital. Al chain-smoked cigarettes as Mary thumbed distractedly through old magazines. The slightest sound of approaching footsteps brought them instantly to their feet. To everyone’s great relief, Brenda came through surgery okay. Five days later, the doctors released her and she recuperated under Mary’s care at the cottage until she was well enough to be up and around.

  On her last night there, a tearful Brenda, devastated that she’d never have another child, broke down in Mary’s comforting arms. It took all of Mary’s willpower not to mingle her own tears with Brenda’s. In spite of all her consultations with medical specialists and all the testing she’d gone through, she’d been unable to get pregnant again. It was mystifying and frustrating to have another child denied to her for no known reason. In the face of Brenda’s grief over the same fate, she held her tongue.

  In the morning Al came with Dale and carried Brenda home. With Matt and Kevin at the ranch so as not to be underfoot during Brenda’s convalescence, Mary faced the remainder of the day and the next alone. In a frenzy to occupy her mind with only trivial matters, she cleaned the house, washed clothes, and rearranged the dishes in the kitchen cupboards before leaving for a walk downtown to buy a few staples at the market.

  She truly didn’t need anything from the market; it was simply a way to escape the memory of the dream that had haunted her since waking. In it, a little girl as pretty as could be, dressed in a summery party dress with a blue ribbon in her curly blond hair, stared at her with big, sad eyes, waved goodbye, and vanished into an enveloping ghostly mist.

  The dream had repeated over and over during the night, each time slightly different but always with the same ending. Each time she woke up sobbing, knowing the little girl in the dream was the daughter she would never, ever have.

  Dismayed by her premonition, hoping to clear her mind, Mary delayed her return home with a stop at the drugstore just prior to closing time, where she dawdled over the stationery section picking through boxes of discounted Christmas cards. On an impulse, she purchased a hand-tooled leather diary with a locking clasp and the image of a frisky colt on the rich grain cover.

  She’d frequently thought to start a journal for Kevin so he’d have a record of her side of the family. He’d never shown much interest in the subject and she certainly hadn’t encouraged any, but the day might come when he’d want to know more. Giving him a journal to read might be the best and safest way to share her past with him while avoiding all the lamentable parts.

  She walked home in a chilling breeze under a low sky with darkness filling the slender river valley and masking the mountains. At the kitchen table, she stared at the lined empty page for a long time wondering where to start. Finally, she picked up her pen, wrote the date at the top of the page and began thusly:

  Suffering from tuberculosis and dissatisfied with his studies to become a Presbyterian minister, your grandfather, Clyde Ralston, came from Chicago to Santa Fe in 1905 to work as an accounting clerk in a dry-goods store. Instead, he took a job as the bookkeeper at the largest ranch on the Galisteo Basin and eventually became a cattleman who loved to preach. />
  She paused and read what she’d written. It was a good beginning. The touch of humor about her sanctimonious, hypocritical father pleased her. Even though it was a witticism that without further explanation would have no meaning to Kevin, she decided to leave it in.

  She continued writing into the night, the words flowing more easily than she’d ever imagined possible. It felt good, even liberating in a way, but at the same time emotionally exhausting.

  ***

  In late winter of 1958, Matt was loaned by the college to the US Fish and Wildlife Service to organize and conduct a wild mustang roundup on the San Andres National Wildlife Refuge in the mountains south of the 7-Bar-K Ranch. A band of fifty or more wild horses led by one dominant, crafty stallion had penetrated the refuge in search of water and browse during the long drought and had taken up permanent residence. Now they were competing with the bighorn sheep and other wildlife for the limited grass and water resources, and the government wanted them removed. If relocation failed they would be shot. Matt’s roundup effort would be constrained by the Fish and Wildlife requirement that during the removal, only minimal damage to the land or the ponies would be tolerated.

  Slightly more than 57,000 acres, the refuge was a haphazardly shaped rectangle twenty-one miles long, completely enclosed by White Sands Proving Ground and permanently off-limits to the public. Created just prior to World War II to protect native bighorn sheep, it was isolated, remote, and relatively untouched by human hands. Except for some disappointing hard-rock-mining ventures and a few failed ranching operations during the territorial days, the refuge contained a largely pristine mountainous slice of the far northern Chihuahuan Desert. Most people in the state, be they native-born or newcomer, didn’t have a clue that it existed, and the few who did know about it had only a foggy notion of its location.

  From the gentle western slopes of the San Andres to the juniper-studded mountainous high country, the refuge was a sanctuary not only for the bighorn sheep that had been decimated by the recent drought, but also for mule deer, mountain lions, and black-tailed jackrabbits. Rock caves sheltered colonies of bats. Long-legged lizards that Matt had never seen before scurried over scorched earth hot enough to fry eggs.

  There was birdsong new to Matt’s ears. Occasionally he got a glimpse of some bright tropical plumage flashing across the sky. Turkey vultures hunted overhead, and fleet-footed roadrunners darted through the bush searching for insects, seeds, or small rodents.

  In deep crevices there were ancient rock-art drawings of bighorn sheep, sun symbols, arrows in flight, lightning bolts, and human handprint impressions in pale white pigment. They were poignant reminders of early hunters who’d come before, each as meaningful as the names of the conquistadors and explorers scratched into the stone face at Inscription Rock, a hundred miles away.

  At the foot of a half dozen steep canyons in the refuge, water flowed from natural springs where ash and desert willow flourished along lush, gurgling stream banks teeming with birds that flittered from tree to tree. On the lower terrain, grasses, agave, yucca, and creosote peppered rolling pastures that climbed gentle foothills. On higher ground, piñon trees clung to rocky slopes, and Apache plume, bursting with delicate white flowers, flourished in crevices below steep, stratified rocky escarpments.

  Matt delighted in the assignment. He’d picked three top-hand cowboys to assist him, all experienced horsemen, and with his assembled crew they made camp their first day on the refuge under the watchful eyes of four bored army MPs, ostensibly assigned to assist, but really there to contain any sudden rash of espionage that might break out among the cowboys. They saw no sign of the ponies that night, but in the morning they awoke to watch the silent passing of the band less than a hundred feet from the camp on the way to water in Ash Canyon.

  Through binoculars, Matt counted fifty-two horses, including the reigning stallion, his mares, yearlings, colts, and three new week-old foals trailing close to their mothers. There was an old dappled gray in the band Matt was certain had been one of the wild ponies he had unsuccessfully tried to gentle back in the Depression years. It made him wonder what had happened to all those other mustangs he and Patrick had boneheadedly tried to tame.

  At a distance, he followed the band on foot so as not to spook them and watched as they leisurely watered in Ash Canyon before moving on to graze in a downslope pasture that he’d already rejected as a gathering point due to an overabundance of mesquite, prickly pear, and tall ocotillo, which would hinder any attempt to haze the animals into a capture corral.

  Wild critters used to ranging and browsing eighteen miles every day, the mustangs were sturdy, well-muscled, sure-footed animals, capable of scrambling quickly up rocky terrain and outrunning just about anything on four legs. They could easily disable, maim, or kill a man with their hooves, teeth, and strong bodies. Capture would be no easy matter. But with the prospect that the ponies would be slaughtered if not removed, Matt had no intention to fail at his task.

  After the band moved on, Matt and his boys spent the day in search of a capture point, finally settling on a foothill pasture at the mouth of a slot canyon where horse tracks showed frequent passage to where live water beyond pooled in a rock basin and trickled down to a narrow, tiny, lush wetland.

  That night they camped up above and in the morning were rewarded by the sight of the ponies passing by on their way to water. Forgoing breakfast, they saddled up and trailed the ponies for several hours to make sure they would be nowhere near the canyon while they built the capture corral. Matt didn’t want the sound of their activity to cause the animals to vary their routine.

  Back at the canyon, Matt laid out his plan for the corral. It was a simple design: gates at both ends with a pen large enough to contain the ponies without crowding and agitating them. The idea was to let them pass through the corral once or twice without capture so they could hopefully contain the entire band when they shut the gates. Once penned, Matt and his hands would lasso small numbers of the ponies at a time and trail them in groups of five to ten, depending on how aggressive the critters were, to waiting livestock trucks on the outskirts of the refuge.

  With the help of Fish and Wildlife personnel and the army MPs, who grudgingly joined in, they set about sinking posts, setting railings, and hanging the gates. After the corral was up, they used tarps, shelter half tents, and surplus cot-size mattresses the army had supplied at Matt’s request to conceal the fencing and pad the posts and the double swinging gates to reduce the chance of injury to the animals. Finally, they cut branches and boughs from a grove of junipers on higher terrain, carted it all to the corral, and tacked it to the posts and gates as camouflage.

  By late afternoon the corral was complete, but Matt wasn’t quite finished. He knew from experience that horses had an excellent sense of smell; any good cow pony would frequently cast for a scent when following cattle no longer in sight, especially if the tracks were hard to discern. The corral alone would be something new and disturbing on the route to water, and the lingering scent of man would unsettle them even more. He ordered the crew to move camp a quarter of a mile away and erase all traces of their presence.

  There they waited.

  Two days passed without a sign of the ponies. Each day Matt sent out riders to spot them and they returned with reports that the band was watering far to the north in a canyon at the edge of the refuge. Two days later, with the ponies drifting closer but still nowhere near the corral, Matt started to think the band had sensed the trap. Another no-show the next morning found him running out of options. With eight days left to remove the horses, there wasn’t time to take down the corral and set it up at a new location. If the ponies didn’t show soon, he’d be forced to attempt to drive the band into the corral, which had a decidedly dismal chance of succeeding.

  Matt slept fitfully that night, imagining the footfalls of ponies, only to wake up in time to see a lone mare with her young foal enter the
mouth of the capture corral. He had no idea if he’d missed the rest of the band, but a quick inspection of hoofprints told him a long line of ponies had slowly and cautiously traversed the length of the corral. Reassured that they were back, he decided to give the band one more safe passage before closing the trap.

  From a distance, Matt and his boys trailed and kept a close watch on the mustangs during the day and throughout the night, shadowing in shifts of two. At daybreak from a nearby promontory they watched in great relief as the horses quietly appeared and meandered into the mouth of the open corral on their way to water.

  The next morning, after another night of sentinel duty and a cold camp breakfast, saddled and ready, they nervously waited to spring the trap. When all but six stragglers were inside, Matt signaled the MPs to close the gates. He sent two of his men to chase down the stragglers, and they kicked up dust in pursuit of three mares, two colts, and a foal that tore out of the canyon. From inside the corral a deafening roar of spitting, snorting, stomping, angry, frightened ponies rose up.

  Matt and his remaining cowboy, Les Leland, a top roper and savvy hand, took a quick look over the top railing at the distressed, agitated animals. The reigning stallion, a thick-chested black, was damn angry and snorting snot. With his nostrils flared and his ears pinned back, he pounded the ground with his powerful hooves and slammed his body against a younger stallion that had invaded a group of mares milling against the corral fence. Two of the mares snapped and bit at another youngster that also tried to intrude.

  Matt hadn’t counted on warfare between the males and told Les they needed to get the stallions out of the corral before they started killing one another. “Best we do it one at a time,” he suggested.

  Les eyed Matt speculatively. “Are you sure you want to go in there?”

  Matt tipped his hat back, scratched his forehead, and checked the rounds in his six-shooter. “Let’s go after that big, mean, black son of a bitch first.”