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National Geographic : 1989 Jan
Contents
"Banditos, banditos!"At Magagna's even the dogs sent to round up a breakaway gang of lambs work in Spanish. Jim hires high school kids for seasonal help, but his regular crew is Mexican and, mainly, Basque. Many sheepmen now use Peruvian and Chilean herders, brought in under special contract through the Labor Department. (More males for the state with the most lopsided ratio of men to women in the lower 48, Nevada being a close second.) After a day of brand ing, notching ears, docking tails, and cas trating lambs by biting off their testicles simpler and less time-consuming than cutting with tools, they say-the men pass around a wineskin of blood red paisano. "I totted up my wine expenses one year, and they came to $4,000," Jim marvels. SPIN WASHINGTON, Willis Mercer arrived from Bone Gap, Illinois, in 1886 and got a sheep herd going in Horse Heaven Hills, near the Columbia River. These basalt scablands are lucky to get 7 to 11 inches of precipitation yearly. Once the John Day Dam made irrigation feasible in 1968, the Mercers could sprinkle on 15 more inch es. Up from the volcanic ashes came alfalfa, corn, wheat, mint, and sugar beets. Not many areas have the right blend of sunshine and soils to grow wine grapes as well. Washington's sagebrush country does. Combined with the massive Columbia Basin Project of dams and canals, it has made this state the major U. S. producer of premium wines, after California. "We call ours handcrafted wines. That means we don't have as much fancy equip ment as we should, and everything is pretty labor-intensive. Where this land supported maybe 15 people as a farm, we now employ up to a hundred as a farm and vineyard," third-generation Washingtonian Don Mercer explains as we stop to savor ripening Caber net grapes. He points to a spot where a coy ote stopped to savor some as well. "A coyote pelt brought four bucks 20 years RIDING THERMALS 2,000 feet above the ColoradoRiver, a hang gliderfloats above Utah's Dead Horse PointState Park.Like other sagebrushstates, Utah offers vast expanses for recreation,landscapesto lose -a nd find-oneself in. Sagebrush Country: America's Outback ago. Now you've got a fifty-dollar bill lopin' by out there," Bill Austin tells me in Rawlins, Wyoming. He ought to know. He's probably killed 5,000 as a federal predator control agent, using rifles, traps, poison baits, and smoke bombs that suffocate pups in dens. At the current price everyone from weekend recreationists to laid-off laborers is after their hide as well. Bill recently went into business for himself selling coyote calls, along with cassette and videotape instruc tions on how to hunt the varmints. Where traditional calls mimic a rabbit in distress, Bill's are for carrying on conversa tions in coyote, a language he has spent 20 years studying. He pauses for a chew of to bacco, then says, "That's a Western frontier right there -communicating with these animals; trying to see into their minds." Funny, but he's come to respect the crea ture's intelligence above all others, much as sagebrush country Indians did. "Tell you the truth, coyotes don't do anywhere near the damage a lot of ranchers and hunters claim they do. A sheep can die from disease, being lost, dogs-anything. God knows it's suicidally dumb. And if a coyote walks by the carcass, it gets the blame." Aury Smith is one rancher who wouldn't mind seeing more coyotes around. In 1928 he came through the shrub steppe on a horse drawn wagon to Cedarville, California. He took to raising cows across the line in Neva da. When times kept getting tougher, Aury sold most of his cows, taught his grandsons to drive tractors, and concentrated on raising alfalfa hay. Dairy farmers on the coast pay a premium price for sagebrush country alfalfa, which grows slow and leafy (and thus higher in protein) because of the cold nights. But night was when the jackrabbits showed up for their share. "One year they came so thick, I'd try to line 'em up to nail three or four with one shot and save on ammo," Aury remembers. "They just kept coming. The bodies got to stinking, so I'd fill the pickup and haul them out. And they still kept coming. You could see them wearing trails down the mountain." At last the popu lation crashed. Aury could not find one live jack. Nope. He noticed mounds spreading across his alfalfa fields instead: the beginning of an upsurge in ground squirrels. Boom and bust. Oregon's Harney County used to put out (Continued on page 76)
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