Hidden America by Jeanne Marie Laskas

Author:Jeanne Marie Laskas
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
Publisher: Penguin Group, USA
Published: 2012-08-14T16:00:00+00:00

BEEF

R.A. Brown Ranch

Throckmorton, Texas

There once was a bull, an astonishing bull with a handsome wide muzzle, stunning scrotal circumference, and a square frame solid as a sycamore. He was the son of Cherokee Canyon, the grandson of Make My Day—a noble pedigree. The cowboy who designed him—who chose the semen, selected the dam, prepared and inseminated the uterus—named him Revelation. “We don’t intend to present this bull as divine,” the cowboy would write in his 2005 sale catalog, “but we do count it as a blessing to have raised him.” The cowboy, although a salesman by nature, was nevertheless not one to speak in hyperbole. He believed in his heart that Revelation, just a year and a half old, could become the most storied bull in the history of the Red Angus breed. Finally, after decades of tinkering, might this be the masterpiece?

Once a year, in October, the ranch welcomes buyers. People come from all over the U.S. to Throckmorton, Texas, in the north-central part of the state, where the R.A. Brown Ranch has been selling breeding cattle for more than a century, and where as many as eight hundred head will go at auction in a single day. Fathers, sons, grandsons—the ranch has passed through five generations, cowboy to cowboy. Donnell Brown, forty-one, is the current cowboy in charge, and at the 2005 R.A. Brown Ranch Bull, Female & Quarter Horse Sale, he sold Revelation to a Houston businessman with a weekend ranch for $12,000.

In time, the bull could turn out to be worth more, much more. Top breeding bulls—once their semen is proven to produce prime calves—can go for well over $100,000. Donnell retained the rights to half of Revelation’s semen. In the breeding business, the buyer gets the animal, but the seller typically retains an interest in the genetics—the true treasure. It would be two years before anyone would know the quality of Revelation’s progeny, still just embryos in the bodies of select cows.

Donnell Brown wears ironed creases on his Wranglers, a starched plaid shirt with long sleeves, and a white hat with the brim cupped obediently up—not some floppy, haphazard shape like East Texas cowboys wear (cowboys who, sadly, don’t seem to know any better). The spurs on his boots bear his initials, but he does not wear jingle bobs—those dangling silver beads Arizona cowboys wear (cowboys who are embarrassingly all flash and pizzazz). No, cowboys in Throckmorton consider themselves West Texas cowboys: starched and ironed just like cowboys are supposed to be. Donnell is tall, slim, with a quarterback’s build and the deep-blue determined eyes of a man who is hanging on with all his might for the ride. No sin. No pride. No giving up on the four life goals he set for himself at age twenty-three: Get to heaven; be the best possible husband and father; be healthy and happy; produce the most efficient beef cattle in the entire world by converting God’s forage into safe, nutritious, delicious food for His people. He wears a clean, straight mustache above a constant intelligent smile.

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