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.