Sorry I haven't read all of this thread, but I'm ah losing my train of thought, so... if this has been mentioned already...
Mostly crops, hogs, and cattle in my area of Missouri, so I'm not up on how folks look at, or think of, sheepherders. Or, how they would have looked upon them in 1963 Wyoming. All I got are fragments of history of how cattle men more than just disliked sheepherders. I'm wondering if it might have been a common joke among folks of that time and place to make assumptions about what herders did with one another over the lonely months up in those high pastures? (not to mention all the old sheep jokes as well)
Could it be Ennis didn't want Alma to know Jack was the man he had spent the summer with before they got married? We've already seen Ennis likes to do what Alma hates, as Mz. Proulx wrote. Might have naming Jack as the 'man' he spent the summer with herding sheep with been a bit too much information for Alma in Ennis's mind? That knowing Ennis and Jack herded sheep together might have been the catalyst for Alma to put two and two together, this was the reason Ennis lied to Alma about how he knows Jack. And for sure, Ennis coming up with the idea of Jack being a fishing buddy to set up future excuses for going off with Jack, to me, that would have had to be something Ennis had thought out before hand. Like, if Jack ever shows up again, what am I gonna tell Alma. (dang, I shouldn't be writing this early of a morning)
The level of denial, if not out right mental disconnect in the characters in Brokeback Mountain, is scary. More so, because I recognize it all too well.
Just a thought on all of the meaning of slang terms in the story and film. 1963 rural America was still rather isolated from the rest of the country. Even in the seventies, I could drive a couple hundred miles north into Iowa, and the use of slang was different enough I'd have to ask about it's usage. Even so, to me, 'wrang it out' was pretty straight forward in the context in which it was used. Which as with a lot of other words and phrases in American English, the meaning is more in the context of the discussion and inflection of the speaker rather than strict definition of words or terms. It's part of the reason I really wish this bit of dialog had been contained in the film.
“I wrang it out a hundred times thinking about you” At least for me as an old mid Missouri hick, it would be, I masturbated a hundred times with your imagine in my mind.