The building stands alone now, surrounded by a barbed wire fence from which even the laziest of sheep could escape. Beyond it the pasture is littered with the remnants of a community; behind it the mesa looms with its sheer white cliff, where once were forests of piñon and cedar now the windmills loom above and reach toward the powdered blue skies. To the south, the almost nearly abandoned railroad tracks hint at the town called Pastura that struggles to carry on. The building may now be a storage shed for antiquated farm implements, but it once was perhaps a warehouse for the merchant rico to store the wool produced by his partidoes, or it may have been a shearing shed for the small independent ranchero who took advantage of the open range policy, though it is smaller than the typical size would have been. The adobe bricks show through the decaying plaster and the wooden door and frame rot in pieces. The windows now have glass where once there was only an oiled skin covering. The sloped corrugated tin roof is a patchwork of new sky-blue and rusted sheets used and reused as the need arises. Older buildings had a flat roof, but even this one may have been constructed of poles and mud and branches. The place wallows in a forgotten time, yielding itself back to an uninterested mother nature.
In 1911, the place had reached its zenith with only the pipeline from the Sierra Blanca mountains and a post office to distinguish it from the steam engine watering hole created by the Southern Pacific Railroad ten years earlier. The government wouldn’t even bother to count the number of people living in Pastura until 1930.
In February of that year, the sheep were still in the winter camp, the open rangeland stretching all the way around the foot of the mesa until it connected to the Pintada Ranch. Around the ranch grew the town, and it thrived for twenty more years. Now it is only a few scattered houses at the end of a dusty track. The rancheros enjoyed the benefits of living in town while the pastores remained in the winter camp, passing each day sitting and watching the sheep who did nothing but graze or lay down to rest. For the pastore, this was a lazy and shiftless life that encouraged antipathy and trouble. They dreamt of the days in the summer camp where, at least, they could bake in the sun during the day and wish on the stars above at night, where they were away from the anxious eyes of the jefe and the constant harangue of their wives and children; where they were the majordomos of their days and the jesters of their nights. In the winter camp they would eat better, they would have their liquor and their women at close hand, and they would stay warm in their adobe houses with two inch thick brick walls. But, the boredom was palpable, and the tongues wagged faster and more harshly than the cold winds crashing off the mesa.
This time of year, day after day, they watched and waited as the ewes stopped grazing, as their udders and teets began to distend; their sides began to bulge wide beyond their hips, giving them a hollow appearance. They were, perhaps, anxious for these signs that lambing season was upon them. The pastores would gather about the corral, but only the ewe would decide when and where she would give birth, and if she would need their help. Imagine the children gathered around the fence to watch as the ewes lay down on their sides, turn their noses to the sky. The appearance of the large bubble of a water bag, its breaking and the rush of water could surely be counted on to elicit a few sighs or even giggles from the younger ones. There, there, can you see the tip of the nose, the front feet pushing and kicking. Just as soon as the pastores pulled the new lamb away, another bubble would appear and the process would repeat itself.
The pastores didn’t have to wait long before the exhausting push in June to shear the herd and get the wool bundled and loaded onto the awaiting railroad cars. Shearing was a skill that not all the pastores possessed, but one for which the small ranchero would pay handsomely. A skilled sheep shearer could handle eighty to one hundred sheep a day, and would not unduly stress either the ewe or the ranchero in the process. For a small ranchero, with a few thousand head and only a few pastores—at least two were needed for every two thousand sheep—employed from season to season, these days were long and hard. If you listen through the silence, you might hear the line-up, each performing his required task—the clipping sound of the hand shears, snipping away at the layers of wool, the huffing of the pastores as they passed the ewes down the line; perhaps the chanting of the women in the background, cooking and feeding in shifts in order to keep the work going, keeping time with the rhythm of the process. It was a kind of music that filled the air.
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