Gila Country Legend: The Life and Times of Quentin Hulse

By Nancy Coggeshall

If there was ever a "ring-tailed roarer" of the backwoods of New Mexico, he was Quentin Hulse (1926-2002). Hulse lived and worked most of his life at the bottom of Canyon Creek in the Gila River country of southwestern New Mexico, but his reputation spread far and wide. His western image appeared on a tourist postcard and souvenir license plate in the 1950s. Footage of a lion hunt led by Hulse and his hounds appeared on the Men's Channel in 2005, three years after his passing.

Hulse grew up primarily in western New Mexico when that ranch and mining country was still remote and raw. At the age of ten he witnessed a point-blank shooting, the culmination of an old-fashioned frontier feud. He followed his parents between mines and towns until his father established a ranch at Canyon Creek. While serving in the navy during World War II, he landed on the bloody beach at Okinawa. After returning from the war, he was shot in a bar near Silver City during a night of carousing.

Hulse was most at home in the rugged Gila Wilderness, in which he ranched and guided for fifty years. With compassion and nuance, Nancy Coggeshall tells the compelling biography of a unique western rancher constantly adjusting to the inroads of modernity into his traditional way of life. Drawing on oral history, archival sources, and her personal association with Hulse and the Gila, she brings this unique westerner, and New Mexican, to life.

• Language: English
• Publisher: University of New Mexico Press
• Release date: Dec 15, 2014
• ISBN: 9780826348265

Nancy Coggeshall

Nancy Coggeshall moved from Rhode Island to New Mexico, after living in London, England; Toronto, Ontario; and the Eastern Townships of Quebec. She quickly found herself at home among the ranching families and slower paced small-town life of the Land of Enchantment. She resides in Reserve, New Mexico.

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Preface

I FIRST contemplated telling the story of Quentin Hulse as an academically constructed monograph, complete with footnotes, a bibliography, and professorial approval. But with that approach, the color that defined him would leach out, it seemed to me. Likewise, telling his story in a carefully built, chronological narrative loomed as doable in my mind as putting ballet slippers on a bear.

My research consisted of substantiating the stories I heard about Quentin, and I talked to more than two hundred people to do so. I couldn’t talk to everyone who knew Quentin, nor could I tell every story I heard. I tried to emulate Wallace Stegner, citing enough warts to show the nature of the man—without cataloging all the warts that developed during Quentin’s lifetime.¹

The Quentin stories are related in his words. When anyone recalled Quentin’s speech, I considered it a direct quote.

I did little to no editing of quoted speech.

I gathered information from friends, family members, and former clients: school records in Silver City, New Mexico, and Miami, Arizona; the World Wide Web, Quentin’s service record, the deck log of the USS Burleigh (APA-95), and the A&E DVD Okinawa: The Last Battle; United States Forest Service records and courthouse records; newspapers, magazines, and books; videotapes of Quentin, recorded conversations with him, and roadside signs. I aimed to wrest Quentin’s story and the stories he told from the tall-tale category and establish him as an oral historian and reliable source about an area that has previously been overlooked.

In the end, I wrote the book using stories: Quentin’s storytelling, stories about him, back stories I discovered, and only those parts of my story as they pertained to my compatibility with him and happiness in the West, finally wrapping his story in the story of our life together. Any mistakes in these tellings are mine.

Map by Deborah Reade.

First Sighting

Jizz (birding), immediately recognizable characteristics of a bird.

—WIKIPEDIA, The Free Encyclopedia

Jizz—the bird’s wild essence

—JOHN SEABROOK, Ruffled Feathers, The New Yorker, May 29, 2006

THE FIRST TIME I met Quentin Hulse, he ignored me completely. I wanted to meet the rumbustious older man because of the stories I had heard about him. All of them reflected intelligence and humor, a combination that appeals to me. At that first meeting, though, I made no impression on him at all. His how-do-you-do consisted of looking in my direction without speaking.

I was at a fiesta in Winston, New Mexico, with Sissy Pound Olney, whose five-generation ranching family adopted me after my arrival in New Mexico in 1988, three years before. Sissy introduced me to Quentin at the town’s cowboy bar, the antithesis of Jackson Hole’s Million Dollar Saloon, which I dutifully patronized three months later in Wyoming, celebrating my jubilee. Winston is a small town—very small—southwest of Albuquerque. Its only bar had no paintings depicting western scenes, or bar stools topped with western saddles like the one in the high-dollar West. Nor did the bar in Winston at that time have indoor toilets. The bar wasn’t open all the time, but only for special occasions—the reason I was there. The annual Winston Fiesta features a parade, a barbecue, and vendors, and hopefully brings more traffic to the local businesses, the owners of the bar, and the general store, which also sold gas. None of the patrons in the crowded bar were tourists. The cowboys playing pool wore dusty boots and dirty hats and yelled, "Chingao!" when the eight ball dropped home. Competing with the general din of conversation and the triumphant bursts around the pool table was a local musician and singer named Bernie Romero. He played his guitar and sang corridos until he was hoarse.

Sissy and I ate barbecued beef and went to the dance, staying in Winston all day. Long after sunset, we followed the nearly fifty-mile gravel road between the Black Range and the San Mateo Mountains and across great stretches of the San Augustin Plain to the ranch where she and her husband Tom lived, in Magdalena, once an important shipping center for cattle.

Tom Olney, Sissy’s husband, told me my first Quentin story in July 1990 around the kitchen table at the Allie Strozzi ranch at La Jencia, the area around La Jencia Creek, basin, and fault north of Highway 60 east of Magdalena. (I consider Tom kin because a John Olney married a Rachel Coggeshall on August 11, 1699, in Providence, Rhode Island,¹ and a Major Coggeshall Olney served in the Revolutionary War.)² Monte Voepel, who shod my horse at that time, offered his Quentin story after Tom finished his. I heard the next one a week or so later from Quentin’s best friend, neighbor, and outfitter-apprentice, Gene Blair. Tom’s father-in-law, Smokey Pound, informed me that Quentin Hulse, quite inebriated, had arrived at the Pound ranch once to buy hay. Quentin confirmed the report, saying he was so drunk he couldn’t have found his ass with both hands.

The most telling Quentin story I heard came from the internationally known artist and sculptor Luis Jimenez. Luis had been hunting in the Gila Country near the Hulse ranch and was lost. He approached the ranch house tentatively because of Quentin’s reputation for orneriness. He was gratified by Quentin’s geniality and helpfulness, but aghast at the sight of a dead horse hanging from a tree. The animal had died the day before. Quentin planned to butcher the meat and dry it to feed his pack of hound dogs over the winter. He sometimes kept as many as seventeen for bear and lion hunting. I thought the solution eminently sensible, even brilliant. My culminating impression of all the Quentin stories was of a man who could find anything he wanted with no hands.

Amid all the noise and conviviality at the Winston Fiesta that Saturday in April, the introduction of Quentin to me was cast aside like peanut shells dropped on the floor. His overriding objective was railing at the younger people thronged around him. He especially targeted Sissy, who hadn’t ridden his white mule in the mule race. Sure, Quentin brushed me off, but that gave me a chance to watch him.

The mental photograph I took home that day was of Quentin in profile, sitting on the last stool, leaning against the wall, his cane hooked nearby. His soiled silver-gray Resistol with the five-inch brim in the middle of his forehead, the nose slightly beak-like, the gray-white beard, and a jawline—like Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s king of Bohemia—suggesting resolution pushed to the point of obstinacy.³ His jizz was electric. He was somehow charged.

In those moments I spent observing him as he told stories and teased the younger people around him, I couldn’t know that I would one day sidle into the last chapters of his story, that our stories would entwine, or that I would be the one to assemble his life story. I had no way of knowing at all.

Port of Entry

Beloved Nance—I still find myself constupated (I think that’s a word) at the extent of yr adaptation to life at the OK Corral. It’s as if you had for all these years elsewhere a ready-made life waiting for you to step into.

—A LETTER FROM DENNIS DUFFY TO THE AUTHOR, December 17, 1990

BY THE TIME I immigrated to New Mexico in full middle age, I had shed my skin many times. Girlhood in Narragansett, Rhode Island, was my first ecdysis. The town is a seaside resort, then seasonally populated by a social spectrum ranging from gypsies and foot-press operators to the upper crust. I grew up with Narragansett Indians, sons and daughters of college professors, commercial fishermen, and U.S. Navy personnel at Quonset Point. I rode my bike past stone walls enclosing coastal meadows, which had provided bounty for the Narragansett Plantation society that flourished before the Revolutionary War. On the early-morning beach, I walked as waves broke gently as pages turning, or towered post-hurricane against a clearing sky. After school I meandered along the pink granite outcroppings lining the shore. Lulled by the rhythm of the waves, I gazed over the ocean with my back to twenty-room summer cottages, reposing on acres of gently sloping lawns. There I possessed transatlantic vision and imagined Portugal on the distant horizon.

Occasionally, when I reflect on that idyllic time, I try to identify what in that landscape readied me for wholeheartedly embracing life in the American West. There were less than ten dairy farms operating in Narragansett when I was a kid. Very few horses were around. But my father, Lawrence Garfield Coggeshall, took me to the lay-up farm for Thoroughbreds from Narragansett Race Track, where I picked grass and fed it to the horses through the wire fence.

As I see it, a childhood case of chicken pox and a jigsaw puzzle loom fancifully as portents, foretelling the inevitability of my destination here. I was allowed the luxury of lolling in my parents’ double bed while I convalesced. Part of a three-piece maple bedroom suite, the bed was unique. The headboard replicated half of a wagon wheel, complete with iron rim, and the foot consisted of a would-be oxen yoke. The mirror for my mother’s dresser was round like a wheel, also rimmed with iron, and between the two top drawers of both the lady’s and gent’s dressers, the carved figure of a man on the seat of a Conestoga wagon drove a bovine team. This furniture prompted all manner of fantasies.

Early one evening while I was still ensconced in that wonderful bed, my father’s only brother, J. A., a house painter, dropped by with a gift for me. It was a puzzle whose pieces represented each of the forty-eight states then in the Union, with the exception of one piece for New England and another for the smaller Mid-Atlantic States. Whenever I completed the puzzle, the last piece I snapped in place was New Mexico’s. The cities of Albuquerque and Santa Fe, with a star designating the latter as the capital, were printed on it. Why that blue-gray piece with its boot heel stuck in Mexico transfixed me, I’ll never know. Yet it didn’t kindle enough curiosity about the place to learn more. Perhaps it stood for something to be discovered later on.

My grandmother Coggeshall related the first eyewitness account about cowboys that I ever heard. I was only six years old at the time—five years before we had a television set, and two or three before I began gluing my ear to the kitchen radio to hear Straight Arrow, Gene Autry, and the boys at the B-Bar-B Ranch. My grandmother’s story involved a cowboy who passed by her family’s house in Plainville, Kansas, where her father had homesteaded after the Civil War. The young man galloped in front of the house and reached down from the saddle to pluck a fifty-cent piece off the ground. That wonderful tale remains deeply etched in my memory. I was so immediately impressed that I illustrated the story in crayon for a grade-one drawing assignment. The picture showed the makeshift home of Civil War veteran Joel Aclon Hunter, with his wife, Hattie Atwood Hunter, and their four children at his side. The cowboy sits on a brown horse. And on a dare from a classmate, the daughter of a fisherman, I carefully added brown balls dropping from the horse’s rump.

Our house was a mere quarter mile from the water. Despite a merchant-marine heritage on both sides, however, my family was not seagoing at all. My father was a carpenter. We had no small sailboat, run-about, or skiff until I was seventeen years old. Then my father bought a rowboat, which touched water only when it rained. But the sea was provender, recreation, and presence. My father fished for mackerel, bluefish, frostfish, and bass. I gathered mussels and periwinkles, collected shells, dug for clams, and participated in what passed for swimming: diving over and under and into waves, or body surfing into shore. The sea imbued me with an abiding sense of expansiveness, wonder, and might.

Before my pilgrimage to the West, my life had encompassed the education I always wanted: a diploma from the University of Rhode Island, and travel I financed myself: a trip to meet my Jamaican pen pal of eight years after I graduated from high school, and six months in Europe upon receiving my bachelor of arts degree.

At the age of twenty-three I married, and was catapulted into jobs at the University of Chicago, with Canada’s civil service, and in suburban Toronto high schools. Living in London, a mile from Karl Marx’s grave in Highgate Cemetery, my husband and I ferried to Belgium and France, and motored from England to Sweden and Finland to visit my relatives on our way to the former Soviet Union. We returned to England by way of Poland, then East Germany, Czechoslovakia, and Austria. We drove from Salzburg to Ostend, in Belgium, in one day. I assisted the medical editor at a British publishing company that distributed books for an American company whose books I promoted. As a researcher at the British Museum for a University of Toronto professor, I one day announced that I wanted to live in Wyoming and research western American history for Twentieth-Century Fox.

I don’t know where that notion came from. Our next landing place was Quebec, where I lived in a lakeside resort town called Ayer’s Cliff, surrounded by a dairy-farming community, ninety miles east-southeast of Montreal. I freelanced, writing about horse pulling contests, Olympic riders, country life, and later, profiles of professional athletes and book reviews.

From our property that had been a hayfield, I looked upon the undulating horizon of the Appalachians’ northernmost reaches, which flattened at the St. Lawrence’s fluvial plain. Life moved to the rhythm of the seasons: In winter, there were bright, snow-covered landscapes, with the air so crystalline and cold it took your breath away. When maple buds opened and trillium appeared, I prepared meals with smelts and fiddle-heads that tasted green. In summer, stalwart corn erupted shoulder-high in fields around the countryside; red geraniums burst open in window boxes in town. When the air sharpened and fall arrived, the foliage flared from variegated greens to reds the color of wine, yellows like egg yolks, orange that is seared. Driving from our apartment to the stable where I rode that first year, I was transported. After seven years of city life, I thought I was in the middle of Glory for the flame of color in the hardwood trees.

When that seventeen-year marriage dissolved, the skin I shed was a wrenching molt. I had lived out of the country for fifteen years, nine in the Eastern Townships of Quebec. Narragansett was a haven. Going home again provided the comfort and succor of family and old friends, as well as instant employment: work as a hostess at a landmark restaurant, sales and banquet manager at a motel across from a trash fish plant in Galilee, and then five-and-a-half years at Johnson & Wales College, now a university. Teaching high school and writing about Olympic riders were excellent qualifications for my first position there, recruiting for and promoting the school’s equine studies program. This led to other positions, most of which involved writing. On one assignment I accompanied the travel-tourism students to Spain and Morocco.

Magdalena was my port of entry to New Mexico. Returning to the old cow town from my first visit to Santa Fe sparked a flashback of driving from Quebec City to Ayer’s Cliff. I had to shake my head: I was now in la tierra encantada, not la belle province. The years I spent in Rhode Island after leaving Quebec were entirely eclipsed. I had lived in New England and New France; now I was living in what had been a New Spain. New Mexico superimposed itself on Quebec, my experience there a palimpsest. Socorro stood for Sherbrooke; Albuquerque for Montreal.

Everywhere I looked there were other eerie reminders. The sixteenth-century French explorers looked for the Northwest Passage; the Spanish quested after the Seven Cities of Gold. The Roman Catholic Church proselytized for both. Colonial furniture styles of both regions were similar. Basque fishermen plied the St. Lawrence River for whales and established camps on its shores; Basques in New Mexico raised cattle and sheep. Both cultures, officially bilingual, clung to their native tongues, Spanish and French. Some Hispanic faces I saw could have been Québecois.

In Magdalena I lived in a rural, agricultural area again. Instead of black and white Holstein cattle or an occasional herd of honey-colored Jerseys, I now saw other varieties: Black Angus and chestnut-colored Herefords, raised for beef. Horse enthusiasts competed in rodeos instead of draft-horse pulling contests at county fairs. From a vantage point in the foothills of the Magdalena Mountains, I could gaze at La Jencia to the north and see the lavender volcanic cone of Ladron Mountain thrust majestically from the flats. The land I contemplated was huge. A cowboy in Magdalena, upon learning where I was from, exclaimed that he had worked on ranches bigger than Rhode Island. One friend, Floyd Mansell, likened me to a southwestern native, but did not entirely comprehend how a woman from cultured New England could be so content in the wooly West. How could I explain? I was raised near the ocean; I was used to space. An old friend from college, when traveling through Albuquerque, got it.

The cowboys are fishermen, he said.

I was home. I had stumbled onto a cockeyed apotheosis of all I cherished in place.

As it happened, my immediate and profound appreciation of place was my salvation. My initiation to New Mexico resulted in a painfully ragged molt. I had remarried and would settle here. The union was brief. I was left stranded in the desert: naked, bestial, gnawing on my heart.¹ Before rubbing my abraded scales free, however, I got a job waitressing in Socorro. The historic Val Verde Hotel then provided the only white-tablecloth dining in the county seat. That summer a facility for training firemen opened in town. Firefighters from all over the state and Juarez in Mexico patronized the restaurant. One night I waited on two truly decent young men—straightforward, thoughtful, and polite—who commented on my accent. Why did you come to New Mexico, they asked.

The Witness Protection Program, I replied.

I was well aware of my luck. I had begun waitressing at fourteen. My parents had applauded my goal for higher education, so I would have something to fall back on. Yet whenever push came to shove, waitressing always tided me over till a better job came along. When you’re a waitress, a black-rooted bottle-blonde I worked with at a coffee shop in Narragansett said to me, you always have a quarter in your pocket for a loaf of bread. I was seventeen. Thirty years later, the job at the Val Verde put quarters in my pocket, introduced me to the community, and provided a base for job hunting in Albuquerque and at the New Mexico Institute of Mining and Technology in Socorro.

But my greatest luck was the Pounds. Sissy Pound Olney tended bar at the Golden Spur in Magdalena and knew I needed a place to live and to work. Her ranching family, five generations old in New Mexico, needed someone to stay with their mom, Betty, who was contending with cancer. Their father, Smokey, was looking after an old friend of Betty’s family, Fred Strozzi, who wanted to spend his last days at his own ranch at Water Canyon at the base of the Magdalena Mountains. (Fred’s parents were Italian Swiss who had been in the cattle business with Betty’s father, Joe Gianera, a northern Italian. The marriage between Betty’s uncle John Gianera and one of Fred’s sisters was another bond.) The last of the nine Strozzi children, eighty-six-year-old Fred was crippled by polio that had afflicted him as a child. After his only remaining sibling died, Fred was incapable of living alone in a house with no electricity or running water. Betty had been taking care of him until she was diagnosed with cancer.

The Pound ranch is located at the southern end of the Magdalenas, four miles beyond Socorro. I moved there at the beginning of April, when spring winds scour the landscape, dry the grass, and blow the earth away. The Pounds’ youngest son, Primo, lived next door with his wife Veronica, a nurse. I stayed at the ranch house so that it was occupied when Betty went to Albuquerque for chemotherapy and then to Sissy’s home to recuperate. I gave Betty a hand when she returned. Smokey said I could bring my horse with me, but he would supply no grain. During that first month at the ranch before I started waitressing, he put gas in my car (I was running ranch errands), and Betty bought me Tampax and toothpaste.

The year Betty was sick, Sissy home-schooled her ten-year-old son, Brian. When Betty was at the ranch, he stayed with her, and she taught him. I made a chart with the parts of speech on it, taped it to the pantry door, and read passages of Paul St. Pierre’s Breaking Smith’s Quarter Horse to him. If Grandma Betty needed to rest, I looked after the boy. On our first walk together through the cholla and prickly pear cactus on the hill that rises behind the saddle shack and barn, Brian collapsed in gales of laughter when I referred to a pile of cow manure as a cow flop, not a cow patty. Another time he told me to try his bow. His father Tom Olney and his uncles Billy Jack, Joe, and Primo Pound were all bow hunters, outfitters, and guides.

No, I’m not strong enough. If I can’t pull it, you’ll laugh. I knew.

No, Nance. Honest. I won’t laugh.

I failed to draw the string to any noticeable degree, and he collapsed again.

On another adventure, Brian killed a thirty-inch black-tailed rattlesnake near the house. I skinned it as I would an eel to preserve the hide.

I looked after the house a bit, shopped for groceries, and did light barn chores: feeding and watering a pet coyote, the chickens, horses, goats, and first-time heifers due to calve. The first nearly newborn calf I picked up was so slippery from lanolin I almost dropped her.

I worked from five o’clock to nine or ten o’clock in the evenings at the Val Verde. Returning to the ranch after my shift, I checked the heifers’ cosas, to see if any of them might be ready to give birth. After that I went to the stone step leading to the hay barn, to look at the moon and talk to my horse. One night I came back after a particularly busy shift serving a buffet at the Socorro Opera House for a golf tournament and found a note on the door:

Nancy

Two guys from Mexico showed up tonite at 10:00. I put them on the porch. They have worked here in the past and are trustworthy. I will be up at 6:30 or 7 in the A.M. and figure out what to do with them.

Billy Jack

I was pleased. If any heifer had trouble, these guys knew more about pulling calves than I did. I went out to check the heifers, and when I returned, there was Andres, dark as walnut skin, leaning against the fireplace, a real Chihuahua cowboy—verdad—wearing Wrangler jeans with a knife on the belt, a western shirt, and boots with a heel.

Are you Andres? I asked in English. He nodded. I’m Nancy, I said. I don’t speak Spanish.

"No hablo ingles," he replied.

On an earlier visit to the Pound ranch, I had met Andres and knew how close he was to the family. The next day I cooked breakfast for him and his friend and drove them to Socorro to catch their ride back to Mexico.

One other evening, when returning to the ranch and passing Primo and Veronica’s trailer, I noticed the young man, all 6' 3 of him, silhouetted against the lights shining from inside. Something dangled nearly to the ground from a piece of baling wire that he held in his hand. I knew exactly what it was. Primo had killed a western diamondback rattlesnake, 4' 7 long and 7" around the middle, at the base of the steps leading to the front door. I became snake-conscious at that ranch, so much so that I later looked for diamondbacks on the asphalt of Albuquerque parking lots when I first worked there.

One observer wryly commented that I was living every Easterner’s wet dream: She’s been in New Mexico [for] a year, and she’s working on a ranch. But I’m not sure Smokey would have called it working.

One morning, Betty yelled at me to change my clothes and get to the corral. A straining heifer stood in the cattle chute, and Sissy ordered me to climb in and stand on the cow’s back end. I did as I was told. Sissy, dripping with sweat, pulled and pulled until the calf dropped. I had witnessed my family’s cat Singer bringing her first litter into the world in my brother’s crib, and a Rottweiler bitch whelping eight dead pups in the laundry room of a former Narragansett estate’s carriage house. This was far more exciting. Sissy first gave the calf mouth-to-mouth resuscitation and vigorously rubbed its sides with an old towel. Then, holding the calf by its back legs, she commenced to swing it around, to get the juices flowing. The baby calf was fine. Sissy cleaned up, I changed again, and she, Betty, and I packed into her truck. Driving Betty to chemotherapy in Albuquerque, Sissy would occasionally turn to spit afterbirth out the window.

Two months after getting the job at the Val Verde, my brother and I sold our parents’ house in Narragansett. I applied for a loan to rent a twenty-one-foot truck and transport my goods and chattel to New Mexico. For collateral I offered my horse Rosey, a registered Missouri fox trotter, and the diamond rings my mother bought after she retired. After viewing the documentation of the house sale, the manager at the Socorro bank said collateral was not necessary. An acquaintance cautioned me about men in crusty underwear lurking along the highway to prey on solitary women. With my Grandfather Coggeshall’s solid-maple constabulary stick resting on the bench seat beside me, I would fend off any potential attackers neglecting personal hygiene. I had no mishaps between Narragansett and Socorro and boasted to Pat Reed, the arts editor at the Albuquerque Journal, that I could have crossed the country in white gloves and a hat with a veil. I would have looked silly, she chuckled. The following month I landed a job as advertising and exhibits manager at the University of New Mexico Press, thanks to Pat’s recommendation. I found a bed-sitter within a mile of I-25 south to Socorro and two miles from the Press. My double life began. Monday through Friday I advertised University of New Mexico Press books and arranged for their display at academic meetings and trade shows. By 5:15 P.M. every Friday, I headed south, where for two days I was a cowgirl-manqué with the Pounds.

What I prize most about the Pounds’ generosity and compassion was their willingness to include me. They gave me connection I might not have otherwise had. Thanksgiving Day included gathering cattle at Fred Strozzi’s. All of us trooped to the trailer, parked there by Sissy and Tom, for Thanksgiving dinner. The Christmas Tom and Sissy’s daughter Gianetta was in the first grade, she sang Silent Night in Navajo for the family. She attended school in Magdalena, where a number of Navajo children also attended. In a moment of indiscretion, the smug six-year-old linguist taught me a rude Navajo expression involving a Red Devil.

I cherished working with the Pounds. Sissy called me Two Good Hands Gone when I rode with them, but I never caused a stampede, blocked the cattle’s passage, fell off Rosey while working, or broke a bone. Before we set off from Fred’s corrals, Smokey would ride over to me on his veteran cow horse, Whiskey, to shake hands. When the cattle were corralled or branded, he would ride up to me again to shake hands. Early in my cow-punching, we gathered cattle at Fred Strozzi’s ranch at the base of the Magdalenas at Water Canyon. Pushing Whiskey in my direction, Smokey said, You stand here with your horse, and if any cows come this way, you stop them. Then, with gruff sarcasm, Do you think you can do that? I performed splendidly that day. No cows scattered toward my post.

Before I got my western saddle, which had been made for Tom’s brother, I used my English saddle. One Saturday in November, we moved cattle from the Strozzi ranch property on La Jencia to another pasture a few miles away. Tom was disgusted with my outfit: English saddle, breeches, and high boots. He muttered that I looked like Margaret Thatcher. What could I say? As an inappropriately outfitted novice I was cowed, even though I was sure Britain’s former prime minister didn’t participate in fox hunts.

On the way back to the ranch house, Billy Jack mentioned to Tom that he had seen a "chinga" rattlesnake.

What does that mean? I asked.

Very big.

Actually, my first experience gathering cattle was for a Magdalena rancher named Buck Wilson. I asked my friend Mary Rose Pino, who helped Buck from time to time, if I could go. I was a real dude, ignorant and brash. I do not know what negotiations transpired, but Mary said it was a go. I was thrilled. While I saddled Rosey at Mary’s corral, I watched the full moon go down toward the Bear Mountains in the west. When we unloaded the horses off Route 107, running south from Magdalena, I saw a coyote trotting against the orange sun rising over the foothills of the San Mateos in the east. The other riders peeled off to make their circles to round up the cattle over the green-tinted southern curve of the San Augustin Plain around the San Mateo Mountains. The sight evoked rightness and calm. Thirteen years later, I ran into Buck