J. Frank Dobie, the Texas folklorist, told and later recorded a story of a phantom bull that roamed the cow jungle of South Texas. Mr. Dobie flavored the tale by having himself and a Mexican cowboy climb a windmill tower and wait in the moonlight to trap this ghost coming to a water lot from the dense brush. By the time my sons turned to other interests, the grooves on our record caused the phonograph's needle to wobble from so much playing.

Another replay about bull hunting was the one I've told so many times of Feliciano Rocha tracking one of the first Angus bulls to be on the old ranch through and across five of the most devoted Hereford breeders in the county. Toward the end of the chase, Feliciano knew the bull's trail so well that he began to gain on him by anticipating the water gaps he passed under ahead of time. Tension was mighty high along the trail of so many white-faced cattle. But like most wandering oxen, he didn't father one crossbred calf on the whole trip.

Fresh material on fence-breaking, water gap crawling bulls developed this winter. All breeds and all genders and ages were unsettled. I don't know whether the drouth made them want to run away, or the cloudless skies extending the horizon gave them a limitless feeling of wanderlust. On top of a disappearing act, we had one episode last week where the star of the show crippled his pasture mate, took off, and left 57 cows to fight in a neighbor's pasture. He must have planned on herding cows back through the fence, as I was later to discover that he tore a hole big enough to pass cattle six abreast.

One of the three bulls in the neighbor's pasture took advantage of the situation to come over on our side, bellowing and chousing the crippled bull. We penned him using 20 percent range cubes as bait. His behavior indicated he resented confinement, so we assigned him a crowd pen too tight to jump from. The owner was down with the dry weather flue from inhaling too much corral dust, so his son had to come over to retrieve him.

Before I knew my neighbor was sick, I'd called him eight times trying to locate my bull. After causing such a stir, I was too embarrassed to saddle a horse and ride the fence. This particular neighbor soars over his ranches in an airplane to direct his hands by two-way radio. I always have been self-conscious how I looked on horseback, but imagine how disgusting it'd seem from a cockpit, the motor purring and the propeller spinning, to see a gray-whiskered man plodding along on a dun horse, wearing a Laredo straw hat following a fence line. I guess it'd be kind of like an astronaut having to judge a Cub Scout kite-flying contest.

On the third day of the defection, I rode the division fence between the ranches. A huge electric transmission line passes down the west side of the pasture. March wind made the cables hum through my hearing aid microphone right on to the last live nerves left in the eardrums. Deer and highline crews had taken a toll on the old fence. Posts leaned at odd angles, broken in strange places, making the job harder to solve. Loose strands of barbwire strewn over our path kept "old Dunny" alert. My chaps flapped in a gale of such force that the wind-born grass husks stung my face. At the far corner, we picked up bull sign, leading to a big hole in the net wire and a mass of tangled barbwire.

One longer ride was yet to be made before the neighbor's new hand and I captured the culprit and loaded him, of all places, in a shearing corral. On the chase, I concluded cattle don't know or care where they belong. They can't read brands, or tell a swallow fork from a jinglebob earmark. Only homing instinct they hold is to the ranch's feed wagon. They can spot "old red" or "old rusty" at great distance. Where fences are bad, and that about takes in all of the ranch country, the feed wagon to cattle means the same as a loft full of hay does to a homing pigeon. An old sister may become so fickle she'll let any calf in the herd suck, but she won't drop her devotion to the Ford or Chevrolet truck that's been feeding her every year for nine long winters. (Don't believe cattle prefer one brand of pickup to another.)

On the last feed run, the bulls were home and the neighbor was over his flu. We are all out of patience and nearly back to the open range days. Mr. Dobie and his assistant never captured the ghost bull. But late on moonlight nights I like to think I can hear "ol' Pancho" reciting, "Me and Ramon rubbed dry cow dung on our skin, so that ol ghost bull couldn't catch our scent. Long about midnight, sitting on the windmill table, we heard him bellowing real low down in his throat. Wur, wurrr, wurr, wur ..."

May 4, 2000