Texas, by gawd!

Dan Barry has an article in The New York Times about rustling in Texas:

Whoever was stealing cattle had to have some cowboy in him, the theory went. You could tell by the seamless way he could lure more than a dozen animals at a time out of their pens, onto his trailer, and off into the endless Texas night, like some Pied Piper of bovines. This was not the handiwork of some crack addict, risking a kick to the addled head for the low yield of a heifer or two. This was a cow whisperer, cattle people told themselves. One of us.
The reports started piling up across South and East Texas. On 15 March, for example, two dozen calves vanished from a sale barn in the Houston County town of Crockett, the same night that a livestock trailer was stolen in neighboring Walker County. On 3 May, eighteen head of cattle disappeared from a sale barn in Milam County. Two nights later and nearly two hundred miles away, over two dozen head went missing from a sale barn in Nacogdoches County.
Enough was enough; these cattle didn’t just wander off to take in the night air. On 6 May 6, Hal Dumas (photo), a special ranger for the unique Texas and Southwestern Cattle Raisers Association— part industry advocate, part law enforcement agency— joined the Milam County sheriff in sending out a be-on-the-lookout alert, telling ranching communities everywhere of the rustler among them:

Locations are being hit in the early morning hours. Suspects will probably be hauling a long goose-neck trailer between midnight and 3:30 a.m. The stolen cattle are generally calves weighing between 350 and 500 pounds.

Though the vigilante, string-’em-up response to cattle rustling has faded into the sepia-toned past, livestock theft still carries the whiff of the low-down cur. In the last decade, special rangers for the cattle raisers association investigated more than 11,000 cases of livestock-related thefts, and recovered or accounted for more than 37,500 head of cattle.
Stealing a cow is like stealing a factory, ranchers say, given that a healthy, breeding cow can return dividends for years. Some ranchers even grow fond of the animals they raise, no matter how abruptly these relationships may end at the stockyard gate.
Most of all, livestock are living bonds of communal trust; precious things of value, grazing close to the road. And when ranchers are ready to sell, they often unload their cattle into the easily accessible pens of sale barns a day or two before auction. The barn might have a security camera or a night watchman; then again, it might not.
Still, you can trust your mother, but cut the cards. That is why the 15,000-member cattle raisers association, founded in 1877 by a band of rustler-weary ranchers, has thirty special rangers, including Mr. Dumas, all with the power of arrest, all wearing guns and white hats. Using sophisticated databases (including a file of more than one hundred thousand registered brands) and plain common sense (checking cow pies for tire tracks), these rangers investigate thefts of livestock and property and inspect millions of cattle a year.
The rangers have the respect of cattle rustlers; they know this because a rustler said so. A few years ago, they helped to pen Jerome Heath Novak, a clever, clean-cut cattle rustler from a proud ranching family in Brazoria County who was so audacious in his nighttime thefts that he even stole livestock from Nolan Ryan, the baseball legend and Texas icon. He was caught only after taking to auction a stolen calf with a distinctive barbed-wire scar, which someone noticed.
Before being sent to prison, a remorseful Mr. Novak, then 27, sat down with rangers to help them understand the mind of the cattle rustler. He confessed to not liking sale barns with motion lights or people living on site, and said he avoided ranches and sale barns that had the cattle raisers association’s blue membership sign on display.
“I tried to keep away from that because it’s a band of members that will hold together and push the issue,” said Mr. Novak, who goes by Heath. “Someone else is there, behind them, backing them up.” When he was done explaining, one of the rangers asked the larger question: “Why? Why, Heath?”
The rangers could establish a rapport with the likes of Mr. Novak because many of them are also ranchers. They gather much of their intelligence by “working” cattle in the pastures, chatting up muck-stained employees in sale barns and asking ranchers what they’re hearing.
Mr. Dumas, 58, the supervisor for 44 counties with 1.4 million cattle, began one recent day by helping Randy Sullivan, a sun-baked rancher in Robertson County, gather some cattle into a pen thick with flies, then sort out calves for shipping. The cowboys on horseback clicked tongues and shouted “Hey-hah!” The cows twitched tails and lowed in anxious response.
The cowboys paused under the leaden sky for a cold drink, with Mr. Sullivan apologizing for not having any RC Cola. Talk soon turned to the recent spate of cattle rustling. “You feel kind of violated,” said Mr. Sullivan, 54, his jagged face shiny with perspiration.
Mr. Dumas returned his horse, Colonel, to his paddock in Franklin, then drove his pickup to an auction at a sale barn in Groesbeck, where, a few months earlier, eight black calves vanished overnight. He ate a hamburger in the barn’s small restaurant, heard a snatch of the auctioneer’s livestock song, chatted with the local sheriff, then walked the perimeter to demonstrate the rustler’s probable modus operandi.
The theory is that the thief pulled his trailer up to the pen late at night, after the last worker had gone home, opened the two iron gates, and chained them to the mouth of his trailer, then whooped the calves through the makeshift chute and into his trailer, and drove off with 4,000 pounds of cow worth about $4,800.
“Probably took two minutes,” Mr. Dumas said, his face shaded by his palm-leaf white hat.
And how is this behavior viewed by those who work and live cattle? Cody de Cordova, 30, whose family owns a sale barn in nearby Buffalo, spat into the dirt, said that hanging was proper punishment and gave no facial indication that he might be kidding.
Last month, four days after Mr. Dumas sent out the cattle-rustler alert, the Brazoria County Sheriff’s Department received a report of a portable corral containing three dozen calves in a field where they did not belong. A responding deputy pulled up just as a cowboy was loading the calves onto a trailer. The cowboy did not have any paperwork attesting to his ownership of the calves. Chris DuBois, an investigator for the Sheriff’s Department, said that “none of his answers were making any sense”, other than, perhaps, his name: Jerome Heath Novak.
Mr. Novak, now 32, was indicted last week on charges of once again breaking the communal bond, in a case that once again has investigators asking why.

Rico says the post title is from a true story about John Wesley Hardin and the Texas Rangers, but it damn sure applies...