The Guadalajara Reporter

A week of cold and rain: Recovering stolen cattle the easy way – following the muddy trail to find some amateur livestock thieves

Winter weather in the Jalisco highlands traditionally arrives after harvesting is finished in mid-October, a bit later if the rainy season is bountiful.  And frequently there are some cabañuelas in January – brief soakings that are popularly believed to forecast the next temporada de las aguas.

But this dry season turned cold and rainy when Christmas hangovers were still brand new, surprising a lot of people.  At the campesino ranch where I frequently work in the early morning, corn and cornstalks were still spread out on roofs to dry. That, and the cold – making old sprains, fractures and other forgotten injuries, ache – sent up a clutter of inventive swearing to meet the clouds over Rancho Santa Cruz.

I had just returned from entertaining a clutch of medical folk at Houston’s Texas Medical Center – and the constant banal babble of one half of thousands of grotesque electronic conversations. Like many people of a certain age, my exultant days of recklessness – abides, of rodeoing, motorcycles, riding the rails, bar-crawling, car wrecks and decades of surfing – were catching up.  Life’s iron truism, “There is no free lunch,” never lets loose.

The Houston docs put me on a short leash.  So about the third thing I did when I got back was to ignore that advice and went to the campesino ranch where I frequently work in the mornings.  Animals react emphatically to climatic change.  It was still dark, and Angel Diaz, a young wrangler, helped me catch and saddle the hammer-headed bay gelding that I ride.  I’d gone gimpy from the cold and too many weird and pricey pills.  But that spooky bay didn’t even get a chance to bite agile Angel.  After a jolting, cow-hopping start, I set out to ride fence, checking for downed barbed wire and knocked over posts where cattle had broken out.   To loosen up my cold arms and hands, I threw a couple of loops at some still green hoja ancha weeds.  Missed every one.  Too many hours sitting around with physicians and trying to ignore television in waiting rooms.

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