It's funny how the world goes around.
Francisco and I were checking cows, making a big circle early in the
morning to beat the heat. It's peaceful out there. We've got grazing
rights for 200 cows in 18 sections of Lowell Love grass, twenty-foot
high mesquite and assorted cacti, canyons, arroyos and rattlesnakes, 40
miles north of the Mexican border in Arizona.
We were deep in the monte, 'scrub land', when Francisco asked if I'd like to see where my son found the dead man.
Eight
years ago when my son was 16, he and Francisco were making a "juelta," a
big circle (as in "Dar la juelta" – Take a dally). I didn't speak
English to my son until he was 10 years old, so he and Francisco
communicated in Spanish. On that fateful day, Cindy Lou and I were
visiting our friends in northern Idaho in the Whitebird Hill area. The
cell phone rang…it was my son…he was stuttering…he was looking at a dead
man…he wasn't sure the man was dead…he had wheeled his horse to go find
Francisco!
I stopped him and ordered
him to retrace his tracks to make certain he could find his way back to
the corpse after he found Francisco. They both had cell phones.
Francisco phoned the local deputy sheriff who knew the country, and went
to meet them. My son posted guard over the body. That was June 20,
2010. So when Francisco asked if I'd like to see the spot where it all
happened, I said, "Si."
I
had no doubt he could locate the exact area eight years later because
I've come to realize that many cowboys have an unbelievable ability to
remember terrain, cows, horses, tracks, holes in fences, lock
combinations, landmarks and incidents. They are like fish in their own
aquarium, only their aquarium is 12 thousand acres full! He crossed a
couple of arroyos and bottoms, rock slides, 40-foot mesquite trees,
tangles in the unforgiving scrub and then pointed.
I
dismounted, worked around and tried to picture how the scene was when
my son first arrived in this exact spot eight years ago. The victim was
obviously an illegal alien, probably Mexican, traveling with a group.
His compadres had taken his shirt, shoes and personal belongings. He had
been dead a couple days.
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