So, after all, we had our Christmas dinner according to programme, and a capital one it was, too.
The turkeys were à merveille, the venison delicious; for the big buck—he was nearly as big as a Mexican burro-deer—was very fat indeed. It is only the man who has eaten really fat wild venison who knows what good venison really is. The kidneys were completely covered with tallow, and my companion assured us that the buck cut nearly an inch of fat on the brisket. The quarters had been hung out to freeze all night, and were thawed in melted snow-water before being cooked, and so were quite tender.
The plum-pudding was over a foot in diameter; we could hardly pull it out of the pot. It was as good as possible, and followed by a bowl of punch, our punch-bowl being for the nonce a tin bucket; not to mince matters, it was our horses’ watering-bucket, which, though not elegant, was capacious, and the only utensil we had capable of holding the amount of punch the occasion called for.
No holly grew in the country, but the bright red berries of the Indian arrow-wood and of the bearberry-bush made beautiful substitutes, and there were more evergreens in sight than entire Christendom could have made use of, so our camp was profusely and gayly decorated. Altogether the day was well and duly celebrated, and it is marked with a white stone in the calendar of my memory.
A COLORADO “ROUND-UP.”
ALFRED TERRY BACON.
[Among picturesque scenes of American life there are few to surpass those to be seen on the cattle ranges of the West, the home of the cow-boy, and of a mode of life widely removed from the quiet conditions of ordinary civilization. We append a description of daily scenes during a cattle “drive.”]
By a fortunate circumstance I first saw that pastoral pageant known in the West as a “round-up” among the most picturesque surroundings that could have been chosen for it even in Colorado. In the northern counties the abrupt line of the Rocky Mountain foot-hills has nearly a north-and-south direction. From their base the grass-country rolls away in great brown undulations with a general downward slope towards the east for twenty miles, to the depression in the Plains through which the South Platte flows northward. Beyond the river the land rises again with an easy slope for several miles. It is from the side of this rise of ground that the superb panoramic view of the Rocky Mountain range is seen in perfection. More than two hundred miles it stretches in sight, from the masses vaguely seen beyond the snowy shoulders of Pike’s Peak to the lower mountains across the border of Wyoming.
At a considerable height on this slope runs a canal for irrigation, led out from the swiftly-descending Platte some miles above. One brilliant evening in July, a procession of wagons, each with its arched covering of canvas tinted by the sunset light, moved up the ascent to the bank of the ditch. The wagons were drawn up in line, about a hundred feet apart, and in five minutes each driver had unharnessed and “hobbled” his horses and a bright row of camp-fires were dancing in the twilight. The wagons were late in making a camp. Usually they precede the herd by several hours; but now close following is heard the lowing of the cattle, a slowly swelling volume of sound, as the drove approaches. At a spot a quarter of a mile from camp, where a level interrupts the general slope, the herd is massed together, or, in technical phrase, “bunched,” and with the approach of darkness gradually all lie down for the night. One by one the herders drop away to camp as the cattle grow quiet, till but two are left riding in opposite directions about the sleeping herd, each singing vigorously, for the double purpose of warding off sleep and keeping the herd aware of their guard. The songs are continued by the successive watches till dawn, each singer pursuing his tune with a glorious independence of harmony with his mate; yet in the distance, as we sit beside the camp-fire or in waking moments at night, it is a cheerful, vigilant sound. In the cow-boy’s dialect, “singing to ’em” has become a synonymous expression for night-herding.