SHORTGRASS
COUNTRY|By Monte Noelke
Classified advertisements offer wide fields of bargains. Also, fantastic opportunities on opening new businesses are hidden in the columns of material.

Wherever I am, I check the ranches for sale section, knowing that one day, a place is going to be listed in a grove of cottonwoods by a bubbling spring, pouring cold water through a rock milk house. And when I go to look at the ranch, down at the corrals, a lithe young Mexican is going to be halter breaking a pen of blue roan horse colts; and in the garden irrigated by the spring, his pretty wife is going to be planting tomato plants and putting out pepper sets to make salsa to go on the baked cabrito she serves the patron on Sunday wrapped in white flour tortillas.

It isn't all dreams. A few weeks ago, I nearly found a day worker by calling a number in a San Angelo sheet. Once I contacted him, the old boy running the ad charged more than the customary wage, but he thought his brother-in-law knew a kid working at the television station who might want to do something besides sweep out the studio. I considered running a blind advertisement, offering career changes for disillusioned janitors, hoping to catch the kid's eye on a muddy day, or right after a big dust storm roared in from the Panhandle.

The labor shortage is so desperate, I thought of staking out the high school principal's office at Mertzon, hoping to capture a fresh recruit before news spread of his expulsion. Only catch is, kids today learn enough mathematics to know about anything from canning sardines to hand-sweeping fireplace chimneys offers more opportunity than working on a ranch.

A few days ago, the classified section of the Angelo paper ran an offer to buy emu eggs at a dollar apiece. Nothing was said whether the eggs needed to be tested fertile or not. Immediately, I called a neighbor of mine who pastures emus to see if he'd contract his eggs for 50 cents apiece, or $5 a dozen. I knew he was discouraged with his birds. His brother gave them to him for guard animals September a year ago.

Turns out emus are so thorough, they caused a den of rattlesnakes to move under the ranchhouse a month before the normal hibernation season last fall. He claimed every time the cheerleaders for the Cowboy games erupted on the TV, he heard rattling sounds underneath the living room floor. Seems like when a snake hibernates too early, his temperament becomes just as testy as an old man who goes to bed before sundown, and expects the whole house to be quiet until he arises the next morning.

Just the glimpse of an emu makes a diamondback rattler quiver so bad, rattles break off and his old fangs just dangle in the roof of his mouth. I have been told on outfits running big flocks of ratites, snakes shed their hides so fast to go back in the dens, the skins lay straight and smooth without one curlicue, or one sign of body imprint. The nerve trauma is so severe, the fangs becomes as wobbly as an old bicycle wheel. So loose, he may strike at a ground squirrel and shoot his venom way to one side of his mouth.

The dollar-an-egg buyer was bound to be aiming for the Easter market. Emu eggs weigh 24 ounces, or about the same as a dozen large chicken eggs. Cases are known of females laying up to a hundred eggs, or that's what the reference book claims.

Emus lay pre-colored emerald green eggs ready to be hidden. The five-inch shells are big enough to paint a mural on if you wanted to go bigtime and appeal to the art décor market. After the hunt, kitchens having a pan deep enough for an emu omelet will feed a big family of kids. Think of the excitement of cracking a double-yoked egg weighing a pound and a half. Make an old kid's eyes bug out like a sideshow at the rodeo.

So far, not one order has been filled on the contract. I watch going by his place, hoping to spot green objects out in the field. Last week, he killed four big rattlers sunning close to the house. Until he pens his emus, those rattlesnakes aren't going stray far outside the yard fence. It will be awhile, too, after penning his bird, before the snakes will venture far from under the house.

About any kind of control of nature has drawbacks. His brother meant well. He just was unaware how close an emu's shadow looks like a ferret or a mongoose to a western diamondback rattler.