The quarantine has brought a very good order to our work, all the while pushing us to parts of the ranch that are less familiar

There's nothing like a federal tick quarantine to make you take stock of every gate, fence, pasture, and water tank on the property. The 21 days the bawling, braying, lowing bovines spent in our front yard afforded ample opportunity to become acquainted and reacquainted with our cattle. They were the last thing I saw in the rearview mirror as I drove to Laredo to work and the first thing I saw in the headlight beams when I came home with a truckload of range cubes and calf feed.

The wet, soggy weather added yet another facet to the concentration of them in the corrals and the adjacent trap, and certainly it added to the fragrance of the evening air and the mud we tracked through the house.

Though it took us a morning to move the cattle to the southernmost pasture, their vacation of the nearby premises felt like a sudden change in the landscape, like the quick flip of a switch that terminated their highly palpable presence.

Nine of the ten gates to that southernmost pasture are padlocked to ensure that transients or drivers for utility or pipeline companies do not accidentally let the cattle out of the pasture to which they have been confined for the duration of the quarantine.

The cattle are quite content to graze on the low winter weeds on the pipeline easements and senderos as well as the newly emerging crowns of Buffel grass. We have been busy making repairs to water troughs or installing new ones, thankful, ever so thankful that the rains have made trench work a far easier proposition than in drought-hardened earth. We've also built, and in some cases re-built, a small enclosure with a gate around each tank so that when we round up we'll have a way to close off access to water and force the cattle up to the corrals. We're doing it right this time, using old utility poles cut to size rather than cedar posts for the enclosures -- overkill, no doubt, but those enclosures will be there long after I've checked out.

Though spring has yet to declare itself in other parts of the state, it has rioted across the monte in a cloud of damp earth, shades of green that are electrifying, and the intoxicating fragrance of different species of acacia in bloom -- huisache, black brush, guajillo, and catclaw. It's been lovely to be out on the ranch and to come across big patches of Indian blankets, huisache daisies, prickly poppy, and the occasional yucca bracing for its moment of perfumed glory.

In many aspects, the quarantine has brought a very good order to our work and our priorities, all the while pushing us to parts of the ranch that are less familiar than others.