None of which mattered. "We got to rope at least one calf every day," says Tyrel. "You get to be by yourself. Do your own thing, don't get bothered by the boss. I'd go back again."

The Tucker brothers are lanky and taciturn and uninterested in any other life save the one they have led since infancy, when they rode horseback before they were able to walk and received their first horses by the age of two. Not for sport, however: Their mother, Michelle, tended the family ranch near Powell, Wyoming, and needed her boys' help. When Tyrel was 17, he volunteered to drop out in the middle of his sophomore year of high school to get his GED and work full-time on the ranch. "It was great with me," Tyrel recalls. What was there to miss? All of his classmates spent their free time playing Nintendo.

Blaine wears a Fu Manchu mustache, as do his father and his uncle. Tyrel is still working on his. With the hand-to-mouth lifestyle and the desire for independence comes an unexpected though endearing vanity: Cowboys care about how they look. A man who drifts from ranch to ranch, camp to camp, may not ever own a bed, much less a house. What he wears and what he straddles are pretty much all he's got. "You can do this job in tennis shoes and a ball cap, I guess," acknowledges Pat Crisswell, a compact Oklahoman who now tends a camp on the 150,000-acre Wagonhound Land and Livestock Company ranch in Wyoming. "But the more old-timey, the better."

The original vaqueros—derived from vaca, Spanish for "cow"—were horsemen from present-day Mexico who drove cattle into Texas and up into California. Replete with engraved silver and embellished leather gear, the vaqueros cut gallant figures on the surly canvas of the Old West. But form was seldom without function. Their flat-brimmed hats and bandannas warded off the sun and the dust. And for durability, no cotton rope could compete against a hand-braided rawhide riata.

The vaquero style lives on in varying degrees in different regions. Mexico, with its sagging economy, is no longer chief custodian. Instead, California and Nevada buckaroos (itself a corruption of vaquero) are most apt to follow the tradition to the letter: half chaps, flashy silver bits, wide, flat-bottomed stirrups, slick-fork saddles, and the compulsory long ropes and flat hats. To the buckaroos, finesse is key. Rather than constantly jabbing, the buckaroo prefers to cue his horse with his spurs. The uncorrupted art of cattle roping—and God strike a cowboy dead for doctoring a sick cow from a four-wheeler instead of with a horse and lasso—involves first catching the cow, then dallying, or wrapping one's rope around the saddle horn rather than tying it on. This takes more time, but the buckaroo does it anyway, without apology.

"I like the slower pace—throw a big, purty loop, not a hurry-up deal where you're cussing at people," says Wes Miner, the Montana native who was reared in the rodeo trade and now cleaves to the buckaroo ways—as do others less devoted. He notes ruefully: "I wore the flat hat for years. Then one day in Bozeman I saw two guys wearing ones like mine. Turned out they worked for a gardening store."

Buckaroos are afforded their style by the wide-open terrain on which they labor. More rough-hewn landscapes breed a correspondingly unfussy approach to a cowboy's work and dress. Brush country tears up jeans, necessitating the full-length but unadorned shotgun-style chaps worn by cowboys (sometimes called cowpunchers) in the Great Plains states and Texas. Brushy, tree-cluttered environs require shorter ropes and swell-fork saddles to tie on to. (Dallying is, well, dallying.) In windy areas, a stiff gale can knock a flat hat off a cowboy's head, so he may prefer the steadier taco hat. Buckaroo purists may disparage the spartan, gritty style of cowpunchers as "hard and fast" and "rammin'-jammin'." (The term cowpuncher probably derives from the brisk manner in which 19th-century ranch hands loaded cattle onto trains.) But looks deceive. The care in a cowpuncher's work is as evident as in the more stylized rendition of the buckaroo's.

Tyrel Tucker did not know much about these loose distinctions among cowboy traditions until his brother, Blaine, returned from summer on a ranch near Pryor, Montana. The buckaroos there wore silver-studded half chaps, reined their steeds with twisted horsehair mecates, and swung long rawhide ropes. So, now, do the Tucker brothers. Tyrel spends his free time working with silver, designing belt buckles and bits and spurs. The way other young men obsess over sports teams or computer games, Tyrel and Blaine Tucker devour every granule of the cowboy culture.