By Ma. Eugenia Guerra

Cattle are coming to my new music to which I'm only partially listening because what I am really doing is pitching hay from the truck into a stout wind that once more promises rainfall through a sky dark and layered with moist clouds.

I've done it before just like this and the rains have been false promises, but this afternoon the temperature has dropped a bit and it seems more possible as bits of hay fly back into my face and arms like needles. My pockets fill quickly with Coastal Bermuda, but not as quickly as the cattle act like this is their last repast.

I chuckle over what my mother would call this severe windblown look -- la madre del aire -- and I keep on with the chore at hand and move the truck up the road just a bit to feed at another spot. Ducklings tack against the wind and across the surface of the lake that is chopped up with sharp little ripples. Inca dove swoop in the sky above and find shelter in the tobacco weed at the water's edge. Yellow blossoms pop off the palo verde and huisache and become airborne.

Somewhere nearby it is raining. I can smell it. I think of tempting fate by leaving today's feed load in the bed of the truck. Even in the buffeting wind, I hear a refrain, "Oh how can you blame me Life is a game and true love is a trophy and You said watch my head about it, baby, you said watch my head about it."

Excellent advice about any matter, and I'm watching my head about it, baby, on the ground now filling a feeder with jumbo cubes of mascarrote. Now and then I pick up a musical phrase that speaks of "classical virtue" and "a snake in the orchard." Clouds begin to rumble in earnest and the first low crack of lightning discharges someplace rather close to me. Back in the cab now, I hear, "As great as you are, you'll never be greater than yourself." Amen, I think, as the first hard pops of rain kiss the windshield.

Back at the barnyard, I work quickly to unload hen scratch, laying pellets, and horse feed. As I finish, I can hear the roll of a hard rain coming in from the pastures to the south. I'm happy to hear the din on the barn's metal roof which tells me that a rainfall of this magnitude is quickly replenishing my rainwater collection system.

Wet hens make mad dashes for cover in the pelting rain and I'm thinking this high-roofed metal building is not the best place to watch the storm, so I head for the chicken houses and watch a steady rainfall change the color of the sandy ground from tan to brown. In time, rivulets of run-off make their way across the packed earth of the barnyard. Unable to tear myself away from an atmosphere that is cool and delightful, I find busy work in the tack room and watch from its doors and windows the luxuriant fall of moisture to earth. Until I wonder if it is raining on the rest of the ranch. Prompted by the novelty of the cool and thick atmosphere, I head south, elated to understand that the rain is widespread. Oh, the look of wet foliage and wet roads! I stay on the caliche so as not to rut wet sand and at the intersection of Calitre and Chaparro Prieto, I kill the engine to listen in earnest to the roar of a half-inch trying mightily to make a difference in how the ranchland looks.

* * *

Two days after the rain, my friend Adrienne drove from Laredo to help me cut calves from mother cows. Adrienne is a caterer, not a cowgirl; but that didn't stop her from being adept at helping me work through the herd I'd penned up overnight. She was fearless and organized, quick with gates, and fast on her feet.

Except for a brief chase in a small pasture to get a few errant bovines into the pens, all our work centered about the corrals and all our walking was from the maze of the pens and their ten gates through thick sand. It was those last few head of cattle late in the afternoon, cows that had lived apart from the big herd for a good part of a year, that brought us the only grief we'd encountered in our cutting exercise that day.

There's always a wild girl in the bunch, some snorting, eye-rolling, tail-twitching, foot-stamping, dust-throwing, fire-breathing mama cow that gives plenty of indicators that she's hell on the hoof and that she would put to use the menacing rack on her head for whatever problem crossed her path. She had two calves with her -- the one she'd had recently and the heifer we hadn't been able to take from her last year because they broke from the herd and couldn't be penned or found. She looked none the worse for the wear.

Adrienne and I had somehow cajoled her and all her children into the pens, and they weren't real happy about confinement since they'd enjoyed the run of big open pastures for so long. Often it is the case with wild animals that you have but one opportunity, perhaps two if you are lucky, to move them as you need. I made a terrible split-second miscalculation as Adrienne pushed the wild ones through a pen at which I held the gate. I was to let either the mother cow pass back out, or the calves, but not all three. I looked away for a second at something that was happening at the other end of the corrals and then heard Adrienne's warning. My response was to move forward to close the gate. Wrong response. Mama and family were barreling through in a roar that made it clear that a steel gate was a trifle. The mama cow made some split-second decision to change her trajectory just a hair away from the gate and me. I felt her horns move perilously close to my face and my neck. I felt the air displaced by her horns and heard the sound of them sweeping past me like harm itself.

"Close call," we agreed calmly and then reconnoitered to finish the job, which we completed without raised voices or the use of tools of torture like whips, quirts, or cattle prods that shock animals already at a high pitch of anxiety.