Not every cowboy is born into the life. "Some are loved into it," says Pat Crisswell, a racehorse jockey's son. "I had a government security job. The money was great, but I didn't like the city, and I spent more time in bars than I should've. So I went to the Pitchfork Ranch in Guthrie, Texas. Went from $20 an hour to $750 a month. Guys I left behind thought I was crazy. I told 'em, 'There's a little somethin' called job satisfaction.' "

The cowboy culture is more egalitarian than most. You can find boilerplate Westerners riding cattle—but also African Americans, Mexicans, Canadians, and even Mennonites, not to mention emigrants from Germany, Brazil, Australia, and even India. Most who heed the call are young single males stirred by the outdoorsman's yearning for manly adventure. But of course there are cowgirls, too, like Jodi Miner, a clear-eyed woman with a formidable handshake who grew up on a ranch near Dell, Montana, doctoring calves, repairing water tanks, and mending fences. In between college semesters at Bozeman, she took jobs calving and branding heifers and slept in bunkhouses surrounded by snoring men. Today, she and her husband, Wes, run the Snowline Ranch together on behalf of an absentee board of directors. They get free housing for themselves and their two young daughters. In return, the board expects Wes and Jodi Miner to devote themselves to ranch management, dealing with the Bureau of Land Management and the Forest Service. Cowboys have long been gypsy-like in their meanders—ever searching, through word of mouth (cowboys don't Google), for that optimal blend of agreeable terrain, independence, and the opportunity to stay in the saddle. "In Montana, there aren't many straight-up cowboy jobs anymore," sighs Wes Miner. "For the most part, you're gonna have to get off your horse a bit."

So the Miners, and most of their ilk, get off their horses. Adapt they must, when they must. Cowboys have seen the alternative to their life, from a safe distance: men who live for the weekend, for their golf game. There is no Monday or Friday out on the ranch. There is no "hobby." Instead, there is just being on a horse among three hundred elk and watching the sun rise. Cowboys don't rhapsodize about such pleasures. Leave that to the poets or the keen brilliance of artist Charlie Russell. The cowboys hold their passion in reserve—waiting till the snows melt and the cattle trailers pull up to the gates, followed by the year's first swell of hoofbeats. Then the vaqueros fall out of time, and they're riding and hollering, boys for one more season.