The Southwestern Historical Quarterly, Volume 48, July 1944 - April, 1945 Page: 114
617 p. : ill., maps, ports. ; 24 cm.View a full description of this periodical.
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Southwestern Historical Quarterly
crests of the Carson sandhills for miles in every direction, high, but
not dry, and frozen into a firm footing for Buster's confident stride.
But we were soon off these, and breaking through the drifts of the
choppy little hills beyond, where the tall red sage grass sometimes stuck
through the snow; sometimes merely humped up under the snow and
ice in miniature hills itself.
Everything was going well except I had taken a bath the night before
and put on a new suit of heavy underwear, and I kept shifting uneasily
in the saddle with a trouble not associated with rough terrain alone.
I soon discovered the trouble. The underwear had a button in the wrong
place for a man who acquired his bow legs just setting around - "just
settin' around a horse," as Curly said. I worked it to one side and
pushed on, but it pushed right back. On the ridge between Carson and
Moore's creek I went through a wire gap, and while I was off I un-
buckled my leggings, pulled down my Levi's, got out my knife, and--
standing there in a gentle breeze and a foot of snow, cut that brightly
polished button off and let it drop into a drift. "When I get to be an
inventor," I said to myself, "the first thing I'm going to invent is a
pair of underwear on which the button does not abut slap dab upon
your saddle seat." After that we sailed smoothly along until we reached
Moore's Creek. It was belly deep to a tall Indian for a hundred yards,
with the drifts running in great waves, and curling back under at
the crests, like those of the sea frozen in motion. Everywhere under foot
in the thickets along the creek, were turkey tracks made while these
long-legged wild birds hunted hackberries that still clung to the branches
of the scrubby trees, and in one giant cottonwood were a bunch of robins,
as mixed up on the seasons as everybody else.
At the Ds it was pitiful. By that time we had been under a foot of
snow for a solid month. Our feed pastures - our smoothest country,
did not have a thing showing except the tips of the bear grass and once
in awhile the rusty red of a little coarse sage grass. In the first one
we had our cows and baby calves. For a solid month they had stood
or slept for twenty-four hours a day on snow and ice. Faint touches
of green on the noses of the calves showed the signs of futile struggles
to chew a little substance out of the stringy tips of the bear grass. Once
in a while I would see an old cow get hold of a bundle of the spines,
and stand and pull, shaking her head from side to side like a bulldog
on a badger, trying to pull the stems out, and I thought: Food or fiber?
In Mexico it is fiber; they make it into ropes. Here it was the only feed
besides the pitiful dole of cake that we were putting out. Once in
awhile I would see an old cow that had managed to pull out a bundle of
the center stems. She would be standing sore-footed, humped high, but
with her head held up, a satisfied look on her face, chewing away, with
the soapsuds boiling out of her mouth, and falling to be frozen into
infinitesimal bubbles of ice upon the white crust below. Of course the
milk that they gave was a tragic drop, and as we drifted them in from
the ridges to the feed grounds, where we could reach them with a
wagon, blood often marking the tracks they cut deep through the ice
- for the snow froze into a cake that encrusted our whole world - I114
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Texas State Historical Association. The Southwestern Historical Quarterly, Volume 48, July 1944 - April, 1945, periodical, 1945; Austin, Texas. (https://texashistory.unt.edu/ark:/67531/metapth146055/m1/118/: accessed April 28, 2024), University of North Texas Libraries, The Portal to Texas History, https://texashistory.unt.edu; crediting Texas State Historical Association.