DATIL

For more than a hundred consecutive nights this year, Louis Sanders has patrolled his sweeping cattle ranch with a spotlight after eight calves and one cow were killed by Mexican gray wolves.

“I was out every night until well past midnight,” said Sanders, 60, looking out over the wide-open country beneath a straw cowboy hat after a recent day of mending fences. “I’m trying to make enough noise to where they aren’t in my cow herd. It didn’t do no good.”

Sanders acknowledged his attempts to wrangle with Mexican wolf packs have come at a personal and emotional cost. In a sign of blind exhaustion, he once awoke after three or four hours of unplanned but fitful sleep, his head on the steering wheel of his pickup in front of the cattle gate, his truck still running.

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