Where I Live Now by Sharon Butala

Author:Sharon Butala
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Simon & Schuster

Peter, being human (and judged by me), had his shortcomings, but he knew one thing with every fibre of his being: how precious his land was. He knew too, though, that he was very fortunate in that he could afford to keep his grass in excellent condition because he hadn’t married — deliberately, he claimed — until he was forty-one and established financially. He told me many times that by marrying young, men guaranteed that the financial pressure involved in raising a family meant that they would not be able to take any of their land out of production in order to rest it for a year or several years as he sometimes did; that they would have to put too many head of cattle on their grass, which would result in damage to the grass, and as the roots weakened, invader plants such as crested wheatgrass, or forbs such as sage, would crowd out the nutritious and cattle-friendly native plants. As our years together passed, he cut back his herd more and more in order to preserve the quality of the prairie under his control.

I admired a good deal more about him than only his love and care of his land. He minded his own business, kept silent when others might have gossiped or spread cruel stories. He placed a high value on his father’s dictum that he should care for his mother and his sisters and tried his best to look out for them, and did his — admittedly, distant — best where Sean was concerned, wanting to take responsibility, yet careful not to overstep boundaries for a boy who was close to his father. He loved his old friends and was loyal to them too, the men he had cowboyed with when he was young, and whose rodeo adventures he followed and admired. He had struggled too hard to maintain what he had acquired to be wildly generous (despite what some of the neighbours apparently thought, he was never a rich man), but he helped a number of people, quietly, behind the scenes. He didn’t seem to have any ambition to become a prominent community member other than by being a successful, knowledgeable rancher, one who could be turned to for advice about cattle or horses; if asked, he willingly gave it.

The older he got, the more he cared for his animals and the harder it became for him to do some of the things that the ranching enterprise required. Castrating young bulls or horses was something he would have preferred never to do again, and he particularly loathed de-horning as very painful to the animal and needlessly cruel; he even commented with disgust on the large size of some brands on animals we saw in the sale ring or elsewhere as causing them unnecessary pain. He refused to try to produce bigger and bigger calves at birth because of the danger and suffering this caused his cows. For most of the years we were married and

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