The busiest periods of the sheepman's year 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.