Beef: It's What's for Dinner
As the rattling of a Chevy pickup disrupts the early morning silence, they stop in their tracks, turn their heads, and stare. Gazing absentmindedly toward us, they wait expectantly, tails swishing through the fog. Patches of black, white, and brown dot the landscape, emerging from behind the green foliage and mesquite trees.

Jim honks the horn, and their trance is broken. Realizing that he has brought them breakfast, they begin a slow, lumbering trot towards the pickup, surrounding it with their half-ton bodies. As Jim puts the truck in gear, he parts the herd and honks again for good measure. They fall in line behind us, keeping pace over the rocks and fields.
After a few hundred yards, the caravan stops. Jim throws a lever on the trailer behind his truck to engage the gear, and starts ambling along again. Every fifty feet or so, the sputtering of the engine is punctuated by the ka-chunk of the gate on the trailer as it drops a pile of alfalfa pellets. Each pellet is about the size of a roll of quarters, and they are devoured by the herd immediately. A black and white calf, no more than three weeks old, notices that the green and yellow wires of the trailer lights look like grass and gnaws them tenderly.
In the distance, the faint sound of hooves stomping and cattle lowing in annoyance grows stronger with each passing minute. Finally, through the trees on the other side of the field marches a herd roughly equal in size to the one gathered around Jim’s pickup, with a group of six mounted cowboys driving them forward. Brandishing lassoes and a pair of well-trained dogs, they control the herd from the rear, yelling both at the cows stumbling ahead and their mounts, who seem intent on running them through mesquite branches. Jim drops the truck back in gear, and the newly assembled herd marches submissively across the rocky ranch to a holding pen on the other side, where the shouts of a half-dozen cowboys and barks from the dogs drive them into the pipe-fenced corral. If the cattle are a group that just lost their collective freedom, they seem unaware.
Not missing a step, the cowboys follow the cattle in. Working on horseback with an effortless unity, they quickly separate the season’s new calves from the rest of the herd. Gates are closed, horses are dismounted, and breakfast is served as the group takes a break.

“All I wanted to do was get a damn steak,” recalls Lance, to his peers. “But I seen this buddy of mine, and, well… we kinda got carried away.” The other cowboys, whose leathery skin betrays their age and experience, chuckle knowingly. By the time Lance made it back to his house, his older brother Clay was already up and drinking coffee in preparation for the day’s roundup. Lance is looking queasy and worn out after getting only a half-hour of sleep in his brother’s pickup on the way to the ranch. His eyes are bloodshot.
To be quite honest, I know how he feels. To be a cowboy is to wake up at an oppressively early hour of the morning, work hard all day, go to bed exhausted, and then get up the next day and do it all over again. After driving most of the night through a thick fog, I arrived in Llano sometime around 1:00, just in time to get up at 5:00 and head out to the ranch before daybreak. Like Lance, I could use some coffee.

After breakfast, there is a flurry of activity as chutes are set up, mysterious devices are assembled, and fires stoked. Finally, there is another lull as the group gathers around the propane fire waiting for what looks like a trio of branding irons, only circular on the end, to heat up. It is a chance to trade stories, sharpen knives, and talk about days gone by. As the implements keep a silent watch from the flames, they become flecked in red, yellow, and orange from the heat.
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