Four years ago, as a historic February storm draped Texas in a curtain of ice, Deborah Clark sprinted across a snow-dusted pasture, frantically trying to save a steer’s life. The animal had wandered onto the surface of a frozen stock pond on Clark’s 12,000-acre ranch in the Red River basin of North Texas, likely looking for forage on the tallgrass prairie that had been transformed overnight into a snowy expanse. The thin ice sheet couldn’t bear the creature’s weight; it spider-webbed and shattered, plunging all 650 pounds of thrashing bovine into the bitterly cold water.Clark and her husband, Emry Birdwell, found the steer “struggling in slow motion.” Birdwell, a lifelong rancher, threw a rope to the center of the pond, hanging it around the steer’s…
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