by J P S Brown
"No," said Kane. "Pay me in sixty days. I'm broke. I mean it."
"All right then. I've got to look at some cattle in Tesopaco so I'm going to get moving. I'll see you in a week, " said Mulligan.
"So long, Shorty. "
Kane spent a week repairing his corrals and pasture fences. He knew 500 wild beasts that were nothing like normal bovines were on the way.
When the first truck rolled up to his chutes he thought it was empty. The bottom half of the rack was solid board. Kane couldn't see anything in the top half of the rack.
The trucker backed up to the chute. Kane climbed up on the rack. All the cattle were down in a mass of sullen disorder. They had that moribund look, that abandonment of will that Brahma cattle get when they have been choused to their limit. They had quit in their tracks. Unable to hold their footing in the crowded, shaking truck, they had cramped up and given up and lain down one on top of another.
Kane opened the end gate of the truck. The driver was perched on top of the rack poking a big gray bull with a sharp stick. The bull just quivered with each poke and growled a deep, gruff exhalation of his frustration.
"Leave him alone, cuñado," Kane said. "He'll stay there forever if you keep that up."
Kane grabbed the horns of the bovine nearest the gate and pulled head and front legs around so they lay in the chute. Then he lifted on the tail. The steer jumped up and charged shakily down the chute looking for an opponent.
Kane had more room now and he began loosening the pile. Finally the bull the driver had been poking was the only one left. He was down with his head under him. His nose was half in a pool of fresh manure. Bubbles rose from under one nostril as he breathed. His eyes were turned up. He had quit. It was just more than he could bear. Kane pulled his head over and he lay flat. The eyes went farther away. They had become orientally passive. The bull was suspending his animation. He had poured gasoline on himself and set himself afire and was now going to die inscrutably. He had sent his being away and made his body impervious.
Kane jumped over the rack, found two sticks, and climbed back in with the bull. He picked up the limp tail, straightened it, and stood on the tuft at the end. Then he placed the sticks on two sides of the tail and squeezed them together with both hands on the ends. He rubbed the sticks briskly up and down the white tail. Little downy hairs began to depart from the tail, drifting lightly in the air. The pink hide began to show in spots. The being was summoned back to the present, to the here, to the now. It found sight again and then voice. The bull bellowed and lurched to his feet, sliding on the slick truck bottom. He whirled toward Kane but Kane was running through the gate. The bull charged after Kane through the chute and into the coral.
Every truckload that came in was full of mad, sulled up, skinned up, on-the-fight cattle. Kane had a man meeting the trucks at the scale and Kane stayed at the corrals supervising the unloading. Mulligan was loading the cattle at the Brajcich ranch.
On the second day, in the evening, Kane had just unloaded a truck, when the driver walked up to him and handed him the weight slips.
"That's all of them, I guess," the driver said.
"Yeah, that's twelve head. That's what you've usually been hauling," Kane said;
"No, that's the total. We won't be hauling any more. Se acabó el ganado. No more cattle."
"I thought there were going to be five hundred head. This only makes one hundred twenty."
"Don David says that's all he's going to sell at this time."
"To finish me off!" Kane said..
"The gringo said he couldn't pay the price they had originally agreed on because the cattle are too wild. So Don David opened the gate and turned the rest of the cattle out."
Kane opened a gate and let the steers into a big pasture with the other cattle. The pasture was surrounded by a six-wire fence and completely shaded by álamos trees. That evening Kane went to the hotel to see Mulligan. He found him in his room sitting on the bed in a pair of pink silk pajamas. The white bare feet peeked out from under the too-long pajama trousers.
"Those cattle just ain't livestock, Jim," Mulligan said.
"They were tearing down the corrals and tearing themselves up, too. I don't know what's going to happen when we turn them loose on the desert. We'll probably never see them
again.
"Well, Shorty, I'm shipping tomorrow no matter what shape they're in. I can't afford to keep them for the thirty dollars you are paying me," Kane said.
"Go ahead," Mulligan said. "Sorry it turned out this way, but I've got to answer to Potter and I just couldn't take any more of those cattle at that price. We'll go ahead with our deal on your little cattle and you'll make enough to feel good again. The feed on the desert is really good and Potter will buy a lot of cattle from you next year if he likes you."
Kane went to the railroad office the next morning and ordered the cars. Then he looked up the vaquero truckers he always hired and told them what to expect. He didn't intend to drive those snuffy cattle through the town of Rio Alamos to the railroad yards. Mr. Potter and Mr. Mulligan were going to have to pay for trucks.
On the morning he shipped, it took Kane and five vaqueros several hours to get the cattle into the corrals. Train time was getting close. Finally all the cattle were in the pens and they started loading the trucks.
A big red steer about eight years old with a huge spread of horns kept circling the corral and ducking back every time a bunch was driven into the crowding pens off the loading chute. He would circle the corral; looking over the top crosstie at the shady álamos. As the cattle began to thin in the corral he became more frantic. He was standing at a water trough along the fence when he decided to jump. He cleared the trough and the top tie without touching either.
Kane's horse, Pajaro, was standing saddled outside the corral. Kane tightened his cinches, mounted, and took out after the steer.
Big Red High Horns threw his tail up and ran for the back fence of the pasture. He never hesitated when he came to it. He jumped it, but he misjudged his distance and jumped from too far back. His front feet cleared the top strand of wire but his hind feet went under it and over the second strand. He was trapped by the hind feet like a pilgrim in a penalty stock. Kane roped the big horns just as the wires snapped and the steer broke free again. Kane had him caught but he and the steer were on opposite sides of the fence. Kane led him down to a gate, unlatched the gate without dismounting, and rode through to the steer's side of the fence.
The big steer tried to hook Pajaro. Kane jerked him down and tied him to a tree. It was too near train time to try to lead him back to the corrals and load him. He tied the steer with plenty of slack so he could get up when he cooled off.
Kane rode back to the corrals in time to see a black, humpy bull jump the fence on the opposite side of the corrals from Kane. He jumped into another of Kane's pastures, a large one, full of brush. He was out of sight in an instant. They would have to get him later.
Kane opened the gate and rode into the corral. The big bull that had got the tail treatment in the first truckload had armed himself to fight and was defending the chutes. He didn't want to go back into the loading chute. His tail was scabby now and he was looking for revenge. None of the other cattle would pass by him and he turned back the ones that were inclined to enter the chute.
Kane roped him and threw the coils of the rope to one of the truckers. The trucker passed the rope up the chute into the truck and out the front end. All the truckers got on the end of the rope and pulled the bull around so he faced up the chute and then one of them stood in the truck at the end of the chute and waved his hat, taunting the bull. When the bull charged, Kane and the other vaqueros hazed the other cattle after the bull and they followed him into the truck.
One bull remained to be loaded. He had charged back through the gate out of the crowding pen when Kane had entered to rope the armed bull.
He was standing alone in the big corral now. When the men all turned their eyes on him he
jumped the fence into a lane that separated the corrals from a neighbors salflower field. The fence around the field was overgrown with thick, leafy vines that were solid cover around the field. The lane curved round the field and out of sight toward the Alamos River. The bull threw a number 9 in his tail and charged down that lane toward the river.
Flaco Cota was coming up the lane around the corner from the corrals. He was carrying a bucket of milk. He was happy in the morning walking. He was singing loudly. Then un toronón of a bull, bent on escape, his thousand pounds in full velocity, rounded the corner and bore down on him. The happy sounds of Flaco Cota stopped in mid-phrase of the poem he sang and the sounds of terror of Flaco Cota took over. The bull's head lowered to the ground in order to get the tip of the horn as low as possible and drive it deeply into the slender obstacle which it must lift and toss out of the way, maybe destroying it satisfactorily. Flaco's arms raised. One hand held the full milk bucket. The movement of the bulk of the bucket caught the bull's eye and he drove his left horn, his best horn, at it. He drove it so hard his front feet left the ground, his spine stiffened and his head jerked sharply up.
It seemed to Flaco it rained milk for five minutes. He could not believe there had been that much milk in that little bucket. The smell of the milk was suddenly, inordinately, sharp in his nostrils. He became aware of how warm it still felt, though it was drying and getting sticky now. He was surprised that he even had it, sticky, in the small creases of his throat and under his chin. He was sitting there marveling blankly when Kane rode up..
Kane had heard Flaco's approaching song and had seen the milk bucket in flight over the vines in the lane and had been badly frightened for Flaco.
"Are you all right, Flaco?" he asked.
"Yes."
"Are you really all right?"
"What was that demon?"
"A bull, Flaco."
"Oh."
"I was really scared. I thought he'd killed you."
"Well, no, he didn't."
"Come on over to the corrals and I'll give you a trago for the susto, a drink for the fright."
Kane started to ride away. He stopped and turned back.
Flaco was sitting there, his legs spread out in front of him, his palms turned up on his lap. Milk was splattered all over him.
Flies were arriving lazily. Flaco smiled at Kane.
"You coming, Flaco?"
"Yes," said Flaco Cota and got up on his feet.
The last truck was pulling out when Kane got back to the corrals. He got out a liter of the mezcal lechuguilla from the glove compartment of his pickup and left it with the cowboys. He told them to drink it with Flaco for his susto. Then he and Benigno, the cowboy that worked steady for Kane, got in the pickup and followed the truck to the railroad pens.
While they were loading the last railroad car, a two-year-old steer slipped on the ramp between the dock and the car and fell through an opening beside the ramp to the ground. Before anyone could rope him or turn him back he was gone down the tracks. Kane and Benigno chased him in the pickup. The steer followed the tracks paralleling a big canal. When he got to a highway crossing, some loafers who were refreshing themselves at a soda stand jumped up and waved their arms at him. The steer turned off the tracks and across a bridge spanning the canal. He scattered bicyclists off the bridge. He left the highway and went into the backyard areas of houses that faced the highway. When Kane and Benigno got to the bridge they had lost the steer. Kane stopped the pickup on the bridge.
"And the steer?" he called to the loafers.
"Rumbo a las cases, toward the houses," one shouted.
They were very excited and laughing. A bull had blessed their morning.
"Vámonos, let go," Kane shouted and three of them got in the back of the pickup.
They heard a shriek and a woman burst out into the street from behind a house shouting, "¡Auxilio! There goes a bull with the rabies."
Kane got to the woman just as the steer broke from cover down at the end of the block. The steer was really running now. An old woman was sprinting after him waving a broom
and shouting, "Now you'll see who you scare. Now you'll see!"
The steer ran skidding across the highway, not looking back. Across the highway he found the great, smooth, uncomplicated openness of the municipal airport.
Kane gunned the pickup after him. He pulled up beside the running steer. The steer was hot, he had but one purpose, to get away from houses and to get to the brush he could see across the airport. He would not turn away from the brush. Benigno grabbed the steer's tail and pulled it over the windowsill and pulled down on it. Kane drove the pickup on by and the steer was neatly tailed over. Kane looked back and saw the steer rolling on his back with all four feet up in the air. Kane braked the truck, jumped out of the cab in a cloud of dust, and bulldogged the steer as he was getting up. There was no fight left in the steer. They tied him up and loaded him in the back of the pickup.
The switch engine was hooking on to the lead car whenthey got back to the railroad yards. The trainmen waited while Kane and Benigno loaded the steer.
Kane looked in the cars. The big cattle were caught now. They stood silently together. Their dark, almond, Brahma eyes looked out through the slits between the boards. Well, they'll be free a little longer once they get on the desert, if they get to the desert, Kane thought. My hand in their unhappiness is over.
That afternoon he went back to the place where he had the big steer tied. The steer hadn't been up on his feet since Kane left him. He was lying in the sun now and had made no
attempt to rise and walk around to the shady side of the tree.
"You must have missed fifteen or twenty roundups in your life, old steer," Kane thought.
"You brushed up and watched the cowboys go by with your buddies all gathered together and being driven down the road. You knew you'd never see them again. Then all of a sudden you got real scared at how close you had come to getting caught too and you ran off back in the brush until you couldn't smell or hear the herd anymore.
"How many cowboys must have been right on your tail, just waiting till you ran through a little clearing so they could rope those big horns of yours, and you found a deep, thick, spiny clump and you knew a trail through it and when the vaquero thought he had you, you turned sharply at right angles to his path and slipped through the brush and you were alone again.
"I wonder how they finally caught you. They probably starved you for water. They cut you off from your regular easy-to-get and easy-to-get-away-from watering places. Then they trapped you in a corral or waterlot when you just couldn't stand the thirst anymore. It took them years, though. I bet they haven't seen you ten times in your life. I bet you spent many, many nights smelling and listening to a watering place before you went down to drink. I bet it's been years since you watered in the daytime. I bet no one ever roped you on their little horses. You would have given them a hot sleigh ride through the stickers. .
"Now you are caught and you can't face getting up. You would rather lie there and die. You probably will unless I can figure a way to get you up."
Kane had brought a quart bottle of rum mixed with warm water and sugar. He hooked the steer's dry nostrils with thumb and forefinger and jammed the bottle in the corner of his mouth, pouring the toddy down his throat. He and Benigno got hold of the tail together and hauled up on it but the steer refused to stand on his hind legs when they cleared the ground. The stick treatment was just torturing him for nothing. The big steer just moaned softly and hooked the big horns weakly into the ground. Kane left him alone. If` he wanted to die, why not let him. He would never be merchandise. Maybe the toddy warm in his stomach would give him hope.
Kane and Benigno went to the corrals and saddled their horses. They rode out in the brush pasture to look for the black bull that had got away at shipping time.
The pasture was about fifty acres of thick brush cut in two by a wide right-of-way for a power line that passed through it. B
enigno and Kane each took half of the pasture and started looking for the bull.
Kane always liked to ride in the brush. If he looked carefully and rode slowly he could find the trails used by the stock. They hadn't turned any of the Brajcich cattle loose in this pasture. They would have been too hard to find and drive out.
He hit the bull's tracks and followed them into a corner of the pasture. Big mesquite trees grew there and the ground was in solid shade. It was almost evening. Kane found tracks where the bull had nooned under the mesquite. He cut for tracks around the perimeter of bare ground shaded by the mesquite and found where the bull had left the corner and gone down the fence toward the right-of-way of the power line again. He followed the tracks down the fence and suddenly lost them. He circled away from the fence around a thicket of jócona, a straight, thorny, white tree. He couldn't} find where the bull had come out. He rode around the jócona again, searching in the deep shadows. When he got back to the fence again he saw the bull. The bull was standing in plain sight of the fence. He was black in the shadows. His head was turned away from Kane. He was standing absolutely still and dark, only his ears showed he was aware of Kane. The big, leafy, Brahma ears were bent back, the holes pointed directly at Kane. They twitched a little when Kane stopped to watch the bull. The ears moved slowly to where Kane's progress might have continued and when they heard nothing there they turned to the last place they had heard Kane and stopped again. The tip of one ear twitched a fly away. Kane didn't move. The ears examined the terrain in front of the bull, then returned again to Kane. The head turned slowly and one eye glared, unblinking lest movement attract, at Kane.
"Boo!" said Kane.
The black bull moved gracefully through the jócona. Kane skirted the thicket so as to head the bull down the fence. When the bull hit the trail on the fence, Kane spurred Pajaro at fullspeed after him, got his rope off the swells of the saddle, and built a loop.
"¡Ahí te va! He's coming to you!" he shouted to Benigno, but Benigno was late and the bull broke out into the right-of-way and back into the brush ahead of him.