Jim Kane - J P S Brown (39 page)

He was back in San Bernardo by evening the next day.
He walked up to Poncho and handed him the cigarettes. "I guess
that proves you've been to gringolandia," Poncho said. "The
Pardito isn't even rested yet."

"
It's a shame I had to ride him so hard, but
your government is very exacting of gringos, with good reason, I
guess.

"
You mean with
mostrencos
,
unbranded mavericks like you," Poncho said, laughing. "The
Pardo hasn't been hurt, don't worry. I have bad news for you, though.
Pablo killed himself the evening after you left."

"
No! I can't believe it. You mean he committed
suicide?"

"He shot himself through the roof of the mouth."

"
The wife?"

"
They had a fight and he killed himself. She
sent Chonito the hunter to Chinipas where they wired for the plane.
The plane picked her up at Avena at sunup yesterday. She left her
baby with the maids at San Rafael. They say she didn't even say
good-bye."
 

23
The
Brown-and-White
Spotted Aristocratic
Corriente

In Mexico the word
corriente
means common or plain. The word is used to
describe the usual run of the cheap and mediocre.

When applied to cattle,
corriente
means native cattle. The corriente is a
descendent of the cattle the Spaniard brought to Mexico, the same
cattle the Texas Longhorn descended from. But
corrientes
are not defunct like the Texas Longhorn. The
Mexican
corriente
still
abounds in spite of hunger, drought, deprivation, and degeneration.

Since he is common and cheap to buy, people think
he is inferior, a butt of jokes. A joke circulates among cattlemen in
Mexico about a cattle buyer who went to see a bunch of cattle and
after he looked them over he told the owner he didn't want them after
all.

"
Why?" asked the owner, "I told you
they were
corriente
before
you came to see them and you said you didn't mind it if they were
corriente."

"
Yes. I said that," said the buyer. "But
your cattle are mucho muy
corriente
,
very much too much
corriente
."

"
What the devil! Common is common. I said
they were common. How can any common thing be too common any more
than any aristocratic thing be too aristocratic?" said the
owner.

"
Now you have it,"
said the buyer. "I want aristocratic
corrientes
."

The cow was poor.

Someone had tipped· her big horns back with a saw.
The swelling rings on her old dead horns showed she had a lot of age
on her. Along her backbone, which was very prominent, with each
vertebra clearly distinguishable, her dark brown hide was faded and
bleached and stretched to a golden brown. She stood in a wash that
fell off a mountain of  the Sierra Madre of Chihuahua, her belly
tight and swollen. It was time for her, the sixth time for she was
seven years old, to have her calf

The brown cow moved slowly out of the still heat of
the open wash into a tunnel of
vainoro
,
the thick spiny brush that grew solidly along the sides of the wash.
She probed her way through the unyieldy thorned branches to the dark
uncluttered shade next to the trunks. There in the private depths of
the
vainoro
she
dropped her calf, a brown-and-white spotted bull calf.

She licked her calf clean. He staggered on weak legs
with each swipe of her rough tongue. She nudged him onto her sparse
teats and he took the vital first milk, the milk that gave him his
mothers resistance to disease. When he had nursed she left him full
and sleeping, the tiny head flattened to the ground, the large clean
ears down flat against the head, and left the tunnel of
vainoro
to feed and water.

Later, when the calf awoke alone, he raised his head.
Instinct kept him quiet. He moved only his head, ears twitching at
the insects that came to investigate his new live warmth. Then his
tail began to wring spasmodically on the ground as he examined each
new wonder in the
vainoro
and
longed for his mother. Once, the heavy steps of a large animal passed
in the wash below and the calf lowered his head to the ground,
stretched his neck out along the ground, and stilled his ears and
tail.

A few days later it became necessary for the cow to
range away from the
vainoro
and
she took the calf out of his tunnel. He trotted out on long knobby
legs close at her side, shying at the marvel of a butterfly, a
lizard, or the smell and sign of an old bull.

During the ranging the
vacuero
Manuel Rodriguez saw the cow had calved and, with the
help of his dog, drove her to the corral of his camp at El Naranjo.
He took the calf from his mother. He tied him down. He took out his
sharp knife and seized a stiff healthy ear and earmarked the calf. He
carved a round hole, called a balazo, or bullet hole, in the center
of one ear, and he sliced off the whole curve of the underslope of
the other ear. The calf now bore the official mark of all livestock
of the El Naranjo ranch. Manuel shut the calf in a small corral with
several other calves. He then turned the brown cow out into a pasture
where she joined other cows that were being milked.

Each morning the cows would call at the gate of the
corral, bawling for their offspring. Manuel and his son let them in,
roped them, hobbled their hind legs, and released the calves to let
them suck. When the cows were letting down their milk freely, the men
caught the calves and tied them to the fence and milked the cows of
all but a small portion of their milk. Then the calves were untied
and allowed to strip the cows of the last of their milk. The
brown-and-white spotted calf slobbered ravenously over his mother's
little udder, butting it in consternation when it went dry, his long
black tongue curved around a teat, the pure eyes half closed in
delight.

During this time the calf learned to respect the men.
He learned the rope around his neck had an end to it and would jerk
him back sharply when he ran against it. He learned to undergo
patiently the hunger that was to dominate him for most of his life.
He found his corral had bounds but he never respected them. He was
always hunting a way out of the corral.

The brown cow was milked for a month and then was
replaced by another cow and released to take her calf back to her
querencia
, her
favorite range. The calf was now dead of hair and weak from having
been robbed of the greater part of his early nourishment. He was
stunted and potbellied. With the milk that had been robbed from the
calf Manuel Rodriguez's wife had made cheeses and fresh curd
panelas
which they sold. These cheeses paid the biggest part of
Manuel's wage and was the reason he worked for the owner of the ranch
of which the brown cow and her calf were units of livestock.

Hunger was the rule in the Sierra Madre. El Naranjo
was small and overstocked. This part of the Sierra Madre was not cow
country, not grass country. Grass grew only from July until the
middle of October and had dried up and been eaten up by November.
Then hunger took over again and got worse each month until the July
rains began again.

The owner of El Naranjo was Juan Vogel. He could not
live on his ranch because he could not make a living there. He paid
Manuel Rodriguez a small wage and gave him the right to milk the cows
for the cheeses. Juan took what his ranch and livestock produced as a
supplement to his living in town and rarely returned anything to the
ranch for its improvement.

Summer had begun when the brown cow was released from
the milking: The land and foliage of the Sierra Madre were brown.
Cattle moved little in the heat of the day and browsed at night on
brush,
pechita
beans
of the mesquite trees, leaves of the
tuna
,
prickly pear cactus, and the
cholla
cactus. Mother cows eating the fierce needle-like spines
of the cholla would get their cheeks, muzzles, and foreheads covered
with pieces of stalks of cholla. The spines festered on the cattle
and prevented them from browsing and grazing normally. Gradually
these cactus eaters became addicted to cactus, as they could eat
nothing else. The tips of their tongues split, their mouths filled
with thorns until they constantly frothed, expelling valuable fluid.
These cattle were able to eat less each day until they became so thin
they resembled racks with dusty skins stretched tightly over them.
They became bellyless, wild, and covered with parasites. A cow man
wondered what sort of soul or spirit kept them alive, certainly
nothing requiring food or drink.

Then, when it looked as if there was not another bite
of feed anywhere in the Sierra and cattle ranged like goats up on the
cliffs in country apparently impossible for a bovine, and every inch
of the Sierra had been picked over, the summer rains began and grass
sprouted.

The brown cow ranged far from Manuel Rodriguez' camp.
She and her calf summered in a tiny meadow on a stream of clear water
surrounded by straight pines high on the border of Chihuahua and
Sonora.

When winter came the feed was gone in the meadow and
the two moved down into the brush country where the spotted calf had
been born. Here they ranged until the spring when the browncow had
her seventh calf, a black heifer calf. The spotted calf was a
yearling now. He had been weaned by his mother but he still ran by
her side.

One day Manuel Rodriguez came for the brown cow again
and she and her heifer calf and the spotted yearling were driven to
the corrals where the cow was taken for milking again. The spotted
yearling stayed close to his mother when ever she was turned out of
the corral but he was becoming accustomed to ranging farther away
each day looking for better feed, as there was not enough for him
near the camp of Manuel Rodriguez. One evening he stayed away from
his mother for the first time in his life. Gradually his visits to
his mother became fewer as the rustling for feed became more
difficult. He began to hunt new ranges and when his mother was turned
out again the brown-and-white spotted yearling was on his own.

His pointed little horns were growing fast, nearly an
inch a month now. The short hair under each eye was black and formed
black crescents, a natural protection against the glare of the sun.
He was light brown and white over his head, neck, and foreparts, but
along his flanks and rear the spots changed to a reddish brown and
were small and numerous, like reddish brown grains. He was almost a
roan on his hindparts but he wasn't a roan. He was a
granizo
,
with a multitude of distinct freckles on his hindquarters.

The yearling was learning to be alone. He found it
natural to hide when a man passed near him. Alone, it was easy for
him to climb high in the Sierra and feed in places his mother had not
been spry enough to take him. He traveled silently on small
rock-trimmed hooves. He picked his way patiently and surely over
vertical slopes of smooth rock. He never wasted energy in being
curious or calfish for he had none to waste, his process of making a
living in that country took every bit of his nerve and guile. He
never passed up a chance to eat, his every waking moment was
dedicated to feed. He became as crafty and wild as the pumas,
jaguars, and ocelots he encountered in their pursuit of a living.

Once, during the rainy season when the grass was good
in the high pine country and the acorns were thick under the oak
trees, the spotted yearling had been grazing two days without water
on the new grass in a shaded ravine. In the evening he finally headed
for water. He topped out over a sharp ridge covered with pines and
walked down over needle carpeting into the steep shade of late
afternoon. He could smell the deep cold water in the spring of an
arroyo far below him. He rounded a bend in the trail and came upon
more cattle on their way to the spring. He followed them on the
narrow trail. The trail rimmed a precipice of sheer white rock.