Bullday
By Ken Ely

Many of the stories my mother told to me when I was young I have forgotten. I wish it were not so because the ones I can recall are interesting stories. The forgotten ones probably were, too. The forgotten and the remembered have all left an impression, however, giving me a sense of who I am and from where I came. This is not to discount my father's contribution to where I came from, mind you. It's just that it was because of my mother's stories that I decided to go ranching; and it was through that short-lived but eventful ranch experiment that I connected my own life to the tales she told me and made them mine.

Somewhere along the line, I seemed to have overlooked the fact that my forebearers in the glamor and romance of ranching had much to do with sheep and little to do with cows. None the less, I decided in my twenty-first year to drink from the Bradford cup and become a cattle rancher. Maybe that is why my aspirations as such became only a brief reality: I got the wrong cup.

I went at ranch building vigorously, in a costly, time-consuming, ignorant fashion - which is usually the way it is done when you don't know what you're doing. Instead of buying a herd of yearling stock, feeding them for a period of time, then turning them at auction for cash to repeat the process again on a slightly larger scale, I bought day-old calves and raised them in the barn on milk that I wrung by hand from three cows. After a couple of years at this, my impatience got the upper hand and I went out that spring and bought a two year-old heifer to breed in the late summer. A real quantum leap - sideways. She proved to be baren. It was only a decade after I sold out that I learned how I actually should have gone at the thing.

Chores started at five every morning. If anyone had bothered to tell me that my yearning to imbibe from the vine of family tradition would demand that I rise from a warm bed and go out at that hour every morning for several years, I might have chosen to let the cup pass from me.

I was on my way to the barn by the dawn's early light one spring Saturday, with plans of going to the stock auction later in the day dancing in my head, when I happened to glance out at my miniscule herd as it wandered through the blue and purple of the morn. I concluded by the herd's singular lack of bulk that our bull was missing. This was not a certainty, you understand, given the nature of the lighting; but it was definitely a probability. The bull would not be hiding in the woods by himself - unless, of course, he had some very good reason for hiding in the woods. There were no reasons in our woods, I knew, however, because I could see all of his reasons milling around in the blue and purple.

A photograph of that bull crossed my path the other day and I threw it away. I had raised the unfortunate creature from a calf. He was one of two twins born to "ol' Red," our most ancient milk cow. These twins were so unidentical that one's supposition upon seeing them for the first time might justifiably have been that they were not even of the same species. The twin brother, whom I had made into a steer - probably while under the influence of that side of my nature which has proven to be my own worst enemy - was a huge, handsome fellow with a cooperative disposition. I lamented the fact that I had not retained him as God had made him, for he would have thrown excellent calves. The twin I chose to keep as a bull grew up smaller, with body like one of those early, Zoroastrian gods that did not quite resemble anything that crept or crawled upon the face of the earth. He was also bug-eyed, and somewhat wild in his behavior. I speculated, at the time, that his wildness stemmed from the fact that he could not see very well. His eyes were wretched looking affairs, protruding at forty-five degrees of angle on either side of his head in the manner popularized by miniature poodles, with blood-shot scleras and no discernable pupils. Peering at them closely, one would have disbelieved that he could see at all.

We had put a ring in his nose to lead him along by, but whenever we attached a lead rope to it, the brute backed up. Trying to use this behavior to advantage, I had even attempted to steer him in reverse, using the lead rope to pull his head to the side opposite the direction I desired his hind end to go; but he tended to over-control and not go into doorways or through gates, crashing into walls and posts, dislodging them or fracturing wood. I don't imagine that the act of installing his nose ring in the first place added anything to the scant fund of sanity he possessed and I am certain that ramming him stern-first into fences and barns improved him very little in this regard.

When I say "we" put a ring in his nose, I mean myself and Martin Moritz. He and I were partners. Mart had been a small-time farmer all of his 62 years and knew a lot about the business - except how to make money at it.

Anyway, back to the blue and purple morn. After we had milked the three cows and fed the seven or eight calves we had going in the barn at the time, we saddled up and rode out to discover where the bull had gone through the fence. As always, our two dogs trotted along with us - not because they thought they could be of any help, for they seldom were. In fact, my black lab, Art, was usually a detriment to anything we were trying to accomplish. Mart's border collie, Gypsie, could bring the herd up to the barn if asked to do so, but she was of little use in tracking down and bringing back animals that escaped from the pasture. Whatever Mart and I did on the place, the dogs came along just to run rabbits. We found the stretch in the wire fence where the bull had pushed with his woolley forehead and gone through. His tracks on the other side lead to a bramble which he had also plowed right through - probably because he couldn't see it. We could see it, though, and it offered little in the way of passage for men or horses. Drawing the machetes which hung in scabbards on our saddles, we began to hack our way along after him. This enterprise was shaping up handsomely until Art, exercising his customary talent for throwing a spanner into the gears of whatever we were going at, thrust his mellon under Martin's downstroke, which split his (Art's) burlap open to the bone. And it knocked him silly to the degree that he staggered around, bleeding all over. We grabbed him and held him still, pressing the wound closed until it clotted shut. That achieved, Art seemed willing to return to running rabbits, so we resumed bludgeoning out our passage through the bramble.

Once on the other side, we surmised where the bull had probably gone: on across the mile to the Halldorson place. This was because they had heifers. There was a barn behind the Halldorsons' house, then a fenced-in pasture of about five acres behind the barn. This pasture contained a bevy of the little darlings. Before that pasture could be reached, however, a lot of other old fencing had to be negotiated. No doubt the bull, following his nose in default of his eyes, had made his way like a dozer. It was no road to proceed with horses, however, (not a horse one wanted to use again in the future, anyway) and, as the bull's location was only a probability, we decided to return home for the truck and drive round to Halldorsons' for an easy look-see.

The bull was, indeed, there, quite content, among the heifers. Nobody else was in evidence, nor could anyone be raised by knock or bell. To the rational mind, why should they have been? After all, it was 8:30, on a Saturday morning. Karen Halldorson probably arose at 8:00 to turn the heat up, looked out the window, and noticed the bull; then, like a responsible helpmeet, she probably climbed back into bed, saying to the love of her life, "Chuck, there's a pop-eyed bull in our pasture."

My reply to such a proclamation, at such an hour, would sensibly have been, "Good, then we'll have pop-eyed calves," after which I would have snuggled down and gone back to sleep. Chuck, no doubt, was as equally sensible.

Now, despite the clotting, Art was in obvious need of stitches, so we returned to the ranch (where we had left him safely chained while we made our reconnaisance), decanted him into the back of the pick-up, and headed for Lynden and the vet.

The vet was a lady vet and went about cleaning out Art's wound in a manner which suggested that she had received her initial training in hygiene on moldy bathroom tile - for which exercise, oddly enough, Art sat like one of those cement dogs people put out on their lawns to keep their plastic flamingos company. When she threaded a long, curved needle and approached the patient like she meant to use it, I grew a little alarmed.

" Aren't you going to give him an anesthetic?" I ventured to ask. " I don't think he'll need it," she replied confidently. "He sat still enough for the scrubbing."

I could follow her logic, all right, but I was just about to say that I really didn't think he would sit still for being stabbed when she seized one of the flaps of Art's scalp and drove her threaded scimitar into the underside of it. Art came off the table like he had been fired from a mortar. If Mart and I had not tackled him, he would have taken her nose off - maybe more.

The vet's hands were just detectably unstable as she administered the general anesthetic. Oddly enough, Art did not seem to mind in the slightest the needle sliding into the vein in his foreleg .

Locking Art's limp form in one of the empty calf pens when we got back to the ranch, we hitched the old plywood horse trailer to the pick-up. Mart immediately piled himself into the cab, for it was his assumption that the trailer was to be used to bring the bull home. I, on the other hand, was operating under the certainty that we were taking our horses with us, so I strode off toward the tie stalls, where we had parked them, still saddled, when we drove round to Halldorsons' to see if the bull was there. As I led my mount past the truck, Mart rolled the door window down and asked what I was doing.

" Loading my horse. And you're going to need yours."

" What are we going to do with them?"

" Capture the bull."

" I think we would have more luck at it on foot. After all, he's in a fenced pasture."

" He's in a muddy, five-acre, fenced pasture. Remember that time we tried to move Mr. Bainter's cattle for him on foot? We ended up going back for the horses to get the job done."


" Well, those cattle could see where we were driving them. This bull can't see a thing and I don't think he can be driven by a horse and rider any more than a pig can. I think we'll have to coax him along on foot." " Ahead or astern?" I wanted to know. In either direction, I was not going to slog around up to my ankles in mud all morning. That's what long-legged horses were used for. "Anyway, if he proves to be as undrivable as a pig, we'll just shoot him and eat him on the spot." With that sensible promise as collateral, Martin got out of the truck and loaded his horse.

The old, wooden trailer, freighted with horses, pointed up all the different elevations in the lane proceeding into the Halldorson place in a fashion the unencumbered pick-up alone had been incapable of doing. I grumbled the observation to Martin, wondering what could have directed so many meteors to land in one driveway.

Again, nobody would admit they were home by answering the bell. I expected that they were in the house, though, and had been aware of our presence since we had first labored up the drive. The gist of their conversation could only have been as follows:

Karen: "Oh, Chuck! Someone's coming up the lane with a trailer. Probably to get the bull!"

Chuck: "Get back from that window, and if they come to the door, don't answer it."

Karen: "It's Mr. Moritz and Ken Ely!"

Chuck: "Get away from that window, please, and make some more coffee. If all goes well, they will have removed their pop-eyed bologna by the time I've finished the paper. I have no mind to spend my morning out in the mud."

We bumped, creaked, and clattered on past the house to the barn. It was one of those old affairs with a hay mow on either side and a wagon alley dividing the middle. We walked through the wagon alley to survey our terrain and plot our campaign.

Several different plans of attack presented themselves, the initial and most appealing one being to leave a note on the Halldorsons' door deeding them full proprietary rights to the bull and driving back to the ranch congratulating ourselves on our good fortune at having got rid of him with so little effort. In lieu of that, however, we unloaded the horses, lead them through the barn and tied them on its behind side; then we backed the trailer into the front end of the wagon alley. As the wagon alley was conveniently defined by rails - the sort of rails one would find in stalls - I supposed it would be an easy enough matter to haze the bull into the barn through the rear opening (which might have been considered a reasonable target for even a visually impaired bull), up into the trailer, and then to cart him off home.

We tried cutting him out from the heifers but he was of no mind to go. And the heifers were of no mind to have him gone, which is a testimony to the lack of discrimination on the part of cattle in general: cattle are usually spooked by strange-looking objects that move; however, the heifers seemed to embrace the bull's company as desirable. That left us with pushing the whole lot of them up to the barn. Up to the barn: we couldn't get them to go in, though. They hemmed, they hawed, they milled around. When pressed by our horses, they tended to break and scatter. One would have thought the world was flat and the edge of it lay just inside that barn door. Ultimately, the whole bunch exploded in a panic, went tearing around us, and formed up at the farthest corner of the pasture. Getting them lined out along the fence, we began to march them along it, intending to drive them from corner to corner until we had them bunched again at the edge of the world. We were proceeding handsomely, evenlly orderly, like the Cherokee nation traversing the Trail of Tears, when one of the Cherokees revealed her true identity as an Apache and bolted from the line at full tilt. I let out a whoop and shot my horse into a run after her. Martin, at the same instant, let out a whoop with the word " Wire!" in it.

Now, shouting "Wire!" to a horseman is like shouting "Rocks!" to a sailor. I could see no wire anywhere ahead of me, but reflexes had me sit down hard and draw rein. My horse squatted right back on her heels in a sliding stop - only she couldn't confine the maneuver to just sitting on her heels and stopping because of the mud: she went right on sliding until she fell flat on her side in the gumbo. I would like to be able to report that I stepped off her at the last possible moment with a cavalier's flourish. In fact, however, I remained with her to the conclusion of the evolution and met with the mud in the same splash that she did.

The escaped Apache lead all the Cherokees, and the bull, to run into a small corral on the far side of the barn. This, of course, was tactical idiocy on the Apache's part, leading me to surmise that she probably wasn't really an Apache after all; for true Apaches are cagey strategists. The corral was long, but so narrow that the whole bunch could be easily detained within it by one of us on a horse. If either Martin or I had been genuine cowboys, one of us could have edged his horse in and tossed a loop over the bull's horns while the other kept the herd at bay. Only our cowboyness didn't reach that far. While I sat my horse in the gateway, Mart dismounted, took his lariat off his saddle, and walked quietly into the corral. He found one heifer a little older than the rest, and a little less spooky, who allowed him to use her as a screen to get close to the bull. From the cover of her side, Mart draped his loop over the bugger's horns. As soon as the bull felt the rope tighten around his poll, he shot straight backward - in his usual fashion - crushing one heifer into the fence and causing the whole corral to pop and crack badly enough that I feared the entire structure would collapse. Mart ran the rope to his saddle horn, made fast, and climbed back into the saddle again.. Then, with his horse pulling and me whacking the bull's rump, or booting it, we worked him round to the entrance to the wagon alley.

Realizing that he was at the edge of the world once more, the bull plunged and yawed like a kite on a string. His gyrations went to such a pitch that Mart's horse began to stagger and stumble, but still she made progress, like a tug pulling a barge against a cross seaway. We got the bull's head just inside the barn and there the fear of death seized upon him. He reared like a marlin on a line, which fantails over the water, trying to throw the uncomprehended hook that holds his head and drags him to his doom; and he bellowed that curious, tongue-sticking-out shriek that bull's can make. As his front legs descended from this performance, I rammed my horse's chest into his rump. Into the barn he shot to stand in the middle of the wagon alley in myopic amazement.

I closed the gate behind him, tied my horse to the railing along the side of the alley, and went up into the trailer. Mart walked his horse past the trailer, easily pulling the bull up to it. This was because once he was off the edge of the world and floating in outer space, he came along pretty nicely. I maintained a minimum of tension on the rope while Mart took it off his saddle and ran it through the trailer, out the front, and tied it around the trailer tongue. Pulling and pushing together, we managed to coax him up between the trailer doors. Here, he began to toss his head from side to side, which resulted in his banging one of the trailer doors with his horn. The door flapped open against the limit of its hinges, then sprung back and whacked him on the side of the face. At this, he took offence, drove his horn through the door, and ripped it off its hinges. Then he shot backward to the limit of the rope. " Have you got enough rope outside the front of the trailer to make fast to your saddle horn again?" I asked Mart. "I don't think we have enough horsepower, ourselves, to drag him into the trailer."

" No, but I'll tell you what. Jump in and drive the truck, the trailer, and the bull out of the wagon alley until I can slide the barn door shut. Then, back up and squeeze him into the trailer."

This all worked pretty well. When I inched the trailer backward, the bull retreated at the end of the rope until his rump fetched up against the closed door behind him. Thus stabilized as he (the bull) was, Mart could take up the slack in the rope as I continued to back up, preventing him (the bull) from squirting out sideways. Logic would have it that, when put to the squeeze, the bull would have stepped up into the trailer, since he had no place else to go. But there was not what might be called and abundant harvest of logic that had accrued to this bull during his life. He didn't step up; he just stood there and let me push his front legs backward with the trailer until he fell into it on his chin. Then he laid there. And it took us a power of tugging and kicking to get him back on his feet and the rest of the way in.

Mart drove the bull home; I rode one horse and led the other. Somehow, the day had got by us without our having eaten lunch or gone to the stock auction, either. There was just time left to clean stalls before supper. And, as I look back on it all, it seems like most of the ranch years passed like this particular day. Busy. Full of plans that got waylaid in little misadventures. None of the Bradfords are ranching nowadays. Neither am I. Ranching was a small vintage for all of us. A strong vintage, though; and a good vintage; but one that is better - and best - looked back upon rather than imbibed for a lifetime.

©2004 February 3, 2004

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