Between Grass And Sky: Where I Live And Work

Coiled in the Pressure Cooker

C O I L E D I N T H E P R E S S U R E C O O K E R 7 2 Nearly everyone who ever stepped outside the house on the plains has a snake story. I remember a fresh fall day my husband George and I moved a few head of cattle. We wanted to take one bunch to the summer pasture across the railroad tracks, while holding back a few we wanted to keep closer to home. We thought the job would be so easy we didn’t take the horses. The cows were fat and slow, and anyway, the broken ties and rails discarded in the right-of-way by railroad workers made it dangerous to use horses there. Then a wild Charolais heifer jumped through the rickety fence. I scrambled up the steep embankment and staggered along the ties behind her. Then she wriggled through another hole in the fence. Amazingly, she’d gone into the pasture where we wanted her. That’s not usually the way cows behave. Still, we weren’t finished sorting the cattle, and I knew if we didn’t fix the fence right away, others would jump through it and cause more trouble. That’s one reason ranchers work such long days—every job seems to lead to another. A few years before, along this same stretch of fence, my father had stopped pounding steeples into rotting posts long enough to mutter, “Damn—excuse me—darn railroad never fixes fences. They got the land free, the least they could do is keep the fences up.” Pressed, he told me how pioneering railroad companies talked the government into giving them a strip of free land clear across the country. Officials ••• Hasselstrom/67-112 6/13/02 10:49 AM Page 72 insisted the railroad was a public service, a way to encourage farmers to move west, homesteading the “Great American Desert.” After the farmers got established, the same tracks could carry their produce east to feed the populous seaboard. Of course, even though the companies got millions of acres of free land, neither the farmers nor the goods rode free, so the railroads made enormous profits. Some companies didn’t lay any track at all, just got rich selling land several times to different settlers. While I listened to my father fume, I picked up the soda cans the train crews tossed into our pastures when they sprayed chemicals to kill weeds. Later in the summer, when the dead weeds had dried enough, the railroad’s dilapidated engines would throw sparks and set prairie fires. Remembering my father’s comments, I climbed back over the tracks in waist-deep weeds lugging a bucket of fencing supplies and a shovel. I repeated my father’s story to George, who was just beginning to learn our ranching business, adding details like the company truck that followed every train for a few days after the company set a big prairie fire. The truck carried no fire-fighting equipment, only a radio. If the train started a blaze, the driver radioed our volunteer fire department, consisting of my neighbors and myself, and we fought the fire. After a particularly fiery summer, a pack of ranchers would sometimes sue the railroad. If they felt especially pugnacious , they’d tell each other over coffee how easily a train might be tipped over if a few of those discarded ties were placed strategically on the rails. My vehemence left me breathless and a bit off-balance. Besides, George had already crossed the tracks to the fence on the other side. Reaching for a clump of grass to pull myself up the steep slope, I heard my subconscious say, “Great place for a snake.” I stopped in midstride, telling myself the heifer had scared away any snake when she ran through this grass. I took a deep breath, heard the unmistakable chatter of rattles, and knew I’d been hearing it since I started up the slope. Coiled under the clump of grass I’d almost grabbed, within two feet of my face, the rattlesnake was warning me with every ounce of energy it could spare. If it had felt inclined, the snake could already have struck my face as I leaned forward, or my leg as I raced after the fleeing heifer. I set down the bucket, slid the shovel under the deadly package, lifted it to show George, and tossed...