PERSPECTIVEnh: ‘i’-‘: :l.^KnEven in mid-September you cannot go comfortably bynday into the deserts of southeastern Utah. Together thenlate Edward Abbey and I rented horses and rode into the LanSal mountains, following what began as a dirt road andnended as a trail at an elevation of approximately 10,500 feet.nFrom the mountain pass, we looked northwest betweenntriangled peaks of pinkish-gray talus across the fantasticallynelaborate redness of the Colorado Plateau, at whose rednheart the Green and Colorado Rivers achieve conflux.nTwenty miles to the northwest, the old uranium town ofnMoab, now a mecca for river rats and mountain bikers,nglittered like a tin-can dump in the haze below the purplensandstone tumuli of Arches National Monument. Thisnis — will always be — to the literate (as well as the not-soliterate)nAbbey’s Country: locus of his experience and of hisnwork, geological embodiment of his life’s concern.nThe cow lay on her back in the road, her belly grosslyndistended between the boundary stakes of her rigid upturnednlegs, the hind ones spread away from a porridge ofnwrithing maggots. Ed worked his horse with difficultynaround the carcass while my own, a well-grained mare callednBeefy, tried to bolt away up the cutbank where she would bensplendidly positioned to lose her footing and roll her twelvenor thirteen hundred pounds over me. I got her safely pastnfinally and rode up beside Ed, whose face expressed anChilton Williamson, Jr. is the book editor of Chronicles.nHe lives in Kemmerer, Wyoming.n12/CHRONICLESn’i> ! ”lii**”nThe Cow in the Trailnby Chilton Williamson, Jr.nnndisgust incommensurate with the stench we had just riddennthrough. We were in timber now; fool-hens rocketed undernthe chins of the horses, making them start and crowhop. Inhad my field glasses out, looking for elk. At the sound ofnbodies crashing among the trees I was off the horse and onnone knee, glassing the shadows for flashes of tan; thennEd laughed. “Slow elk,” he said, as a herd of white-facedncattle trotted heavily into the grassy park ahead. “Dirty,nstinking, bawling, s—t-smeared brutes. Four-legged lawnmowers.n. . .”nAfter supper that evening Ed reverted to the subject ofnthe presence of livestock — sheep and beef cattle — on thenpublic range. He had had a letter on the subject publishednearlier that summer in the Moab Times-Independent, thatnhad not been well-received by the town fathers, whonaccused him of “pissing on the town of Moab.” Ed hadnaccepted their reaction with equanimity. Two years beforenhe had flown from his home in Tucson to Missoula,nMontana, where he had delivered a lecture entitled “FreenSpeech: The Cowboy and flis Cow” to an audience of whatnhe later described as “five or six hundred students, ranchers,nand instant rednecks [transplanted Easterners]” who alsonhad failed to respond like ladies and gentlemen to hisnremarks. These began, “When I first came West inn1948 … I thought, like most simple-minded Easterners,nthat a cowboy was a kind of mythic hero. I idolized thosenscrawny little red-nosed hired hands in their tight jeans,nfunny boots, and comical hats,” and ended with jeers, “a sit-n