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Show /£ his knife and cut a notch in the top of the left ear and cut tlie lower quarter of die right ear away for our ear-mark. He always kept the big blade whet like a razor and, finished with the ears, he held the litde bull's scrotum and cut off the end of it, slid out one testicle and held it firmly and carefully while he cut the cords. Then the odier one, and then I brought him the first iron. The old brand in die family was open A X O and, though we had A and O irons, die X had been lost and we used straight irons widi tips like thick blunt spearheads. Dad brushed off the dirt from the hide first, lined up die three letters in his mind and then pressed down that A, moving it a little to leave a good scar. The calf lurched and bawled, and I could smell burnt hair and hide, not a bad smell out in me open like that, and outside the corral the dam was looking nervous. When we let the little steer up, he walked with stiff hind legs and stood in a corner and wouldn't run, as if he figured nothing more could happen to him, nothing that bad anyhow. As Dad told me to, I carried die testicles down to the creek and washed the dirt off them, each about the size of a fist, and then placed them in the coals of the fire. Dad roped the next calf, catching her with a pretty good toss the first time; and Henry took the one after that, not roping too well and not having much luck either, so slow at it mat afterwards we took a break. We squatted on our heels upwind from the fire and not close enough to get the heat, and Dad tilted back his hat to wipe the sweat from his forehead, telling us how in the old days out on the open range when they rounded up the cattle for branding, they never stopped mid-day to eat, just when they got hungry they rolled a testicle out of the branding fire, ate it and drank water and got back in the saddle. They'd go twelve, thirteen hours a day, and in the evening eat from a chuck wagon, sitting around the fire and joshing, and then sleep on the ground in a bed roll. I too tilted my hat back to wipe the sweat and asked if he'd used his saddle for a pillow. "No," he said, scoffing at the idea. "A saddle's too damn hard. I'd just roll up my slicker around my jumper and use that. I remember John Mathews used to sleep on his though," he said grinning, shifting his weight from one heel to the other. With his hat pushed back and his cigarette dangling from one corner of his mouth, I thought my father about the handsomest man I'd ever 232 |