Somewhere out in the northeast corner of Young County, about 40 miles south of Wichita Falls, an aging cattleman cups his gnarled hands around his mouth, and from it comes his call, high and sharp and short. It snaps over mesquite and chaparral with the clarity of a rifle's report.
Brandon Thibodeaux
Brandon Thibodeaux
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"Whoo!"
His hands return to his sides as he scans the landscape. Post oaks stand blackly in the dim morning light, not far from where the West Fork of the Trinity sits shallow and still.
He hears nothing and calls them again. "Whoo!"
A half mile away, a cow responds, a deep bellow coming from its guts, terminating in a full-throated bawl.
"I'd just as soon have them stay where they are," 82-year-old Jack Loftin says. "They just tromp. Every blade of grass is valuable."
He turns and, in his tentative but efficient gait, rounds the front of his blue Chevy pickup, grips the steering wheel and hoists himself into the seat. There's an automatic feeder mounted to the truck bed, loaded up with alfalfa cubes he'll feed to his herd to supplement their waning supply of grass. The cubes smell of molasses, an odor that fills the truck's cab.
The truck starts off along tire ruts worn into the thinning buffalograss. He mashes the horn for a moment. And again, calling them to him. The cows bawl again, and their call becomes choral as others join, knowing well the ritual after a straight year of feeding on cubes.
He steers through the dense stands of mesquite, whose taproots sink deep underground and will survive when everything else here is dead. Their limbs rake the side panels and roof of the pickup, and their thorns screech and etch faint new lines in the paint. Fifty yards out, an immaculate rib cage belonging to one of last winter's casualties bleaches. Ahead, a calf in the truck's path faces it down, then turns and lopes on. Cows filter out of the brush, complaining and converging on the truck. Loftin stops at a spot where the dun-colored grasses are ground into the dust, and where a handful of halved old tires are crusted with rock salt for the cows.
Loftin's blue eyes dance over the backs of a few dozen head and one bull. He doesn't see the white one that's a bit of a loner, but figures she'll show up next time. She has to. There isn't enough growing out there to sustain a full-grown cow. He counts them and appraises their conditions, and shakes his head.
"They're shrunk in the back, all right," he says, eyeing hides draped thinly over rib cages and sunken into the slopes of pelvic bones. "They'll get worse, I imagine."
Across his pastures, the buffalograss — a hardy native grass that's supposed to be drought-resistant — is moisture-starved after the driest year in Texas history and a summer of triple-digit temperatures. It's common to feed during lean winter months, but it's a sign that trouble has come to cattle country when ranchers feed through the spring and summer. As their demand for feed rises, prices keep climbing, up to nearly $20 per hundred pounds. It doesn't sound like much until you do the math: 70 cows, 1,500 pounds per week, week in and week out for a year straight. Like just about every other cattleman he knows, Loftin was forced to sell off half of his herd this summer just to stay afloat, and very well may have to sell these too.
Loftin clambers back into the truck's cab and activates the feeder. It spouts cubes as he drives in a long, slow arc. The cows jostle for position on the line, tossing off strands of saliva like spidersilk. The hollow noise of their large molars crushing cubes resounds.
Loftin parks and walks across the pasture, scuffing along in a pair of lace-up brogans with leather peeling back from the toes. He ducks between strands of barbed wire hung from mesquite fence posts and, before long, comes to the only thing standing between what remains of his herd and the sale barn: a stock pond rimmed with ragweed and milkweed. It's down to five feet but holding for now.
"If we could just get some rain," he says. "You'd be surprised how quick it could change."
Later, he pulls off Loftin Road and rattles over the iron cattle guard and across the washed-out dirt road, his house framed unsteadily in the windshield. It's an oil pumper's house he bought for $1,865 in 1953. He had it trucked out to a rise on this 450-acre spread in Archer County, which has been in his family since 1933 (and happens to be adjacent to the ranch Pulitzer-Prize winning author Larry McMurtry grew up on). It had a water well productive enough for household use. He rocked over the outside with sandstone slabs he found in the pastures, and eventually built an east wing when he and his wife, Marie, had children.
Mrs. Loftin is a sweet, attentive woman with a short head of wavy hair the pearly color of lamb's wool, who makes sure guests sitting in the tiny living room's cloth recliners are in the path of the house's only wall-mounted air conditioning unit. She never did love this life the way he did. She didn't love the way he brought his worry and frustration home like a stone on his back, rather than checking it at the door the way a salaried man might. "I doubt if the younger ones feel it the same as the older ones," she says. "They may have the financial commitments, but the older ones feel like it's a journey they've been on, and don't want to get off."
