The San Joaquin Valley is remembered as both a home and a hunting ground in Tiratore Scelto’s account of his childhood. On a fifty-acre sheep ranch amid mostly steppe-like terrain, the valley’s open distances made survival feel precarious and gave the young narrator room to pursue the birds that preyed on the family’s animals.

Setting and Family Life

The ranch lay in the San Joaquin Valley between Salinas to the west and Bakersfield to the south. The family lived on what little remained of its sheep operation: Tiratore Scelto, his father, and his father’s older brother, whose leg had been injured in a different war. Others had left, but the family did not speak of them. Long drives in an open Ford truck connected their isolated home to the surrounding country.

A Working Landscape Under Attack

The ranch’s chickens and sheep were vulnerable to numerous predators, including Coyotes and feral dogs, and, more rarely, pumas. The most feared attackers were birds of prey: their numbers and speed made them particularly difficult to stop. Red-Tailed Hawks, Goshawks, and Golden Eagles swooped down to seize smaller animals and carry them off alive; larger victims might be mauled where they grazed or slept. The narrator’s recollection of dying lambs and scattered carcasses makes the valley’s pastoral setting inseparable from the violence of protecting livestock.

The Valley as a Hunting Ground

As a boy, Tiratore Scelto most often shot Goshawks. When their numbers near home dwindled, he went farther afield to find them, first on horseback and later in the family truck, once he was old enough to drive and could afford the gasoline. The birds’ gray-blue feathers could make them disappear against a veiled sky, turning each shot into a challenge against a fast, nearly invisible target. His memories of the valley thus combine the practical demands of ranch life with the excitement of the hunt, while revealing how completely the family’s livelihood had organized his relationship to the surrounding wildlife.