Word: herds
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...finned Cadillacs and fat farm subsidies, that is. Unhappily, his neighbors back home in New Mexico considered McCanless as loco as a headless road runner. He has embarked on history's last Long Trail Drive, across macadam highways and through skyscraper-canyoned cities at the head of his herd-which consists of one aged cow with a plastic window in her side...
Over a bottle of sour mash with Houseboy Paco, McCanless succumbs to a vision. That ventilated cow out in the barn, Old Blue-she is actually a vast, milling herd of white-faced steers. Like a latter-day Don Quixote, McCanless lays out his inspired plan to Paco: "We grass-fatten the herd on the trail, and then we sell it at top market. And when it's all over . . . we'll buy each of us a scarlet sweetheart and honky-tonk our tails...
After a long investigation, Major Grimwood decided that the best place for a "world herd" of Arab-proof oryxes was not in Kenya, but in Phoenix, where the dry, hot climate resembles that of Arabia, and where there is the spacious and hospitable Maytag Zoo. The Arizona Air National Guard, happy to boost the home state, flew a C-97 cargo plane to pick up the oryxes, which had been shipped to New Jersey. The four consisted of two males and two females, Edith from Aden, and Caroline, contributed by the London Zoo. Another female, still unnamed, will arrive...
...saguaros have been removed, and the thorns of the saguaros have been clipped to a height above the reach of an oryx. Every day the zoo fills out a sheet for each animal, listing weather, temperature, food and water consumed, bowel movements, breeding (none so far). The little world herd seems to be doing fine, although Caroline, the female from London, suffered at first from the Arizona heat. Edith may be pregnant, but it did not happen in Phoenix. Until the oryxes are fully acclimated, the males and females are being kept strictly apart...
When the Bannons' herd of prize cattle is infected with foot-and-mouth disease, Hud suggests that they sell the cattle "up North" and get their money, instead of accepting the Government's 50?-on-the-dollar bounty when they are destroyed. His father sorrowfully and scornfully refuses. In a long and heartbreaking scene, uncluttered by more than a few words of dialogue, a bulldozer scoops a giant grave out of the grassland and the cattle are driven into it; then a platoon of men with shotguns and rifles stand around the edge and systematically shoot them dead...