John Duncklee

High in the Sierra Madre Occidental the streams are small, finger-width where they begin. As they trickle their way down they join to form larger streams. Then the larger ones join others to become rivers. This pattern of stream marriage happens all the way to the Gulf of California. Only then does it stop. This pattern streams make from the summits of mountains to the gulf or ocean is called a watershed.

John Duncklee

The two buzzards were members of a flock of buzzards that were soaring through the sky searching for carrion. But, there was something special about these two. They had paired, but so did others. They flew together, but so did others. They could communicate, but not like others. They could actually speak. They could also read. However, they never learned to write.

Hunter Liguore

“We’ll not spare either our souls, or our bodies to get freedom, and we’ll prove that we brother’s are Kozak kin.” –Palvo Chubynsky, 1863

John Duncklee

I was nineteen years old in 1948 and working on the E4 Ranch near Big Horn, Wyoming. Every pay day I went to Sheridan to cash my hundred dollar check, put eighty dollars from it into my account at the bank, ten in a separate pocket for Bull Durham, a couple of beers, and other expenses. With the other ten I would try my luck at some poker table.

John Duncklee

In the early sixties, my partner and I bought some registered Brangus cattle from a breeder in Yuma. We leased a bull to service the heifers. The day the cattle arrived via truck from Yuma I was not at the ranch, but doing errands in town.

by Terrell Brown
(from Range magazine)

Over forty years ago, through some remote acquaintances of my mother, I got a job on a cattle ranch on the eastern plains of Colorado. I traveled north out of New Mexico by Greyhound bus through Raton Pass and was picked up from the Colorado Springs depot by my employer and his wife in what was even then an old Chevy car. He and his wife were in their mid-70s and the lonesome spread of 17,000 acres southeast of Colorado Springs sprawled across the undulating range miles from the nearest town.

Leslie Johnson

The rage around gaited horse shows was mule racing, and it was a serious sport to those involved. A mule can run, despite rumors to the contrary, but being a sensible creature they don’t bother with it unless absolutely necessary.

Leslie Johnson

The whole time we’d been riding, Mac had done nothing but whine about getting a rattlesnake hat band. If he could get one of those bad boys, he’d be punchy for sure, and people would start taking him seriously about being a cowboy.

“I’m not sure a hat band is what makes a cowboy.” I mused, letting Siego step over the log the shorter Quarter horses had hopped over. “Maybe you shouldn’t wear Doc Martin’s and a surfer shirt, if you think clothes make a difference.”

Leslie Johnson

In the part of the country I’m from, they don’t like bald faced horses, especially ones with a blue eye, or two. They call them Cabesa de Muertes, or “Deaths Heads”, and they are bad luck and bad news. No vaquero or his American counter part will pick one in a remuda, no matter how trained it is supposed to be, and to do so is to court sure disaster.

Tom Sheehan

And so it had come to this… nothing would ever take him from his steely promise to extract, once and for all, total redemption from his old pal and teammate, Geg Lumbada, payment of the highest order, Amontillado on the instant air. So be it.