“
The road clung to the spine of the ridge, sidewinding in sinuous loops toward the blue smokes of Smoky Mountain where deposits of coal, ignited by lightning some long-gone summer afternoon a thousand—ten thousand?—years before, smoldered beneath the surface of the mountain’s shoulders. There seemed to be no pursuit. But why should there be? They hadn’t done anything wrong. So far they had done everything right. Down on the alkali flats where only saltbush, cholla and snakeweed grew, they met a small herd of baldface cows ambling up to the higher country. Beef on the hoof, looking for trouble. What Smith liked to call “slow elk,” regarding them with satisfaction as a reliable outdoor meat supply in hard times. How did they survive, these wasteland cattle? It was these cattle which had created the wasteland. Hayduke and Smith dallied several times to get out the old pliers and cut fence. “You can’t never go wrong cuttin’ fence,” Smith would say. “Especially sheep fence.” (Clunk!) “But cow fence too. Any fence.” “Who invented barbed wire anyhow?” Hayduke asked. (Plunk!) “It was a man named J. F. Glidden done it; took out his patent back in 1874.” An immediate success, that barbwire. Now the antelope die by the thousands, the bighorn sheep perish by the hundreds every winter from Alberta down to Arizona, because fencing cuts off their escape from blizzard and drought. And coyotes too, and golden eagles, and peasant soldiers on the coils of concertina wire, victims of the same fat evil the wide world over, hang dead on the barbed and tetanous steel. “You can’t never go wrong cuttin’ fence,” repeated Smith, warming to his task. (Pling!) “Always cut fence. That’s the law west of the hundredth meridian. East of that don’t matter none. Back there it’s all lost anyhow. But west, cut fence.” (Plang!)
”
”