Lot 2

Some country sells itself on scenery. This asks for something else. Tract 2 is 205.68 acres of plain, workmanlike ranch land for sale at the Pumpville Ranch Subdivision in Val Verde County, and it won't flatter anybody, won't pretend to be a park, and will reward the owner who likes a place he has to learn by walking it. Pale caliche underfoot, greasewood and mesquite holding the flats, and a sky that does most of the work from horizon to horizon. People who want simple ground want this kind of ground.

Water shows up here in two shapes. The first is a creek, roughly 2,350 ft of it bending across the middle of the tract, and you can pick its line out from a distance because the brush along the drainage runs a darker green than anything around it. The bed is caliche and gravel, with banks the runoff has carved out to a man's waist in places. It runs with the weather, the way creeks do in this canyon country. Walk the crossing after a storm and you'll read every hoof that used it.

The second is a stock tank, concrete rimmed, standing in a thicket of mesquite that has seen hard years. There was water in it, green and still, the day we were out there. What that tank does in a dry August is a fair question and the right one to ask us, so we'll walk you to the rim and let you look at it yourself rather than tell you a story about it from an office.

About three quarters of the acreage carries brush, heaviest across the middle where the cover thickens around the drainage and the deer bed in the warm part of the day. Quail country. The ground rolls easy, maybe 38 ft of fall from one end of the place to the other, so a pickup can work most of it and nothing out here will wear out your knees. Between the clumps the ground opens to bare, bright caliche flats, which is where you'll find tracks in the morning and where a blind or a feeder would have a clean line of sight if you ever wanted one.

An existing ranch road, around 1,530 ft of it, runs the east part of the tract, two worn ruts in caliche with mesquite and cedar crowding the edges. That's your way in toward the middle on wheels instead of on foot. What you can and can't use legally is settled by the deed and the plat, not by ruts in the ground, and we'll go across that paperwork with you line by line. There is also wire standing along the east side, roughly a quarter of the perimeter all told. Where that wire sits relative to the surveyed line is the survey's business.

The name of this country is honest too. In 1887 the railroad bored 600 ft for water to feed steam locomotives, built a pump house, and a settlement grew around the sound of it. Diesel ended that. The depot shut in the 1950s and the water quit not many seasons after, and what the trains left was quiet and a great deal of it. Stand on the flat here at midday and the loudest thing is usually wind in the brush.

This sells as a surveyed tract with straightforward terms. The covenants are short, commercial operations are barred, and the silence you buy stays bought. Owner financing is available, with as low as 5% to start, which is how most people out here get their first piece of real acreage bought and paid for.

Pick a cool month, January or February, when the brush is bare and you can see the lay of the country. Wear boots, good britches, and bring more water than you think you need. We'll start you at the ranch road on the east, walk the creek bed where it crosses the middle, and finish at the tank, and you can decide out there with the wind in your ears.