Читать книгу Memory's Storehouse Unlocked, True Stories. Pioneer Days In Wetmore and Northeast Kansas онлайн

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The herd had grazed on past my tree-perch. The unruly steer did not follow, but if the critter was capable of the sound thinking I was willing to credit him with, “I betcha” he always wished he had. A good cowhand could play a tune with a cattlewhip on a critter’s rump, under dead run. And John Taylor was good. He lashed his short-handled 10-foot whip overhead to the steer’s rump, right and left, with rhythmic timing, making the hair fly with each crack. The steer’s hindparts, seemingly trying to outrun his foreparts, swung to the right and swung to the left with clocklike regularity—and he thus wove himself deep into the herd, bawling “bloody murder.”

When told of John Taylor’s adroitness with the whip, my father said, “I wouldn’t care to tan his hide”—meaning the steer’s, of course. While father bought the hides from the lost dead of all those big herds—sometimes the losses in the early spring were heavy—he tanned only a few of them. He didn’t like to tan a mutilated hide, nor the hide of a branded critter—and he wouldn’t tan a grubby murrain hide.