WE BRANDED THAT EVENING. That is, the men branded, Pink and I remaining interested onlookers outside the log corral. Once indeed we took a part; a calf escaped, leaping the gate and starting with extreme rapidity for parts unknown. In a weak moment I started after it, but the last I saw of it it was headed for the Cheyenne Reservation and like the darky in the war, if it had had a feather in its hand “it would have flew.” Curiously enough, a calf which loses its mother will always go back to the last place where it suckled; as the mother does the same thing there is practically no such thing as a lost calf.
But, generally speaking, we were onlookers. At this particular spot there was a rough log corral, and the branding was somewhat simplified by that fact. Corral, or no corral, however, the procedure is essentially the same.
While we had been having supper, then, at four o’clock, the herders had been busy cutting out the cows with unbranded calves and driving off the rest. Gladly enough they went back to their coulees and creek bottoms again, leaving behind them those who were to have their baptism of fire. This smaller herd, lowing and anxious, now awaited us at the top of a hill about two hundred yards from the ancient log corral. The branding irons had been brought out from the rack in the bed wagon, and inside the corral a fire had been built. These irons generally consist at the branding end of a quarter circle, a full circle and a bar. When, as with the Rocking Chair outfit, a special brand is used, that outfit carries it, and the others, picking up a Rocking Chair calf and mother, do their best with the tools at hand to etch a rocking-chair on the calf’s side! Thus, picking up a Skull and Crossbones calf, we did a fair job with the full circle for a skull and two bars for the crossed bones.
But although the corral was ready for the cattle, the cattle were not yet in it. And this proved to be a difficult and delicate operation. Wide-spreading jaws or wings of logs reached out from the inner circle, and the cattle moved docilely enough until these were reached. Behind them the line of mounted cowboys, moving slowly, was closing in on them. Ahead of them was the opening into the corral. The lead cow would stop, gaze about and nine times out of ten make a bolt for freedom, and the entire bunch would follow suit. But the inexorable line of horsemen waited behind, and gaps were instantly closed. As the jaws of the Y narrowed, the men were riding shoulder to shoulder, and the cattle were quietly pushed inside the corral. Then the logs were placed across the entrance and the work began.
One man roped the calves from his horse and dragged them out. Two other men waited to throw them and a fourth brought the branding iron. The mother’s brand was called and the calf similarly marked.
That night I was too weary to sleep. I sat in my tepee as before, the pillow on my knee, my candle in its can perilously near me, and made my notes. Then I blew out my candle and sliding along the ground at last found that slight hollow for the hip bone which is my camping substitute for springs and hair mattress.
The outfit slept. Somewhere to the east of us, the nighthawk was watching the horses, grazing them slowly along and nodding wearily in his saddle as he rode. Two to a bed for warmth, the cowboys lay in the open, their gear piled beside them on the ground. The night wind blew through the pine trees. And over the hill a coyote barked. From the cook tent below there came a regular, sonorous sound like the slow monotonous beating of a war drum far away. But it was not a war drum; it was Dad, his long body rolled in his blankets, comfortably and unconsciously baying at the moon.