Lot 30

First light in November, and the thorn still holds the night's cool. Steam rises where the sun touches caliche. A truck door shuts out on the lane and you hear it clean across the brush, because this country carries sound. Tract 30 at 44 Ranch South runs 10.31 acres of Duval County ranch land for sale in the Rio Grande Plains, and the thing you'll still be thinking on a week after you see it is the trail cutting the middle of it corner to corner.

That trail is a head start, and a head start is most of what a first hunting tract is worth. Somebody put a blade through here before you ever showed up. It takes a truck in at an angle, leaves the thorn standing on either hand, and points you at the middle of the tract, which is exactly where a camp wants to sit: brush on every side, the lane out of sight behind you. Deer use a cut like that at dusk. Quail work its edges, where shade meets open ground, and you can sit one chair and watch both sides of it at once.

Along the east side, roughly 260 ft of existing ranch road hugs the tract. That's where a gooseneck swings around without a three-point turn, where a load of posts gets unstacked, where you stop and shut the engine off and listen before you ever step off. Hard-packed and pale, already graded. Treat it as an existing ranch road and nothing further: the recorded plat and the title work govern how you legally reach the tract, and we'll put both in your hands before you sign anything.

The ground barely moves. Something near 14 ft of fall across the whole 10.31 acres, so what shapes this tract isn't slope, it's how tight the thorn grows from one end to the other, and that's a difference you feel in your shins before you ever see it on paper. Chalky rock shows in the bare spots. Good footing when the wet arrives.

The cover is the real draw. Mesquite stands head high to twice that, feathery and silver-green, hedge-thick in stretches, with cenizo filling the gaps and throwing white bloom after a rain. Lichen grays the older limbs. Every so often a Spanish dagger pushes its stiff blades above the canopy where you can pick it out from a hundred yards and steer by it. Whitetail hold in that tangle all day and won't show themselves until the light turns orange, which is the whole argument for owning brush instead of pasture.

This is working ranch country, and it looks it. From the east end the land stretches away in a low green sea, cumulus stacked white above it on an August midday, other ranch lanes drawn pale through the scrub in the distance and a windmill frame standing up past the treeline for a landmark. The small ranch towns of this county sit out that way. People have been running stock and hunting this brush here for generations, which is a fair reason to trust the ground as a first buy.

Boundaries are surveyed, and the corners are where the survey puts them, not where somebody's old wire happens to run. Your way in is on record, not a handshake with a neighbor. The covenants are short and light-handed, aimed at holding industry off the ranch instead of telling you where to set a camp trailer or how many seasons you get to think it through, and we'll hand you a copy to read yourself. We finance these in house, and 5% starts a note.

See it in the cool months, after a norther has taken some fight out of the thorn. Gloves, sleeves you don't mind snagging, something thornproof on your feet. We'll drive the trail with you at its angle through the middle, step off the ranch road on the east side, and stand you on the surveyed corners so you can see where your 10.31 acres begins and where it quits.