This morning, Monty marveled again at the impacts on the ranch caused by 150 years of cattle grazing. The early morning sun, as its rays first washed over the steeply-sloping hillsides, clearly delineated the horizontal terraces created by the hooves of the thousands of cattle which had crisscrossed those hills. These were a foot wide, a couple of feet apart, making the hills look as though they had been wrapped with giant bolts of wide-wale corduroy fabric. While these were visible only when the slanting rays of the sun highlighted them, the actual cowpaths could always be seen. These were narrow, darker lines which snaked down from the hills to the valley floor, ending at the river. Monty had read letters in the newspaper, denouncing ranchers for the way they ruined the land by allowing cattle to graze it: but he knew that those horizontal terraces on the vertical hillsides slowed the runoff during heavy rains, and prevented erosion. As to the cowpaths, he had never seen any signs of erosion along them: since the cows used those paths for ascent as well as for descent, they had chosen routes with a shallow slope. Monty had never seen animals damage the landscape the way man did when he cut bulldozer paths across hillsides, or carved out pads for homesites.
As he turned his gaze from the familiar scene and back to the detail of the fence line which he was supposed to be checking, Monty's thoughts grew somber. It was eight years ago, when he was a 20-year-old just finishing his senior year at Cal Poly in San Luis Obispo, that the accident had happened which had made him the owner of this 16,000 acres which he loved so much. His parents had been returning from a trip to King City, and the bed of the pickup held two 55-gallon drums, one filled with diesel fuel, the other with gasoline. Like many ranchers, his father chose to haul his fuel this way rather than have it delivered to the remote ranch, since fuel suppliers required high minimum purchases in order to make the trip out. As a cattle operation with farming only a sideline to produce hay for supplemental feed in the fall, the Bar A required fuel only a couple of times a year. Besides, with hand-operated pumps in the drums, the refueling could be done in the fields. Driving the pickup truck out to the swather, baler, or automatic bale wagon was often simpler than moving those big pieces of equipment in to stationary tanks at the barn just for fuel.
The one consolation Monty had was the knowledge that his parents had certainly not suffered, and probably had not had more than a second to realize that their deaths were imminent. As nearly as it could be reconstructed, the horrendous accident, like most accidents, had simply been the result of several actions and events which, by themselves, were quite ordinary. The mangled carcass of a freshly-killed doe, flung up onto the embankment where the roadway was cut narrowly through the little hilltop, told a too-common story of a deer which had suddenly leapt out of the manzanita brush into the path of a vehicle. Paint on the carcass indicated that it had been struck by, or had struck, both the dark green Ford ranch pickup and the white GMC truck tractor which was hauling the loaded double set of trailers in the opposite direction: but no clues could tell what the exact sequence of events had been. It had all happened too quickly for there to even have been skid marks.