Steak - Mark Schatzker [139]
It would be a good idea, Elzinga mentioned almost in passing, if I pointed my heels down on the steeper pitches, so that if my mount went over I could land squarely on my foot and so be poised to leap out of the way of a tumbling horse. For the rest of the day, my heels stayed down, as though pulled by rare earth magnets.
Some pitches were so steep we had to get off and walk, leading the horses by the reins. The grass grew here in little tufts, islands of green surrounded by loose rock and dry ground, but it was lush and tender. When I stopped to catch my breath, Missy would tear off a clump and chew. “Horses are not nearly as good as cattle at digesting grass,” Elzinga said. “You can tell by looking at their turds.” Like Allen Williams, Elzinga is a veteran turd observer. “There’s more undigested grass in it,” he explained.
Horses nevertheless do fine on grass. A band of feral horses lives on Taylor Butte, and grass is all they eat. Elzinga sees them all the time, as well as a band of mustangs that lives a few valleys over. (Mustangs are horses that have been feral so long that, like the Texas longhorn, they have original Spanish blood in them.) His daughter Melanie had recently been with her mother, Caryl, a PhD botanist, looking for rare plants when she spotted a small orphaned mustang far off in the distance. Melanie crawled through tall sagebrush on her belly, commando-style, and tracked it for half a mile. When she got home, she phoned the Bureau of Land Management to tell them they had an orphaned mustang colt on their land. A day later, they phoned back and said, “Do you want it?” He now goes by the name of Chance and lives in a corral at Alderspring Ranch with Ginger and Missy and the other horses. In time he will be climbing Taylor Butte, tearing off grassy tufts and looking for cows.
Elzinga listened for moos. Nothing. We kept riding and dipped low to cross a creek, where the grass was ultra-green and the soil was so soft the horses’ hooves sank down deep into it. As we approached the water, trout darted out of our way.
Cows will not finish on range grass, but they are well nourished by it. It contains so much protein that a mother cow can feed herself and her growing calf. Elzinga had, all told, 160 mothers and calves in his fifty thousand acres of rangeland, which is owned by the Bureau of Land Management and the U.S. Forest Service, but which he has the right to graze. His cattle spend spring, summer, and fall here. When snow hits the ground and the creeks freeze up, the cattle are herded the twenty-six miles back to the ranch. The trip takes three days, and it is the living legacy of a herding culture that stretches back to Spain and Scotland. By the time the cows hit the Pahsimeroi Valley, they know where they’re going. They know there are fields of green, sweet grass and mountains of nutty hay waiting for them, so they break into a run and do not stop.
At the moment, most of those cows were up over the other side of the butte, grazing Big Hat drainage. But a few stragglers—fifteen or twenty cow-calf pairs—were wandering around Park Creek drainage. The U.S. Forest Service had notified Elzinga that it was time to give Park Creek drainage a break from foraging, and that the cows would have to be moved.
Every hour or so we would come across a few patties, and Elzinga and Linnaea analyzed them for freshness. The most recent was two days old, and the rest were disappointingly sunbaked. It went on like this until lunch, which we ate next to the creek in a cool grove of pines that smelled sweet and minty. We stretched out in a clearing, dining on prunes, nuts, and chicken out of a can, drinking cold water from the creek. I lay my head back and noticed it was inches from an old cowpatty, but it was as fresh as the creek-cooled air.
By mid-afternoon, the absence of cows was becoming something of a problem. Where were they? “Do you think they might have gone over to the other side of the butte by themselves?” I asked Elzinga.
“It’s possible,