Jim Kane - J P S Brown

by J P S Brown

  The cattle were never out of sight of the vaqueros, neither on the high, rocky, brushy trails over gorges, nor on smooth, open plain. The men never relaxed their attention to the cattle. They could read a bull's mind and always be one step ahead of him. In the nights, the vaqueros rolled in their blankets and slept on the ground with their feet to the fire, their hats lolling on the sides of their heads, their heads pillowed by their arms. They rose early, before the coming sun pushed the cold air of the night over them at dawn, and stood wrapped in their blankets by a new fire. In the days, they went effortlessly by the cattle, saving their own and the cattle's energies. They never rushed themselves or hurried the cattle.

  As the drive progressed the cattle walked in an accustomed rhythm that matched the erect, attentive pace of the vaqueros. The cattle knew instinctively where the vaqueros were at every moment and a bull knew without looking at his herder when he had made one step out of the grazing boundaries of the herd.

  After a few days the black bull and the brindle walked, drank, and ate together as one in this rhythm of vaquero and herd. They were untied from each other but they stayed together for the rest of the drive as though they were still necked together.

  At the end of the fourth day's jornada, or journey, the herd arrived at the ranch of Carlos Esmit, the ranch called El Término. Kane and the Lion ordered the vaqueros to hold the cattle off the ranch while they went ahead to ask Esmit for permission to pass through his ranch.

  The two men rode over a high trail through oak country to a basin where the headquarters of the ranch lay. The basin was rimmed by a squat, rock fence. The basin covered about a half-section of land. It had been plowed and cultivated in contours on the slopes and planted in corn the previous summer. The cornstalks were so thick the ground could not be seen and the basin glared yellow in the sun. The headquarters lay in the center of the bottom of the basin. The main house was a square, stuccoed house, whitewashed and clean. A log barn stood by the wide, rock corral. A tight log stable stood by the barn. A stream of clear water ran through the basin and filled a lake held by a rock dam below the main house. A four-wheel-drive pickup truck was parked in front of the house.

  Kane and the Lion tied their horses outside the corral and walked to the door of the house. An elderly lady answered the door. She wore a plain cotton dress, long, thick hose, and laced, low-heeled shoes. Her long hair was neatly combed and braided in a thick coil at the nape of her neck. She recognized the Lion and invited the two men into the house. She made coffee and warmed a batch of sourdough biscuits for them while they told her the reason for their visit. They heard a dog barking and went outside.

  A tall, thin man was dismounting from a black mule at the door of the stable. He wore starched Levis, a clean Levi jacket, a good Stetson hat. The only apparel he used that was not the same as that of an American cowman was the huarache on his naked foot and the heavy Chihuahua spur on the bare heel. The man studied Kane and the Lion closely as they walked toward him. He unsaddled the mule and turned him loose in the cornstalks. The Lion introduced Kane to Carlos Esmit. Esmit did not tip his hat for Kane as was the custom of the Sierra. He had blue eyes and a light complexion.

  "Are you a Texan?" he asked Kane in English with a heavy Mexican accent.

  "No, an Arizonan," Kane said. .

  "What brings you this far out of the way of the other Americans?"

  'Tm taking a bunch of cattle to Chihuahua. We would like your permission to pass through your ranch. We would like to bed the cattle near here tonight, Senor Esmit.?

  "How many cattle?"

  "Two hundred sixty-five head," Kane said.

  "I only have this pasture of cornstalks. The stalks were picked over by my stock through the winter. But the dam is full of clear water. You are welcome to sabanear your cattle here if you like."

  "This would be a good place for us, thank you." ‘

  "Then bring your cattle," the man said.

  "I will go and tell the vaqueros to come on with the cattle," the Lion said and mounted the bay horse and rode away.

  "Do you speak Spanish?" Carlos Esmit asked Kane.

  "Yes," Kane said;

  "Better. It would be better if we spoke Spanish. I haven't spoken English in seventeen years."

  "You speak good English."

  "My father was an Englishman," Carlos Esmit said. Kane had never heard of the name Esmit.

  The two men walked to the house. Kane took off his chaps and spurs outside the kitchen door. They went in the house and sat down in the front room. The man had a good collection of books. The furniture in the room was simple and well made. Kane, for the first time since he had come to the Sierra, was sitting on stuffed furniture. The house was lighted by electricity supplied by a diesel generator in a shed near the house. Carlos Esmit took a pipe from his collection on a rack near his chair, filled it with the roughly cut, home-grown tobacco of the Sierra, and lit it.

  "You don't smoke a pipe by any chance, do you Señor Kane?" he asked.

  "Not very often," Kane said.

  "I thought perhaps you might have some good pipe tobacco with you. The only place I can get pipe tobacco is in Chihuahua and I haven't been to Chihuahua in eight months."

  "I thought you would go to San Bernardo and Rio Alamos for your provisions. Aren't you closer to San Bernardo?"

  "Yes, San Bernardo is one long day's ride horseback. But I completed a road this spring from this ranch to the road the government built from Creel for use in the construction of the railroad. I bought a pickup and now I can use it to bring my provisions from Chihuahua. I make the trip to Chihuahua in the pickup in two days and I can bring back more than ten mule-loads in the pickup. As you know, there are no roads except horseshoe roads from here to San Bernardo. With the pickup I can bring equipment and material like lumber and glass that I could not bring from San Bernardo on mules. I brought my generator in the pickup."

  "I see. Progress has found you in the Sierra Madre, Senor Esmit."

  "Yes. In a year or two the railroad will be completed across this Sierra between Creel and Topolobampo and I will have only a half-day's drive to take my cattle to Temoris on the railroad. It sounds odd to hear you, an American, call me Esmit, Señor Kane."

  "I was wondering about your name. It is an odd name."

  "Odd? The name should not sound odd to you. Smith?"

  "Smith?" asked Kane.

  "My name is Charles Smith," the man laughed. "I write it Charles Smith. The serrano's pronunciation is Esmit. Didn't anyone tell you that you had a countryman living in the Sierra?"

  "No one. Not even the Lion."

  "That is the way of the serrano. Some of them may be too young to know my father was English. Some may have forgotten. But though I was raised in Chinipas, I am an American. I was born in El Paso. My father was a mining engineer and he became an American citizen. He was working for a British mining company when he bought this ranch. When the company moved out of Chinipas he went back to the United States. During the Second World War my wife and I worked in an aircraft factory near Los Angeles, California. We saved our money and came back here and bought the ranch back by paying the taxes owed on it. We also bought more land and we bought our livestock.

  "I want to tell you it was hard when we first came back. We didn't have much money left after we bought our livestock and the additional land. We tightened our belts many holes during the first years we were here. We had the radio. We had our books. We had our work and that is all we had. We built this house and the furniture in it. We built the barns, the stables, the corrals, the fences. Our cattle were very far removed from the market. There is very little demand for corriente cattle and the only cattle that thrive here are corriente cattle, so, naturally, we raised corrientes and barely made enough each year on beef and cheeses to make a living.

  We managed to save a very small amount of money. Most of the money we paid for the pickup was money we got from our car when we sold it on leaving California and interest that money
accrued in the bank these last seventeen years.

  "The Sierra, the mountains, is the society we always craved. The people and the Sierra are parts of the same element. The mountains are as much a part of the society here as the people are. We have found that the people and the factories and the freeways and the pricetags of California were all one and the same element. The people were good and bad as they are everywhere, but the freeways and the pricetags on everything were bad for us. Have you ever seen a pricetag on anything in the Sierra, Senor Kane?"

  "No," Jim Kane said.

  "People in the Sierra know the worth of what they own. If you go into a store in Chinipas to buy goods you ask the storekeeper how much they are worth to him and then you bargain with him for what they are worth to you. When you leave the store you are in possession of goods that are of real value to you and you are not made poorer in acquiring them.

  In California the merchant sold articles that didn't last. If he had sold goods that would have endured, he would have gone out of business. The buyer needed goods he could use and throw out of his way because his environment demanded conveniences of this sort, goods he did not have to husband. The merchant put pricetags on the thousands of these conveniences because he could not remember what they were worth, the same goods could be worth twenty dollars today, five dollars in six months, and nothing next year."

  Charles Smith and his wife fed Kane and the Lion and put them up in beds with clean sheets and mattresses that night. The vaqueros camped on the dam and ate fresh meat from a yearling Kane bought from the Smiths. The cattle filled on the cornstalks and rested their feet on the soft ground of the basin pasture.

  In the morning at breakfast Charles Smith asked Kane to look at his best bull. The bull was a good, red Brahma Smith had bought in Chihuahua. The bull was suffering. The end of his penis had swollen and he was unable to draw it into the protection of his sheath. The long sheath, characteristic of Brahma cattle, nearly dragged on the ground and the skin of the end of the penis was swollen and dirty from bumping the ground. The bull would never again be serviceable if the sheath were not shortened so that it cleared the ground. The senior bull of Rancho El Término needed a circumcision. Kane told Charles Smith he had never performed the operation but had seen it done. Charles Smith asked Kane to operate on his bull.

  The Lion and the vaqueros caught the bull in the corral and stretched him out on the ground for Kane. Kane cut a V out of the hide of the front of the sheath and sewed it back together, shortening it so that it did not hang down but lay along the bull's belly. Then he tied a cloth sack fashioned for the purpose by Mrs. Smith around the swollen end. This sack he filled with cotton and soaked with salt water.

  "You should keep the sack soaked with boric acid. I know of no better medicine you could use. Now, how much money do I owe you for the yearling and the sabana?" Kane asked.

  "Nothing. Nada; No mas.”

  "¿Cómo que nada?" Kane asked.

  "How much do I owe you for operating on the bull?"

  "Nada," Kane said, smiling.

  "Then you owe me the same nada for the yearling and the sabana," Charles Smith said.

  Kane went to the house and thanked Charles Smith's wife for her hospitality. Then he led Pajaro to the gate where Charles Smith waited to close it after Kane passed through. "When they give you your American money for these weeks of work in the Sierra, bring it back to the Sierra. You can do more with it here," the rancher said to Kane, shaking his an .

  "Thank you," Kane said. "We'll see."

  33

  The Horse Killers

  Vultures wheeled in the floated as though on a step, and rolled lazily again in their own circular paths in the sky above the trail ahead of Jim Kane's herd.

  "The horse killers," the Lion said. "They must be killing now even though this is the wrong time of the year."

  "What horse killers?" Jim Kane asked.

  "These men buy and steal horses and burros and butcher them, dry their meat, and sell it in Mexicali and Juarez."

  "Who would buy horse and burro jerky?"

  "The city people who don't know they are buying horse and burro jerky."

  "These horse killers must be nice people," Kane said.

  "They have the right."

  "Who has the right?"

  "The ones who make the horse jerky and the ones that eat it," the Lion said, laughing. "Be nice. No fights. We will sabanear with them. They will have tasol for their horses and these cattle aren't going to get anything to eat on the trail until we get out of this horse country. I know how to keep you out of trouble, Jim Kane."

  "How is that?"

  "You don't talk Spanish."

  "Sure I do."

  "I mean you don't talk Spanish while we are with the horse killers. I'm going to tell them you don't know a word of Spanish. That way I'll do all the talking and we'll have some fun. We'll get the feed cheaper that way too."

  "Yes? How will I know that?"

  "Don't be a pendejo. You'll be hearing us talk."

  "I don't know, Lion. I might bite off my tongue trying to keep silent."

  "Understand me! It will be a diversion from this dirty, dusty monotony of a trail. And it will probably be profitable?

  "Bueno. I'll try it," Kane said.

  "I'll tell them the herd is mine. Before we leave here they will owe me and we might get off without paying them for the fee."

  "That is fine. How will they owe you, Lion?"

  "I know every brand in this country and the owners of the horses might not know the horse killers are killing their horses."

  "How do they keep from getting caught if they steal horses when the vultures are always marking their sabanas?"

  "They kill seldom, they kill many, and they move, how else? They 'water at night,' they pay the mordida to the judicial, and they stay away from the villages and ranches. They play the ladino, the mostrenco, the mustang, like you do, Jim Kane. None of them are from this country. They are not known here and people who may see them do not bother them. If these horse killers are the ones I know, they are from Rio Alamos."

  A rider on a black horse came off a hill toward them from one side of the herd. He was covered by stiff, poorly tanned, bullhide chaps and jacket. His lean, baked face was scratched from running horseback in the brush. He rode toward Kane and the Lion and they stopped their horses.

  "What are you skulking about for, Lion?" the rider asked, smiling.

  "Skulking? Yes, I'm skulking along behind two hundred sixty-five head of toretes," the Lion boomed at him.

  "Where do you take them?" .

  "To Creel."

  "Ooooooo! It is closer to San Bernardo. Are they yours or are they the meestair's?" the rider asked, indicating Kane.

  "They are mine," the Lion answered. Kane looked away from the Lion and the horse killer as though he didn't understand their conversation.

  "Who is he?" the horse killer asked.

  . "He is a gringo who wanted to accompany me on this drive for a diversion, a recreation. He can't speak a word of Spanish."

  "He chooses an odd way to divert himself," the rider said, gazing speculatively at Kane's saddle, chaps, pistol, hat, horse. "Where did you find that sorrel horse he is riding?"

  "That is a horse he brought here from the north," the Lion said.

  "He looks like a good horse."

  "He is a good horse if only for the meat he would give," the Lion said.

  The horse killer rode around behind Pajaro and looked at the horse's hind quarters. . `

  "Look at those quarters! They would give one hundred kilos of fresh meat apiece," the horse killer said. Kane looked back at him smiling brightly, dumbly. The horse killer smiled back at Kane.

  "And the gringo? How much meat do you think he would yield?" the Lion asked.

  "Plenty, and all sweet if it is anything like a gringa girl's meat. That is the kind I have always wanted to taste, the meat of a gringa woman, but maybe I should settle for a gringo man," the hor
se killer said, and he and the Lion laughed. And Kane thought, all right, you Lion, you snaggle-tooth.

  Eight horses were in the corrals of the horse killers. The horses all were skinny with tight, dusty, dry hides. Five horse killers were sitting on the rock corral, their mounts tied under trees outside the corral. Another horse killer was leading a bay mare down a wash below the corral. The vultures now had given up their soaring and were flying low over the rider and the mare. The mare was to be killed and quartered in the wash. The vultures would get her fresh blood and bones.

  The horses in the corral had been sheared of the long hair of their manes and tails. A big pile of horsehair lay outside the corral. The hair would be used for bosals, lead ropes, cinches, and headstalls the horse killers would braid when they weren't about their more profitable business of butchering horses.

  When the cattle had been penned and the vaqueros were at their leisure, the horse killers quit work to visit with them.

  The Lion walked to the corral and looked at the eight head of racks on which horses had once walked. A roan horse in the bunch was a fair-looking pony. He was young, with remnants of a fine, wide, barrel chest and straight legs. A white ring surrounded his eye, an eye that showed life and spirit in spite of the certain doom awaiting him from starvation if the horse killers didn't beat starvation to the meat that still abided on his bones.

  "That horse looks like a horse I once saw on the ranch of Salvador Arce," the Lion announced, pointing to the roan. "This horse is a huinduri, an Appaloosa, is he not? That looks like the maple leaf brand of Arce on the horse's hip. How did you find this horse so far from the ranch of Arce?"

  The scratch-faced horse killer who had met Kane and the Lion on the trail got into the corral and walked around the roan horse. He examined the brand closely though the maple leaf was twice the size of a man's hand and could be seen clearly from across the corral.

  "I don't know how the horse finds himself all this way across the Sierra from the ranch of Arce if he belonged to Arce," Scratch Face said.