In the Jalisco highlands the year began with the unapplauded gift of a bipolar attack: near freezing nighttime/early morning weather coupled with warm daytime temperatures.
For many folks living in pueblos and cities it meant “colds”: coughs, runny noses, sore throats and heaving chests. The highlands, providing heart fluttering views, also presented day-long chilly living.
For veteran ranchers and full-time Mexican campesinos, it meant dealing with cranky livestock, aching joints and short supplies of pain-free stamina. Something as simple as putting a halter on the calmest cayuse in the herd can be a teeth-gritting contest. Hard-used hand joints will “sting” on such early mornings. Fighting the halter or bridle by slinging you against the corral fence is normal for some mounts on such mornings. And it sure tends to delay things a bit. Especially when bridling and saddling abruptly ‘touchy” mounts. Getting slammed into corral fencing a couple of times each morning gets you awake amazingly fast. And if you weren’t stiff before, you got there fast.
Throwing a full outfit on such a once-friendly, now truculent, mount (catch rope, bridle, saddle blanket and saddle, cinch, rear cinch, etc.) will show you quickly,x exactly where all your past broken bones and pulled and sprained ligaments have been hiding out.
Cold, dry weather hardens the mountain soil. In younger days, it harassed my friend Eliseo Flores’ arthritis. He would lend me his big roan gelding, whose stubborn cold-weather ways, and stiff gait on hard soil caused him to grumble an inventive vocabulary. He hoped a hard workout by someone less touchy would fix the gelding’s behavior somehow.
As the early morning breeze would pick up in those past days, I’d wrap an old blue towel around my face. And go out to riding fence, a job nobody liked. Most would bitch, saddling their mounts in a way that delayed getting the work done. But it’s one of those jobs that since it was necessary, and done now, you just go at it. Don’t try to find a way out. Chopping new holes to replace tipped posts, piling small boulders at their bases, nailing in four lines of barbed wire and long, sharp-spined branches of wild huisache around the posts. For me, it was a competition to see who could string fence the fastest. Since almost everybody hated tangling with sharp-spinned huisache, it wasn’t much of a contest.
Monday mornings were also a good time to start pushing the dry cattle we had separated up in boulder-rich pasture. I’d start pushing them back toward the ranch. Once started, they’d roam their way in that direction. That also was a good time to pull porcupine quills from some sorry calfs’ noses.
The look of the sky often tells you if worse weather is coming. Elesio rode by with a small herd of yearling calves. “Keep an eye out, hombre,” he said, squinting at the sky. “Think some hard weather is coming.”
It did seem a colder, stronger wind might come up. So I got a good lick of fence work finished before any of that began. Wind, coldness, blowing weeds, skunks, weasles, rats, termites and, of course, livestock and intruders, all work on wrecking untended fencing.
The dry cows, eager to get back to the ranch and better feed, went along easily. As we moved down hill, I ran into a stretch of flimsy wire. Along with my Levi jacket an ever-present rain slicker strapped to the back of my saddle. I was digging a new hole for a downed post when the wind gathered new muscle. By the time I had the post set, wind-loosened clods of dried mountainside began banging my sombrero.
I just got my foot in the stirrup when a muscular cracking dropped a dried tree limb almost directly on top of me and the gelding. He jerked into a dead run downhill, jumping low boulders, tearing through bushes. The wind turned colder, picking up dry mountain-side debris, blinding both of us. I dug out the sheet of plastic to protect my eyes and let me see at the same time. An abrupt sideway gust seemed ready to help, lifting the crackling plastic, then dropping it across the roan’s face.
Kah-pow – he went straight up and sideways. I let the slicker go. It slipped between his forelegs. He, several cows and I, at a dead run, topped some sagging wire fencing. We landed, hoping for some solid footing, sliding through swales of belly-high weeds – acetitilla, orejas de raton, hoja ancha. We hit the side of an arroyo at good clip. A steep, wind-loosened slant greeted us, We plowed up a path of dry season terrain. My right foot was twisted in its stirrup. I’d lost the reins. Grabbed hold of the saddle horn. My jacket and shirt were scooping up weeds and powdery top soil. The roan was fighting hard to get us stopped. Just getting a bit slowed was a jarring mystery just then.
Besides, the problem with fallen horses is that they tend to fight and kick wildly, trying to get back on their feet. My own left foot was still jammed with a couple of pounds of debris in the tangle of the saddle – latigo, stirrup leather and fender. I was trying to shake loose and away from the roan’s flailing hooves. Didn’t want to end up under 1,300 pounds of horse ... maybe more. His eyes were rolling. He was snorting and bellowing when one of his twists popped my foot loose. I grabbed his head, twisted his nose to calm his craziness, got a tight, knotted hold of a rein. With this wrestling, he soon got upright.
Stumbling about, the two of us found a place where a bank had fallen, forming a slanting draw shallow enough to climb onto level ground. Standing up straight, the roan and I started shaking off the remains of our grit bath.
Elesio and a mozo showed up, looking for us. “You two got sort of lost.” Lesio grinned.
As I assessed my torn and permanently soil-dyed clothing, he found our dry-dirt tornado humorous. My saddle was going to want some costly fixing. Lesio noticed one of his roan’s reins on the ground. Normal for cattle horses, but not for obstinate mountain geldings. “Chinga,” he said. “Look at that. I’ve tried for years to train him to prairie rein.” (A gringo phrase I used and Lesio had adopted.)
“A day of lessons for everybody,” I said, counting aloud the number of new bruises and scrapes, making Lesio laugh.