Adventures
in the Sierra Madre
by J. Ramón Palacios
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"Las
Ventanas" ...
"Las
Ventanas" is a gigantic valley which under the misname of
'ranch' is sold periodically and with precise regularity, every
7 years: when abundant water comes out from its very deep well.
Unfortunately in a finite volume and for a time only long enough
to dream a little. One of those occasions was our turn to be the
enthusiastic buyers.
And
although my beloved compadres cried sour tears over the 500
recently planted walnut trees dying of thirst, my son Juan
Ramón and I dedicated ourselves to enjoy at plenitude
the valley's 115° Fahrenheit at noon and 35° at midnight,
its solitude, the sound of silence, barren, with giant 45
miles per hour jackrabbits.

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In that landscape, within
the confines of a huge corral, our horses remembered their
mustang ancestry and became wild. It took us more or less
an hour to saddle up. It was part of the fun, besides having
to make a lengthy surrounding journey to enter this valley
of extinct dinosaurs. The fact was later proven by the colossal
intact and complete skeleton of a mammoth, found a few yards
from the single entrance into the valley.

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In
that segment of our cow-less cowboy era, I had a horse which I
named "Shunkawacan", for the Yellow Hands Sioux indian legend of that
who didn't know whether it was a horse that dreamed with being
a man, or a man dreaming he was a horse. Tough and resilient quarter
horse, noble clear chestnut, he acted well his name. |