north as long as the grass held out up there, and Roddy and I could take turn about, one camping near the cattle and one sleeping in a bed.
“There’s not pasture enough down here to take them through a long winter,” he said, “and it’s safest to keep them grazing up north while you can. Besides, if you bring them down here while the weather’s so warm, they get skittish, and that mesa over there makes trouble. They swim the river and bolt into the mesa, and that’s the last you ever see of them. We’ve lost a lot of critters that way. The mesa has been populated by runaways from our herd, till now there’s a fine bunch of wild cattle up there. When the wind’s right, our cows over here get the scent of them and make a break for the river. You’ll have to watch ’em close when you bring ’em down.”
I asked him whether nobody had ever gone over to get the lost cattle out.
Rapp glared at me.
“Out of that mesa? Nobody has ever got into it yet. The cliffs are like the base of a monument, all the way round. The only way into it is through that deep canyon that opens on the water level, just where the river makes the bend. You can’t get in by that, because the river’s too deep to ford and too swift to swim. Oh, I suppose a horse could swim it, if cattle can, but I don’t want to be the man to try.”
I remarked that I had had my eye on the mesa all summer and meant to climb it.
“Not while you’re working for the Sitwell Company, you don’t! If you boys try any nonsense of that sort, I’ll fire you quick. You’d break your bones and lose the herd for us. You have to watch them close to keep them from going over, I tell you. If it wasn’t for that mesa, this would be the best winter range in all New Mexico.”