Through Time and the Valley

9. Roundup on the Lazy B

9 Roundup on the LazyB Dollarbill and I had gone to a big auditorium to listen to a lecture by Lawrence Ellzey, the Wolf Creek rancher. His subject for the evening was a tribe of primitive people in some faraway land. After the presentation, as my horse and I chatted with friends out in the lobby, I noticed that Dollarbill had developed a limp in his front foot. I looked it over and decided that it needed a good dose of salty meat grease, so off we went to Ed Brainard's saddle house. When we got there ... BAM! BAM! "John? Bill? Wake up, boys, breakfast in half an hour." 74 Roundup on the Lazy B -- 75 For a moment I hung suspended between dream and reality, and from neither could I draw a satisfactory explanation for the voice outside the trailer. Then I heard Bill stumbling around in the other room, and my time and place began to come back to me. I lay there for a moment, waving good-bye to my dream as it climbed the hill of memory and disappeared on the other side. As my thought processes focused in on the present, I couldn't help smiling at the story my sleeping mind had concocted. Sunrise was still a pink bud in the eastern sky and the air hung cool and soft as we picked our way across the front yard, grimacing at the feel of squashed mulberries under our feet. On the porch we paused a moment to watch Lilith through the window. Tall and attractive, with long brown hair and blue eyes, she stood over the stove in the warm yellow light of the kitchen, stirring gravy, salting calf fries that sizzled in a big iron skillet, and brushing a strand of hair back from her forehead. Then she leaned back against the counter to catch her breath and take a few swallows of coffee. We tapped lightly on the door and entered, and were met by the warm rush of kitchen smells. Although the sun hadn't yet cleared the tops of the sand hills to the east, the murmur of young voices and the swish of bare feet could be heard in another part of the house, and now and then we caught sight of pajama-ed children, their eyes puffy with sleep, their cheeks still holding a perfect print of a pillow's topography. After a huge breakfast of calf fries, fresh biscuits, gravy, and homemade jelly, we adjourned to the corral, and in the first glow of daylight saddled the horses and listened as Ed gave the orders for the roundup. We would be gathering two hundred cows and calves out of a five-section pasture, driving them to working pens about three miles west of John'S Creek. Theo and Johnny, two Brainard cowboys from across the river, would gather the river bottom from the west. Ed and Roy B. Sessions would ride the riverbed from the east, and the rest of us, seven in all, would string 76 ...- Through TiIne and the Valley Gathering the herd up at the Lazy-B roundup. out in a line a mile and a half long and push the cattle south out of the hills. I rode right flank on the north end of the pasture, high above the meadow. It was my job to ride out the innumerable little sinks and depressions in the sand hills and push the cattle south out of my territory. Bill Ellzey, about three hundred yards below me, would then pick them up and send them on down toward the main herd which was moving slowly up the river. It was a pleasant morning . The sun had been snared in a web of high thin clouds, and a gentle breeze was blowing in from the southeast. About three miles west of John's Creek, I rode out of the hills and joined the main herd which was holding at a spring-fed pond not far from the working pens. About thirty minutes later, Theo and Johnny came in from the west with another bunch, and the herd of two hundred cows Roundup on the Lazy B - 77 and calves was assembled. After cutting out the bulls and dry cows, we began moving the herd toward the pens. This is the moment of truth in a cattle drive, when a rider's knowledge of...