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     “The burrow is usually fifteen meters long and five meters deep and has many entrances, tunnels, and chambers. Black-tail colonies have ten to a hundred burrow entrances per acre.  Each coterie occupies about half an acre. Here there are four to ten dogs per hectare (2.8 acres), but in the U.S.dog towns there are fifteen; the American ones  are denser because they are smaller [are the dogs adapting to the shrinking amount of land that is available for them ?]  Members of the same coterie open their mouths and ‘kiss’ when they meet each other.   The males are aggressive, fighting with males from neighboring coteries and raiding each other’s harems . But they cooperate in sounding the alarm if a predator is spotted. A town is a continuum of burrows within 150 meters from each other. All of eastern Wyoming, from Fort Laramie to the Power River Basin, was one big black-tail colony. Fort Laramie was where the first black-tail was found. The perritos are  diurnal, with two peaks of activity—8 to 10 a.m. and 5-7 p.m.,  while the jurón,  the ferret,  is nocturnal.

       We saw some painted lady butterflies which at this time of year emerge by the hundreds of thousands in the desert Southwest. Little is known about their migratory patterns. I remember going for a drive in the desert around Albuquerque in the spring of  l992, and smushing hundreds of them on my windshield and grill.

         Jesus didn’t know about the Edith’s checkerspot butterfly, Euphydryas edithi,  which  a study by Dr. Camille Parmesan of the University of Texas finds has been pushed north out of Mexico, probably by global warming. There must have been some of these small, intricately mottled butterflies in Janos; if so, they disappeared before they could even be studied, or their existence verified—the fate of all too many local populations of species. We looked at a  banner-tailed kangaroo rat burrow, a soft dome of  unearthed soil  on the desert floor punctuated with holes. They are the largest species of kangaroo rat, and their mounds were as ubiquitous as the prairie-dog burrows, which had a single entrance hole in the center, like the crater of a volcano. Most of the burrows were raised mounds, five to fifty per acre, but some were recessed in the desert floor.   It was still too cold for the snakes to come out, the boys were dismayed to learn,  but in the summer Jesus usually sees eight or so rattlers a day. The most common ones are western rattlesnake, black-tailed, Mojave, and western diamondback.    No dogs were in evidence. They were all underground, avoiding the heat of the day. Chollo cactuses were in yellow flower. The earth around the burrows was bare, denuded of grass, except for a few clumps here and there that had been clipped to stubble. Overgrazing, Jesus said. 

          Jesus  is doing his Ph.D. on the territory of the introduced ferrets and their impact on the town. The ferret will  live in a burrow for three or four days and will eat all the dogs it can, then go on  to the next. It spends its entire life in a fifteen-square-kilometer territory.     Almost all the 161 captive-bred ferrets were released not on ejido land, but  on the adjacent  Cuervo Ranch, which belongs to some Americans named Jeffers who came down from Cloudcroft, New Mexico,  in the twenties. We drove up to the ranch, which was not overgrazed like the ejido. The shortgrass was lush and golden, like wheat.  Billo Jeffers (his name is William Claxton, but everybody calls him Billo), a lean, laconic cowboy in his thirties,  with a range-weathered face and thick, callused hands-- the real deal-- was just pulling out in his pickup. The boys got out and chased a pet roadrunner around the house. Billo told them to lay off the bird. He was a little wary so to break the ice I asked he why he didn’t raise bison and he said, “Cuz they don’t respect fences. Paw don’t want publicity that we’re cooperating with the effort to reintroduce wildlife. He don’t want people to start coming to see the animals.” We found his father, Jayme Jeffers,  in the garage behind the house, working on a tractor. “We let the ferrets be released to keep down the prairie dogs,” he told us, “but they don’t seem to be doing much good. I don’t like prairie dogs on account of they eat more grass than cattle do and don’t produce.” The Jeffers run 1200 head  on what’s left of the 40,000 hectares that Jayme’s father and uncle leased in the twenties, bought  in the forties, and later sold off more than two thirds of. “We ship steers to the states, that’s what keeps us rolling,” explained Jayme.  “But we don’t have the rains we used to have.”  The perennial complaint of farmers and ranchers in the arid midcontinent. “We used to get a foot of snow, but this winter there was none in the flats. Last week clouds that had a lot of moisture went by, but we didn’t get a drop. It’s been much drier the last 15 years and it’s getting worse and worse. Prairie dogs have always been here, but before, when we used to get rain, there was more grass, it used to be lusher and the carrying capacity for cattle was greater,  so the cattle and the prairie dogs got along. We used  to raise 200 calves, now only we only raise 100. My dad wanted to kill the prairie dogs all out. He got rid of most of ‘em, but that was a long time ago, and now they’re back. It’s too expensive and too much work to get rid of ‘em, so we just live with ‘em.  We’re 200 years behind the States in our way of life here. If the cattlemen get along with the ferrets and the ferrets with the prairie dogs and everything stays in balance, I guess it’d work out allright.” I asked Jayme what he thought about the plan for a biosphere reserve. It was the first he heard of it.

     We left the Jeffers and went to take a look at the prairie dogs on their ranch. I asked Jesus if the ranch would be appropriated for the reserve, and he said, “We could appropriate private ranches, but not the ejido land. But we are searching less aggressive ways.” It was getting late in the day, and the prairie dogs were out, on their second shift of diurnal, above-ground activity. Like all members of the squirrel family, they had hyperactive metabolisms.  They were nervous and vigilant and acted as if they could use a course of Ridalin, but they had to be because if they let down their guard for a second, they could be divebombed by a bird of prey. They were lighter, bleached khaki—the color of  American  desert uniform--  and stood out against the redder, darker, recently excavated earth around their burrows. An accipiter with a white tail and wingbards was hanging in the air overhead, waiting for an opportunity to dive. Several of the dogs gave the quiet alarm, flattening themselves prone and flicking their tails. Then a gravid female sounded the red alert, standing erect and throwing back her head and barking with such vehemence that her feet actually left the ground, then she assumed a defensive crouch. Every dog in sight stood galvanized to the aerial threat.  We looked out over the grassland, where dozens of frenzied prairie dogs were pirouetting around their holes paranoically in the last hour of daylight. Some were vocalizing. Twelve distinct calls have been identified. 

          That evening we went to see Aide Acosta, the commisario ejidal,  the commissioner of the ejido of Casa de Janos, where most of the complex is. Acosta looks out for the interests of  196 ejiditarios.  “Almost all of them know of the plan to compensate them and  are in agreement  because they don’t have to work and will have a guaranteed income,” he told us. What will they do if they stop being cowboys ? I asked.  “They will go back to agriculture and cultivate their campos.  Most of the young adults have left for the States and the cowboy way of life is already dying here,  as it is in your country. The attitude toward  dogs in the ejido is not positive. They are still being gased. If it was a different animal like maranos (peccaries or javelinas), that could be eaten, although perritos are not bad. [Navajos eat them and several have died of plague.]   It is hard for some to understand why  this good pasture should be saved for perritos.  But it has been much drier the last fifteen years and this is making cattle-raising an increasingly marginal proposition, so it will not be a problem giving it up. Plus there are  other pastures in the ejido, sitios where there are  no perritos that the cows  can be put on. If I stop raising cattle I personally will not feel bad at all. I won’t feel the loss if I never ride horse again. I won’t miss it.  Cattle is still  more important for us than farming. We could move the cows up into the sierra but then we would have puma problems, also trouble with the narcotrafficantes, who grow mota and amapola (marijuana and opium poppy) up in the back canyons.” Acosta had a completely different mentality, a completely different way of looking at the situation,  from the Mexico City biologos and the gringo scientists. I was reminded of B.Traven’s story about the American tourist  who meets a campesino  weaving a beautiful little straw basket and asks how much do you want ? 5 pesos, the campesino tells him. The American has chocolate factory back home, and he starts thinking, if I put the chocolate in these nice little baskets, I could get a lot more for it. How much do you want for 25,000 baskets ? he asks the campesino, who tells him I need to think about that, come back tomorrow. The next day he tells the gringo, each basket will cost five hundred pesos. The gringo is flabbergasted. He thought he could get the campesino down to two pesos a basket because it was such a big order, but the campesino explains that it is going to take a lot of time and effort to find the straw for all those baskets, and even more to make them. 

     I’m still writing the book on my wife’s family  and have been reading up on cattlekeeping cultures; her people  kept cows for generations. In a chapter of his book,  Coming of Age in the Pleistocene, called “The Cowboy Alternative,” the late Paul Shepard writes : “The long shadow thrown over the earth’s ecology is that of a man on a horse, the domestic animal which, more than any other consolidated centralized power, energized the worldwide debacle of the skinning of the earth, the  creation of modern warfare, and the ideological disassociation from the earthbound realm.” The horse evolved in North America, but became extinct there during the Pleistocene, but not before some of them crossed the frozen Behring Strait into Asia and Europe and proliferated there. It returned to North America after a ten-thousand-year-long absence, arriving with the conquistadors, and cattle soon followed, and the vaquero/cowboy culture evolved, which certainly did a number on the North American plains, althoug not as much as agriculture. The plains were ideal for farming, once the technology for accessing their groundwater was developed, because they were flat, the soil was good, and there were no trees or stones to clear. Cattle were run where it was too dry and rocky—which is most of the West. But now pasture that conserves at least some of the original prairie ecosystem looks pretty good, compared to paving urbanizing suburbanizing what’s left of the plains and covering it with sprawl or turning it into rows of lettuce or orange groves, and the cowboys, we were soon to find,  who are an endangered species themselves, have become the closest thing to custodians of the remaining open prairie. Some of them have formed a pragmatic alliance  with the conservationists, like the rubber-tappers of the Amazon, to save their way of life and their habitat. 
 
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