An unseasonable biting wind brought sleety rains, mornings that put rubbery rims of ice on horse troughs, and harried rural residents of Jalisco’s mountainsides.
That was November and December of what people called ”the cold year” in the early 1960’s. Concha Rosales, in her mythical 16th year, was on her gelding, Lobo, squinting into the sleet for a missing cow and calf. As usual, she had risen early to grind nixtamal – lime-water-softened kernels of corn – on a metate (mortar) shaped from a piece of rough volcanic mountain basalt. When she stepped into the wind-blown drizzle for her necesidades, Concha noticed the cow with a new calf was missing.
Concha stepped back inside the adobe house to feed more leña to night fire, enlarging it into the morning’s cooking fire. Her older male siblings were supposed to maintain the night fire, but often they let it die. Concha had taken on that chore. She was a sleepwalker, something that worried Chema and Guadalupe Rosales, who had secretly, unofficially, adopted her. Gathering kindling and cooking were traditional tasks for women. By the time Concha was eight, she surprised her family by carrying a well-filled child-sized trump-line of kindling.
Knowing what occurred when wet, cold and windy weather hit scattered mountain settlements, I drove in the darkness up the slippery wagon-wide brecha to the Rosaleses. Chema, Lupe and their relatives lived in a loose cluster of dwellings: a mix of adobe casas, whose tile roofs began to leak during long-run storms, as did those of the more fragile thatch-roofed and wattle-sided jacales. By this time in the storm everyone would begin to be running out of dry leña. There thick forests of pino, palo avellana (Hazelnut), picea (spruce), guaje (acacia) furnished ample supplies of fire wood. But everything was rain-soaked by now. It would have to be dried by placing stacks near indoor fires. But to quickly dry wood for leña none of it could be large chopped pieces of tree trunks.
At the edge of the high beam of my headlights, I could see someone in a china, a “raincoat” of palm fronds laced together. I couldn’t see who it was but the horse’s gait made it plain it wasn’t Concha’s gelding. I kept a dun-colored mare with Chema. There were no lights on in the house. I parked in front of Chema’s horse troje, and quickly threw my saddle at La Nube – The Cloud. She was the wisest and calmest – yet always most alert – horse I’d had in Mexico. And as we took off in the sleet after the rider that I figured was Concha, La Nube broke into a smooth, careful canter.The clouds had barely begun to lighten when we had to step off a burro trail to avoid the action up ahead. The cow, I saw, was a sour-tempered critter, always hard to milk – a head-throwing bucket-kicker – now on the prod to protect her calf from interlopers. The rider – Concha, on one of her father’s top horses, a bay gelding that I doubted she’d ever ridden before – had ridden past the “herd-quitter” to block the trail leading away from the ranch, and was shaking out her rope.
A thrown rope with a large animal tied at either end can be a dangerous, even deadly, combination. I knew Concha was a good roper of fairly steady targets. And she practiced a lot, mostly on easy-behaved “stock” around the ranch – fence posts, buckets, dogs, pigs, sheep, calves and her brothers. But hooking irritable stock in open country is something else altogether. I didn’t really know how strong slim, hard-working Concha was, or how savvy and calm she’d be when things turn sudden and bad. A 1,300-pound horse on one end – even if well-trained – and a weighty, stirred-up, naturally feisty head of stock on the other can turn a thrown rope into a catastrophe as fast as you can blink.
Off to the right, on the slightly downhill side of the trail, I swung La Nube around to face this confrontation. I unlimbered my line, hoping Concha might consider second thoughts. Slowly, I drifted toward the rear of the herd-quitter that folks who had to milk her called La Loca. I was aiming to try for her back feet when the action started. It was cold enough to make all of us – horses, cow and calf, Concha and me – want to get out the wind and sleet. Impasses on a mountainside in such circumstances don’t last too long.
In that era, a lot of people didn’t de-horn their calves, and this cow was a product of that practice. So when she began moving toward Concha’s mount, I shook my head in an exaggerated motion, hoping she would take notice in the cloud-smudged light. But she was concentrating on the herd-quitter.
Just riding into this face-off and throwing a loop on the crazed cow was a consideration. But two ropes, two large animals and a calf on a mud-slick, slant-sided trail made it seem a dicey gamble. I wasn’t really worried about the herd-quitter; I was worried about getting the girl hurt in a melee like that.
Damn. Before I could decide which was the best thing to do, Concha tossed her loop over the horns of La Loca, and mud-skidding chaos erupted. The crazy cow took a swipe at Concha’s mount with her wide horns, then yanked around to protect her calf. That swift movement forward put slack in the rope and the quick swerve toward the calf turned that slack into a loop that curled toward Concha.
The pass the herd-quitter took at Concha’s bay gelding with her horns made him dodge off-trail, uphill. I figured the curl in the rope would be yanked out when La Loca turned toward her calf. But the gelding’s dodge got her attention and she lunged forward filling out the loop. There’re many times a vaquero can make a coil seem to run along a rope as if it’s alive. Also there are times that happens just by accident, usually a bad accident. That’s what seemed about to happen.
When the herd-quitter went toward Concha’s bay, I’d yanked out my machete and sharply kicked La Nube uphill and into the mud-splashed melee. Stretching far to the left, I slashed at empty air. La Nube banged into the crazed cow. I slashed again as the rope crazily curled backwards toward Concha. She ducked and sent her bay into the cow. Hit from both sides, the herd-quitter lost its footing in muddy mountain clay. The partially cut rope snapped as the cow rolled and slid downhill, until the trunk of a mesquite blocked her path.
I checked Concha, whose face was pale under a coating of mud, even as she began laughing and swearing. The tangled melee both scared and amazed her. My fear for her began to ease. With our horses, we took shelter under a guamuchil tree. I had Concha check herself again. “What about you, Señor?” “Just scratches. We were lucky.” “Some luck,” she laughed, taking the spurs off her huaraches so she could clean mud from her bare feet. Both of us were scraping off mud, grinning and shaking our heads.
When we went down to check on the herd-quitter, she was standing against the mesquite, seemingly dazed. Her calf had found her and was insistently sucking a teat as if nothing had happened.
“Let’s see now,” I said, “if we can get these cattle back to the ranch without more excitement.”
“Isn’t the rain stopping?” Concha nodded at the sky. “There’s going to be sun today.”