are the lambing- and shearing-seasons. The first begins early in March, when the little mesquite-trees are of a feathery greenness and the brown gramma and mesquite grass are beginning to freshen, and lasts about six weeks. It is an exacting time for the conscientious proprietor. He says good-by to his cottage, and goes off to camp with a small army of Mexicans, who, proof against the toils of the day, make night crazy with singing, dancing, and uncontrollable hilarity. He is as much concerned about the weather as a sailor or one in conversation's straits. His terror is the long, cold storm which covers the grass with a hopeless coating of ice. The weakened ewe cannot graze, and the norther comes down with a bitter sweep to devastate the starved flock.
The camp is pitched within easy reach of the bed-grounds of two ewe-flocks, each of twelve hundred, who absorb all the attention of the superintendent and his numerous aids. Each flock goes out on the range at daybreak under the charge of two herders. The ewes that have dropped lambs over-night are retained in the corral with their offspring for about six hours, or till afternoon, when the lamb should be in possession of sufficient strength to move about; then the ewes go forth slowly to graze, followed by their chiquitas. The unnatural mothers who deny their children are caught, with a lariat by a Mexican, with a crook by a Yankee, and confined in separate little pens alone with their lambs. If necessary to compel them to acknowledge their maternal responsibilities, they are kept in solitary confinement two days, without food. If still obdurate at the end of these two days, mother and child, marked with red chalk or tagged alike with bright cloth, are turned out, the herder in charge of the solitaries "roping" the ewe for the convenience of the lamb whenever the latter indicates a desire for nourishment.
The flock grazing out on the range will have gone by noon perhaps a mile from the bed-ground. Here a little corral is made, and the lambs born in the vicinity, with their mothers, are penned here over-night, one of the two herders sleeping with them. In the afternoon the remaining herder takes the flock grazing back to the bed-ground. The next day, with many more to follow, repeats the routine of this and its incidents. The lambs and good mothers of a period of twenty-four hours are bunched together and placed a little remote from the bed-ground, with a little pen and a herder to themselves: they constitute a so-called "baby-flock." After five days the lambs lose their tails and have their ears punched and marked; on the sixth day they are still farther removed from their native spot, placed in charge of a strange herder, and become the nucleus of a so-called "lamb-flock," which, fed from many sources, grows till it includes six hundred ewes, with their lambs, when it is a full flock, and is in its turn removed and the formation of a new lamb-flock begun. During the six days' novitiate of a baby-flock five other such flocks have been formed: so that, somewhat remotely round about the main pen at the bed-ground of each flock, there are six baby-flocks, with their pens and herders and several little prison-pens for unnatural mothers, with other little pens in which mothers bereft by death of their proper children are confined with the extra twin lambs of prolific ewes, clad in the lost ones' skins, in the sure hope that they will adopt them. The ruse may be said never to fail. The solitary-confinement pens are in the charge of still another herder, a much perplexed and irritated man, on whose part considerable swearing—Mexican for small ills, English for serious occasions—is to be excused. A superintendent of two lambing ewe-flocks, it will thus be seen, has to oversee eighteen herders or so, with their charges, besides the growing lamb-flock, all more or less distant from each other. He is a busy man. His head-quarters, like those of General Pope, may be said to be in the saddle. His note-book is in constant use. It contains a record of each day's births and deaths, of the twins (which are tagged or marked alike for easy identification) and the still-born, that each bereft mother may be provided with a foster-child, and the daily count of the daily-changing flocks.
The first lamb born starts the refrain, to be taken up as the season waxes by thousands of others scattered over the range, and swollen into a roaring, shrieking chorus, as though an enormous public school had just turned its urchins into the play-ground. A listener standing in the hall of the Stock Exchange gets some faint idea of it when there has been a serious break in Lake Shore, say, or when C.C.C.&I. has "gone off" a considerable number of points. Out of these thousands of voices, not to be differentiated by the human ear, the ewe knows the note of her little one with very remarkable certainty, and the lamb the answering cry of its dam. With this sound ringing in his ears, and daily becoming more and more insufferable from monotony and increase, the sheep-man rides out in the morning among his Mexicans, and returns to camp at night aweary, with haply a couple of little ones abandoned by their mothers in his arms, to be brought up on that pis-aller of infancy,—and, alas! occasionally of age,—the bottle.
V
When the prickly pear had made a golden garden of the prairie and the heart of Cereus phoeniceus was warm with the intention of lighting its gorgeous crimson torch on the divides; when the arroyo, but lately a pretty streamlet, had told wellnigh all its beads to the sun-god, and had but here and there in its parched length an isolated pool; when the flock at noon no longer flushed the last teal from the creek, because that lingering bird had finally winged its way toward Manitoba or some other favorite retreat northerly,—at this time the constant wind, gentle but never-failing, and almost always from the south, was overweighted with a roar of multitudinous bleating and befouled with dust; for shearing was going on at the ranch. It is a very picturesque occupation, but it soils the most delightful season of the year, the fresh month of May, with a fortnight of dusty toil, anticipating the sun, and not halting promptly on his setting.
The shearing-shed lay somewhat apart from the other ranch buildings, with a system of pens at its back, with chutes and swinging wickets for "cutting out" lambs from their mothers destined for the shears, and other incidental purposes. The shed was a roof of bearded mesquite-grass, stayed by boughs and supported on live-oak or pecan posts, the outside or bounding rows of which were sheathed up with boards four feet or so, the remainder space up to the roof being open for draught. On these boards Baleriano Torres, Secundino Ramon, and others their companions of the shears, who had worked and played beneath this shade in springs past, had written their names in large characters of stencil-ink. One could see in the county roofs made of fresh boughs, through which the sunlight sifted, flecking the swarthy faces and arms of the shearers and the mantles of the sheep with a very picturesque effect; but it is probably best to resist the temptation to treat the shearing-shed as an artistic composition. The ground-plan of the shed was one hundred feet or so long by twenty-five wide. The floor was of trampled earth, and on it were placed shearing-tables, s s s, and burring-and tying-tables, B B. The shearing-tables were about fifteen inches high, the burring-tables high enough for a man to stand up to. It is the custom in many parts of the country to shear on the floor. In Mr. Hardy's picturesque novel, "Far from the Madding Crowd," the shearers shear in a cathedral-like barn, on a shining black-oak floor,—probably for purposes of contrast. Round the ranch, however, shearers preferred very generally the low wooden tables. The space back of the shearing-tables was occupied, when shearing was going on, by a "bunch" of sheep admitted through the movable panels from a pen containing the unshorn: after shearing, they departed through the panels into another pen, and eventually over the prairie to their pleasant grazing-grounds, angular and grotesque in appearance, but happy, their troubles past, their year's chief purpose served.
[Illustration: Movable Panels. CORRALS.]
The shearers this year were a band of forty or so Mexicans from Uvalde and other border towns, jollily travelling two hundred miles up the country in charge of a capitan and grande capitan responsible fellows, who had contracted with the ranchmen of the neighborhood to do their shearing. Early in May we heard of them on the creeks, and made preparation for them, the shed and corrals being put to rights in every detail, the supply of bacon and frijoles augmented at the store, and all hands, including the stranger within the gates, set to hemming wool-sacks with coarse twine and sailors' needles. One evening, but shrewdly in time for supper, a couple of Mexicans on horses, thridding their way through the mesquites, came into the ranch, quickly followed by others, one or two on burros, more on ponies, most on the skeleton of a prairieschooner drawn by four horses,—and the shearers had arrived. They were a dark, black-eyed, hilarious set, some forty odd in all, rather ragged as a crew, but
