CHAPTER XI
There were eighteen hundred head of calves to be vaccinated, branded, dehorned and weaned. Over the widespreading hills and meadows the cattle poured in a long unbroken stream, bellowing and calling as they moved. The round-up included the mothers, eighteen hundred head of white-faced Herefords. These, sensing danger to their young, came unwillingly, moaning and stopping stolidly to bawl their unceasing protests or to call peremptorily to their straying offspring. Sometimes a mother would make a break for freedom and a rider would have his hands full driving her out of the dense brush where the fugitive might find a temporary asylum.
At the corrals they were driving long posts four feet deep into the earth. Close by the posts a soft coal fire spat and blazed. “Doc” Murray, veterinary surgeon, on an upturned wooden box, sleeves rolled to elbow and pipe in the corner of his mouth, squatted, directing the preparations. Everything was done ship-shape at O Bar O.
For some time, oblivious to the taunts and jeers cast at him, Cheerio, returned from the round-up, had been standing by his horse’s head gazing up the hill in a brown study of rapture. The sight of that army sweeping in from all directions over the hills and from the woods, to meet in the lower pastures and automatically form in to that symmetrical file, fascinated him beyond words. Even the riders, loosely seated on their horses, their bright handkerchiefs blowing free in the breeze, whirling lariat and long cattle whips, flanking and following the herd, seemed pleasing to the eye of the Englishman.
Though the day of the chap-clad, large-hatted type of cowboy is said to have passed in the Western States, in Alberta he is still a thriving, living reality. In this “last of the big lands,” where the cattle still range over hundreds of thousands of acres, their guardians appear to have somewhat of that romantic element about them which has made the cowboy famous in story and in song. He wears the fur and leather chaps, the buckskin shirts and coats, the Indian beaded gauntlets and the wide felt hats not wholly because they are good to look at, but because of their sterling qualities for utilitarian purposes. The chaps are indispensable for the trail, the fur ones for warmth and general protection and the leather ones for the brush. The great hats, which the Indians also use in Alberta, serve the double purposes of protection from a too-ardent sun and as great drinking vessels during a long ride. The hide shirts are both wind and sun proof and the beadwork sewn on with gut thread serve as excellent places for the scratching of matches. Cheerio himself had by now a full cowboy outfit, chaps, hide shirt, wide hat, flowing tie, but he never tired of looking appreciatively at the other fellows in similar garb. Now, with eyes slightly screwed to get the right angle upon them, he planned a canvas that was some day to hang in a place of great honour.
The morning’s work had been exhilarating. To him had been assigned some of the most difficult riding tasks of the round-up. He had been dispatched into the bush on the east side of the Ghost River to gather in forty-seven strays that had taken refuge in the bog lands and had drawn with them their young into this insecure and dubious protection from the riders.
Cheerio had ridden through woods so dense that his horse could barely squeeze between the bushes and the trees. He had been obliged to draw his feet out of the stirrups and ride cross-legged in his saddle. Sometimes he was forced to dismount and lead his horse over trails so narrow that the animal had balked and hesitated to pass until led. Rattling a tin bell made of an empty tomato can with a couple of rocks in it, Cheerio wended his way through the deep woods. This loudly-clanking contraption served to rouse and frighten the hidden cattle out into the open, but several of them retreated and plunged farther into the bush that bordered hidden pools of succulent mud and quicksand.
The branches of the thick trees had snapped against his face as he rode and his chin and cheeks were scratched where the wide hat had failed to afford sufficient protection. The sleeves of his rough riding shirt were literally torn to shreds and even the bright magenta chaps that were his especial pride and care came out of that brush ragged, soiled and full of dead leaves, brush and mud.
He had been delayed at a slough whose surface of dark green growth gave no intimation of the muddy quicksands beneath. Stuck hard in the mud of this pool a terrified heifer was slowly sinking, while her bawling calf was restrained from following its mother only through the quick action of Cheerio, who drove the distracted little creature a considerable distance into the woods ere he returned to its mother.
It is one thing to throw the lariat in an open space and to land it upon the horns or the back feet of a fleeing animal. It is another thing to swing a lariat in a thickly-wooded bush where the noose is more likely than not to land securely in the branch or the crotch of a tree, resisting all tugs and jerks to leave its secure hold. Cheerio, inexpert with the lariat, gave up all thought of rescuing the animal in that way. Instead, his quick wits worked to devise a more ingenious method of pulling the heifer from the slough, where she would have perished without help.
Along the edges of the woods were fallen willow trees and bushes that the Indians had cleaved for future fence posts. Cheerio hauled a quantity of these over to the slough, and shoving and piling them in criss-cross sections, he made a sort of ford to within about fifteen feet of the mired cow. His horse was tied by its halter rope to a tree. With one end of the lariat firmly attached to the pommel of his saddle which had been cinched on to the animal very tightly and the other end about his own waist, Cheerio crossed this ford toward the animal. He now let out the lariat and coiled its end for the toss. It landed easily upon the horns of the animal. Holding to the rope, now drawn taut, Cheerio made his way back over the ford. Unfastening his horse, he mounted. Now began the hard part of the work. His horse rode out a few feet and the sudden pull upon the horns of the cow brought her to her feet. She stumbled and swayed but the rope held her up. A pause for rest for horse and heifer, and then another and harder and longer pull and tug. The cow, half-strangled in the mud, nevertheless was drawn along by the stout lariat rope. She slid along the slippery floor of the slough and not till her feet touched sod was she able to give even a feeble aid to the now heavily-panting mare.
Once on solid ground, Cheerio burst into a cheer such as an excited boy might have given, and he called soothingly to the desperately-frightened heifer.
“You’re doing fine, old girl! There you go! Ripping!” And to the mare:
“Good for you, Sally-Ann! You’re a top-notcher, old girl!”
There was an interval to give the exhausted animals an opportunity for a rest and then they were on the bush trail again, the heifer going slowly ahead, thoroughly tamed and dejected, yet raising her head with monotonous regularity to call and moan her long loud cry for her young.
As Cheerio came out into the open range certain words recurred to his mind and he repeated them aloud with elation and pride:
“They’s the makings of a damn fine cowboy in you,” had said the foreman of O Bar O.
He was whooping and hurrahing internally for himself and he felt as proud of his achievement as if he had won a hard pitched battle. In fact, if one reckoned success in the terms of dollars and of cents, then Cheerio had saved for O Bar O the considerable sum of $1500, which was the value of the pure-bred heifer rescued from the slough. Moreover, Cheerio had brought from the bush the full quota of missing cows and their offspring. When at last he joined up with that steadily-growing line pouring down from all parts of the woods and the ranges, to join in the lower meadows, he was whistling and jubilantly keeping time to his music with the clanking “bell,” and when he came within sight of his “mates” he waved his hat above his head, and rode gleefully down among them, shouting and boasting of his day’s work. He counted his cows with triumph before the doubting “Thomases” who had predicted that the tenderfoot would come out of that dense wood with half a heifer’s horn and a calf’s foot.
They rode westward under a sky bright blue, while facing them, wrapped about in a haze of soft mauve, the snow-crowned peaks of the Rocky Mountains towered before them like a dream. The glow of a late summer day was tinting all of the horizon and rested in slumberous splendour upon the widespreading bosom of pastures and meadows and fair undulating sloping hills. Almost in silence, as if unconsciously subdued by the beauty of the day, came the O Bar O outfit, riding ahead, behind, and flanking the two sides of that marvellous army of cattle.
Small wonder that the Englishman’s heart beat high and that his blood seemed to race in his veins with an electrical fervour that comes from sheer joy and satisfaction with life. If anyone had asked him whether he regretted the life he had deliberately sacrificed for this wild “adventure” in Western Canada, he would have shouted with all the vehemence and it may be some of the typical profanity of O Bar O:
“Not by a blistering pipeful! This is the life! It’s r-ripping! It’s—Jake!”
But now they were at the corrals. Finished the exhilarating riding of the range, done the pretty work of cutting out the cattle and drawing the herd into that line while one by one they were passed through the gates that opened into especial pastures assigned for the mothers, while the calves that were to be operated upon were “cut out” and driven into the corrals.
Slowly Cheerio tore his gaze from the fascinating spectacle of that moving stream of cattle and turned towards the corral. He saw, first of all, a giant structure, a platform on which was a gallowslike contrivance. Already a bawling calf had been driven up the incline and its head had been gripped by the closing gates around its neck. The Squeezegate! The dehorning shears were being sharpened over the grindstone and the whirring of the wheel, the grating of the steel hissed into the moaning cries of the trapped calves in the corrals.