Free Perfection of the Morning by Sharon Butala Page A

miles of the fieldwhere we wanted them, at which point all our help went back home to their own chores. Peter and I were left to bring the herd the rest of the way. We also had to go back several miles to pick up several cows which had calved on the way and been left behind because their newborns couldn’t yet travel.
    We set out from the ranch at daybreak in zero degree Celsius temperature, with a strong wind blowing and the occasional patter of rain mixed with snow. We rode all day, with only a chunk of cheese to eat and a couple of apples I’d stuffed in my pockets. Together we rounded up most of the cattle in fields as big as six or seven sections, six and more square miles, the size of which exhausted me, especially since the terrain was hill after hill, many a good hundred feet high, but which Peter was rather disdainful about. He’d been raised in time when from late fall to about the first of May there were open herd laws. This meant he and his father and their hired men rode out each day to herd cattle which were often twenty or more miles away from the barn where they’d saddled their horses.
    We brought the cattle down the fireguards plowed in the grass—these are the only roads in such big fields—which curved around the bases of the hills. When we reached a fence corner where there was a gate into the next field, Peter left me to hold the herd while he rode back to the far corners of the field to pick up strays. In each field he was gone a couple of hours, and since there was nobody around but me to make the cattle nervous, and since we’d moved them slowly and quietly, as real cowboys do, without shouting or needlessly running them, and they knew they were going home, they stood patiently enough, or moved out short distances to graze. I was free then to sit on a grassy hilltop from which I could see them all, hold my horse’s reins, and wait for his return.
    We were, in various directions, from five to ten miles from the nearest inhabited building. There was nobody else in the field; all the days we rode out there we didn’t see another person, nor any motorized vehicle. It was cold, nasty weather, but I was warmly dressed and I was learning the art of keeping warm: simple things, like staying in the lee of a hill out of the wind and, where there was no hill, like deer and antelope, lying on the ground in tall grass where it was warm and still, or getting off my horse, positioning him between me and the wind, and walking till my feet were warm. Alone, I’d lie on my back in the grass and watch the clouds, or pluck a handful of grass and let the wind carry it away. I remember, when I was supposed to be herding, lying with my hands under me to keep them warm, my face to the sky, while small, dry snowflakes drifted down on me, and falling asleep on a lonely hill lost in a vast sea of grassy yellow, snow-mottled hills.
    I was never bored; the time passed unnoticed. I think I must have been absorbing the atmosphere and the feel of Nature because I wasn’t studying anything in particular, not the grasses, not the few birds’ nests we found, not the horned larks or the hawks or the eagles or the antelope we saw. I was just being there at a time in my life when I could be still and in the present, because my new life was so full of strange and compelling experiences in need of being assimilated that I had little thought of the future.
    I rode with Peter that spring bringing the cattle home for, my journal says, one six-hour and three nine-hour days. On the morning of the fifth day, after we’d breakfasted and the horses were saddled and waiting in the barn, I had on my outdoor clothes and was about to pull on my second boot, I said to Peter, “I can’t go.” I was exhausted, too tired even to find the strength to pull on that second boot. Peter rode that day, the last before the cattle reached home, without me.The entry in my new journal—one of the first I made—ends: It’s five o’clock, Peter’s