Grazers of the purple sage

摘要

The West that Zane Grey portrayed in his novels was a hard-edged place, lonely and rough in a romantic sort of way. Still is. But the New West is a different place than: the Old West depicted in Grey's iconic books. More issues, more people, more complicated. Ride off into the purple sage nowadays and it seems like you're heading into more problems than you're getting away from. Mat Carter knows that. A commercial cow-calf producer in eastern Oregon near Seneca, he's smack dab in the middle of Zane Grey country, purple sage and all. Unlike others, however, he looks at the sage in a little different light. To Carter, it's a high-protein winter feed that helps him cut his feed bill in a country where snow and below-zero cold are as much a part of thelandscape as are sage-choked pastures.