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Outside Magazine, August 2004

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El Último Vaquero Habla Español (The Last Cowboy Speaks Spanish)

By Nick Reding


	BOSS: VETERAN SHEEP RANCHER JOHN FAULKNER (Joshua Paul)

I FIRST MET RENÉ AND NICANOR in September 1999, at their tent camp in Idaho's Skeleton Creek drainage. For the next five years, I followed their lives—partly because I grew to care about them and partly because I was captivated by the story of two men who'd left everything behind to find a new start thousands of miles from anything they'd ever known.

Americans think of the frontier as being long closed, but for people like René and Nicanor—and for millions of others who dream of a richer existence in the U.S.—it remains wide-open. Over time, watching the divergent paths they followed left me amazed by the longing that drives such adventures, and by what they entail. There's opportunity, to be sure, but also terrible hardship. And despite my own once-soaring images of life on the open range, there's little in the way of romance.

I arrived at Skeleton Creek with a Basque immigrant named Julian Larriebia—John Faulkner's majordomo, or ranch foreman, for the past 46 years—as he delivered biweekly supplies to René and Nicanor and the dozen or so other herders working in the national forest. From Gooding we drove to Fairfield, a small town 30 miles north, and followed a dirt road a half-hour through chaparral-veined foothills before entering the mountains on the first of several Forest Service logging roads. The ruts got deeper and the going slower, until Julian's old Ford pickup was moving more up and down on its shocks than forward on its wheels.

Forest Service Road 014 came to an end at a meadow filled out in Indian paintbrush and fringed by yellow-leafed aspens and shady firs. Along the edge of the forest, still far away and tiny, René's and Nicanor's horses, a black gelding and a dappled gray mare, picked their way downslope, followed by a string of mules. René wore a miner's beard, a greasy baseball cap, jeans, and a T-shirt with the sleeves cut off. Across the pommel of his saddle he carried a Chinese-made semi-automatic rifle that he used to kill black bears and mountain lions that threatened the 1,300-animal herd. Nicanor, whose skin was a deep cocoa-brown, rode the gelding with no saddle, just a blanket; he was shirtless, and his shoeless, callused feet were caked with dust.

It's ironic that the South American gaucho would travel all the way to Idaho to pursue the cowboy myth, since the number of real cowboys in the American West has dwindled to almost nothing.

"Están atrasados!" Julian called out in his lisping Continental Spanish—"You're late"—a joke he liked to make about the hit-or-miss nature of supplying people who steer themselves in the wilderness with nothing but pencil-sketched routes on old Forest Service maps. As the riders dismounted, Julian finished stacking the few crates of supplies—eggs, garlic, mayonnaise, oil, and salt, along with cigarettes René had bought. It didn't take long to load the provisions into pack bags carried by the three mules. Then, just as quickly as it began, René and Nicanor's brief contact with the outside world was over, and the three of us—with me sharing Nicanor's horse—were riding back up the trail through the trees.

Above us that day was a bald ridgeline, and as we came down the other side we could see for 70 or 80 miles, through the foothills and across the Camas Prairie to where the Snake River Plain abutted the Idaho Batholith in the hazy, unsure distance. It was dry, austere terrain that was a world away from anything René or Nicanor had ever seen, and they were not immune to its loneliness. With his tongue, René drew a corner of his long mustache into his mouth and chewed it as the mules began to bray.

"I don't know," he quietly said to Nicanor in Spanish, "if I can stand this isolation much longer."

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