Devil’s Rope

February 28, 2021

Hello again,

It's been another adventure on the ranch this week. Two weeks ago I was struggling to keep my two girls apart, as it was apparently National Dog Fighting Week out here. I kept everyone quiet last week and ran Willow with Kim's dog, Cheyenne, and then our two older dogs, Rui and Ela, separately. Everything stayed quiet and calm, Ela's heat cycle ended, and I was gearing up to start running all four dogs together again this week until we got to Tuesday...and Willow ran through a barbed wire fence. I had to go into Las Vegas to do some shopping and get diesel for the tractor that day, so til I got home and fed the horses it was dark when I got back to the house. I usually let our three dogs do a run before dark, if nothing else just out in the big field on the other side of the driveway, but as it was dark I just got home, drank a couple of beers and then decided to take our crew our around 7pm, as it was a nearly full moon and you could see very well. Kim always cautions us to be careful between dusk and dawn, as there are big predators out here, but as the bears and snakes are still sleeping, and I'm pretty sure that we're near big cat country(as opposed to being in it), I let them out to run and blow off some steam. Willow loves to run and run and run, doing big loops around all of us and disappearing for a few minutes at a time. We wandered up towards the old driveway and as I was waiting for Willow to start reining it in, I suddenly heard a short, sharp yelp. At first, I thought that something might have attacked her, but as Ela has been teaching her how to duke it out so well, and I didn't hear anything after the first yelp, I wasn't so sure. Within 30 seconds she was trotting back, but stopping every ten feet or so to reach down and lick her chest...and then I saw a strip of skin hanging down about three or four inches and, with the help of the flashlight, saw that she clearly ran into something. She wasn't bleeding bad and was mobile, so we quickly walked back to the house to better assess the situation. Erin and I are very good at these types of things(not by choice, but by a lot of similar experiences), so as soon as I walked in the door I just said that we needed first aid and we went to work trying to clean her up. You could see some shallow puncture wounds on her upper front legs and two long cuts on her chest, so we felt that we could handle it on our own. On a side note, neither Erin nor I have been to the doctor in about 20 years, so we always aim to treat things as naturally as possible, even when others clearly wouldn't, for better or worse, that's just our style. So, Erin made up a saline solution to clean the wound gently and we also treated it with colloidal silver and just let her crash and go to sleep, as she seemed to have the starch taken out of her. The next day we wrapped her with some gauze and vet wrap and just kept an eye on it. The chest wound split the skin but was not very deep, so we just kept on it to make sure that it didn't get infected. By the end of the next day she was already trying to rough-house and even jumped in the pond, and as of today, most of the wounds have closed up and she seems to just be boiling over with extra energy. She possibly should have gotten stitches, but without having chosen a new vet out here and being somewhat low on funds, we just crossed our fingers and so far, so good. We need to watch out for tetanus, but again, so far, so good. Humans are much more susceptible to it than dogs are, but in the event that she starts stiffening up at all, we can still get her into a vet and start the process. Willow clearly is our problem child and before the wounds on her head have even completely healed from fighting with Ela, she has a whole new collection of scars on her body...hopefully this will help us begin to rein her in before we get to snake season and already she's heeling much better and is constantly coming back to me to make sure that she's not too far away.

So, other than that, it's been kind of a quiet week. The temperatures have been more seasonal than the cold snap that we had a few weeks ago, but lower than the near 70F that we are going to see a couple of times in another week. Erin's still working on the website, trying to get it up and running. In my old school way of doing websites, I would have just made an index page with a picture on it and contact information to get us going, but the way that Erin is doing it requires laying the whole thing out first, in all of its parts, before we then go in and fill it out completely. Still, it's progressing nicely and hopefully within a few days we can have something bare bones up and running. We already have some great ideas on turning our old glass bottles into decanters and olive oil dispensers, perhaps with New Mexico Ranch Life etched on them. We also want to sell our photographs and maybe come up with quarterly releases of the emails and pictures in nice, coffee-table books, plus a million other ideas. We keep having issues with our wood stove and have had to clean out the baffle and catalytic combustor again as we await the chimney sweep in another week or so, and are starting to see the level of the wood pile plunge(Kim said that it's desirable to have zero firewood by spring/summer so that there are no places for snakes and such to hide in). Still, a very quiet week other than Willow's incident.

I've been reading a great book on the open range cattle era that I wanted to share with everyone. It's called Cattle Kingdom, by Christopher Knowlton, and it describes the quarter century from the end of the Civil War until about 1890 that began with hundreds of thousands, if not millions, of free-roaming bison on the plains, as well as the many Plains Indian tribes that relied on them, and ends with less than 350 bison alive in a now nearly completely fenced-in landscape filled with cattle and most of the tribes having been forced onto reservations. It was a huge boom and bust cycle that made a lot of fortunes while also ruining tons of people at the same time after the bottom fell out of the market when late in that period one winter killed most of the cattle in the country and brought all of the speculation and money behind these enterprises back to earth. Up until this time, the biggest meat consumed in the country was pork, which could be preserved very easily, and beef was a seasonal specialty. At the end of this period, refrigeration had been invented, as well as electricity, the telegraph and many more things familiar to us in our modern time period, and beef was readily available all around the country, year-round. Some interesting footnotes: Texas Longhorns became the staple of the trade as they were very disease-resistant, and they were calved in Texas, trailed up into Kansas to rail depots and barbed wire was invented to fence out areas where cattle were not desired. Interestingly, back East, it was the responsibility of the owners of livestock to fence them in so that they didn't wander off and damage other property. In the West, though, fencing-out became the rule and, if you didn't want any cattle coming off the open range to damage your land or spread diseases to your stock, you had to fence your property off to keep the animals out. This is still the case out West and is part of the reason that there is barbed wire everywhere still to this day...which was called the Devil's Rope(just ask Willow!). Another interesting fact, most cowboys didn't carry pistols, as they were heavy and expensive, and all of the shoot-outs and duels that you see in Westerns are very much exaggerated... in fact, most lawmen carried shotguns and most people killed in shootouts in this time period were killed by shotguns, not pistols. On top of that, most of the gunslinging 'Westerns' that we are familiar with took place in Kansas railroad towns, not the far West. In any event, even though it's a history book, it's a real page-turner and is full of tons of amazing information...I literally can't put it down!

So, now for some pictures...the first is a shot of Willow's chest and front legs with some of her wounds. Kim wondered if she had run into a bobcat, as they attack out of nowhere silently(one of the many things she's been through out her), but once she saw the pictures of her, she instantly said, 'Nope, that's from barbed wire.' The next three are shots of Ela, Rui and Willow out on one of our walks pre-barbed wire. Then, three shots of the horses: Freedom(probably the friendliest of the bunch); then a shot over the hay through the feeder; and then Xena, the smallest horse and probably the cutest(I think). Next are some landscape shots: the full moon rising over a cholla along the pasture fence; then a shot of the sun lighting up a dead cholla(the succulent, cactus tissue dies leaving behind woody, hollow branches that seem braided); the setting sun seen through pinyon branches; a view of Rowe Mesa at just about full dark, seen over a puddle in the driveway; one of the many standing stones that Kim has erected here at dark with a small floodlight on it; and then again Rowe Mesa with the sky catching fire right at sunset. Next is a shot of me after figuring out how to take it with my new phone/camera. Then, a shot of our place all lit up at night as I came back in with the dogs. And, finally, Kim's very cool patio and gate that separates the driveway from her house.

That's it for this week...take care everyone!