Ride Easy Pard Victor T. Anderson

My dad had a band of sheep, about twelve hundred ewes. We trailed them to the summer grazing 20 or more miles from where we lambed them and fed in the winter. There was a shearing shed nearby, where I learned to tie wool, which isn’t done anymore, when I was about twelve.

I used a piece of twisted paper twine to tie the fleece as each sheep was sheared. With ten shearers, I was pretty busy. Each fleece, which weighed about ten pounds or so, was tossed near a hanging jute bag that was ten feet long and about three feet across. I and others threw the fleeces up to the wool tromper. He placed three at a time in the bag and walked on them to press them tightly. He’d then place and tromp three more, so they would fit between the three already there. When he had the bag full, we’d lift it, sew it closed, let it down and roll it to the area where they were stored.

Since I worked sheep when younger, when we sheared at the Dogie ranch, I was assigned to help with the shearing. With eight to ten thousand sheep, I had a couple of weeks working sheep.

Tom and I were trailing the bucks to the shearing shed on the Dogie ranch. We had somewhere around three hundred Ramboulet bucks. Ramboulet sheep are known for growing a lot of very fine wool. So much that often the wool would cover their eyes, rendering them blind. Some the the bucks in the bunch were completely wool blind,

Wool blind sheep stay with their band of sheep by listening to the hoofbeats of the others in the band. When they are moved on a highway, as we were doing, a car driving nearby will often confuse them and they follow the car instead of the herd.

Tom and I were trailing our three hundred or so bucks on a paved highway. There were cars making their way, slowly, through the bucks. Some of the bucks followed the cars, by sound, in whichever direction the car was going. I would catch them, tie them down and when Tom got the pickup close enough, I’d lift the buck into the pickup bed.

A family, all of them enjoying something they’d never seen before, were taking pictures, leaning out the car windows, walking and talking with me and having fun.

One of the wool blind bucks became discombobbled, turned, walked into one of their cars headlights and broke it. The family was instantly scared. I walked to the buck, who hearing me, jumped to get away. I happened to grab the far front leg, pulled and down he went, wind knocked out of him. I tied and loaded him into the pickup.

You’d have thought I saved these people from a wild animal. After pictures with me and Tom, they gave me a big tip, which I split with Tom.

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