93/03/04

Shortgrass Country

by Monte Noelke

            Our bulls were turned out with the cows on the eighth of February. By the next week, we'd shipped two to the packers and moved one more to break up a 24-hour bellowing contest where all that was keeping these two gladiators from a fight to the death was a 14 gauge, 75 year-old string of rusted net wire.

            On one morning of a heifer gathering, a pair of young bulls, calved on the same ranch and summered in the same pasture, started scuffling on the way to the pens. After reaching the corrals, the scurred bull hit his half brother such a blow on the right hip that he knocked him up in the air. And in 15 seconds, the picture changed from a two low-birthweight breeder program to one with a three-legged bull and a conquering champion.

            Four to five decades of losing money so fast finally seasons a man. The first thing I do is step off my horse and tighten the belt of my chaps and pull my cinch strap up a couple of holes. Next, I remount and ride off trying to look like John Wayne used to look in his movies, leaving the fort on a big black stallion with his sergeant stripes torn off his shirt and the colonel's beautiful daughter sobbing at the gates.

            Fertility testing is fine, but if an ox is going to spend all his waking hours either bellowing on the fence or jumping fences, his potency is of no value, least of all to the cowboy trailing him down and patching up the water gaps and steel gates he's ruined.

            On the dark mornings, I swear I'll throw the whole herd in one pasture and count them once a year at shipping. If spring turns out as dry as last fall, these sons of peripatetic Pathfinder and Royal Stifle had better be conserving their energy to stay alive and off the packing house rails.

            Be sure and take this advice: before any kind of outburst occurs, be certain your breathing rate checks normal. It sure is hard to curse real loud in a high wind. or throw rocks holding your reins in one hand, or kick at a steel gate if you are hyperventilating.

            Practice and experience polish our behavior. Germination may occur down at the pool hall, or at a Sunday goat roping. For example, the base of my communicative skills on the range happened not our in the pasture, but in the milk pen. On the late evening of my tenth summer, a quarter-blood Brahman milk cow kicked me so hard with her right hind hoof that I fell back far enough for the milk bucket to tip over in my lap and hurt so bad that I violated the code of all young cowboys and bawled like a full crazed panther.

            At that moment, my vocabulary matured far in advance of my age. I hurled the bucket at her and froze in disbelief as she jumped over the corral fence.

            Instead of using the E.P.D. system to rate bulls, I'm in favor of having these better house cat and lap dog doctors to turn their interest toward developing a CAT scan that'll diagnose what's on a bull's mind, fighting or breeding cows. Should the idea fail to pay off, they could always use it one their customers to weed out the bad credit risks