How else do you describe watching Guyanese cowboys (or vaqueiros) at work in a corral? At Dadanawa Ranch, there was a bonfire for brands, and – high up in the rails – the boys clambered around, waiting for their moment to drop down and join the fight. Below them, in the arena, hundreds of animals swirled round, blind with dust and mad with panic. Whiplashes, forty feet long, sizzled over their heads, hissing and crackling like gunfire. Then the vaqueiros dropped, knives drawn. What followed wasn’t so much sport as medieval warfare. Horn and withers became tangled in rope, and – amidst the bellows of terror – the knives began to dart around, nicking ears and emasculating bulls. At one point, a steer seemed to explode from the melee, and, like some huge and bloody meteorite, smashed through the rails, and took off, over the savannah. No one seemed to notice that they’d almost been killed. Even when the work was finished, the vaqueiros weren’t. Each found himself a furious steer, jumped on its back, and then rode it for a few exhilarating seconds, before the animal bucked him off.
"What can I do?" said the foreman, "It’s the only life they know."
I didn’t see the vaqueiros again after that. The next day, they were far away, rounding up distant cattle. Across the ranch, they had over a million acres to cover. Whilst Dadanawa was not what it was in 1900, it was still twice the size of Suffolk.