Horse Lover (12 page)

The corral was cluttered with wood and debris and had loose rub boards hanging down. I assigned Vince cleanup duty. Cole and I headed our horses out along the levy that separated the Gila River from Charlie’s fields. A barbed wire fence ran the length of the levy. The ground on both sides of the fence was a mosaic of giant hoofprints. We opened a gate to get to the river where we thought the bull might be hanging out and left it open so we could backtrack through it. The ground had long since gulped the monsoon rains so the slender river barely filled one-eighth of its quarter-mile bed. Thickets of scrub brush and mesquite grew in the sand, perfect hideouts for a crafty animal not quite crafty enough to hide his trail. We followed a fresh track of prints that led straight into a thicket.

There was a muted drum roll of thudding hooves, a splash of water, and a big red bull with a massive set of horns jumped out front and center about eighty yards ahead of us. Except for the tips having been cut off the horns years before, he could have been the poster bull for Merrill Lynch. He must have weighed eighteen hundred pounds. He glared at us, defiant, then bolted into the next thicket. He might have been all hulk, but he was quicker than an
NFL
running back.

Cole and I loped toward him, hoping to haze him out of the thicket. Instead he raced downstream to the next clump of brush. We approached and he dashed out, ran across the river, and ducked behind more mesquite and sagebrush. This tacking back and forth across the river with him getting the better of us quickly grew tiresome. I decided to call a different play. I hand signaled to Cole that I was going to slip around to the far side of brush where the bull would exit. Cole knew the play. He stayed on the opposite side and started making a racket. The bull burst out. He looked startled to see me twenty yards away. The lid popped off the action box.

Tequila charged the bull. I threw my rope, intending to rope him around the neck so I could choke him if I had to. A bull can’t fight if he can’t breathe. But instead, the rope pulled up around his horns. I dallied up. Tequila jammed her front legs straight out. The bull turned and headed off, dragging her twelve hundred pounds like a sled in a southwestern Iditarod. A hundred yards later he stopped to catch his breath. Cole rode up on the side of him and hazed him toward the corral. For the next twenty minutes, the fight spread over the river valley. When the bull turned toward the corral, we gave him slack and followed him. Then he’d tire, stop, and turn back toward us. Not what you want. A feisty bull facing you. Cole would fight him again until he turned forward again and we’d make more progress. I could feel Tequila beginning to tire. I was sorry that I had roped this sucker; it was more than Tequila could handle, but she wasn’t going to quit. She remained brave and stayed with the job.

“Come on, girl. I can see the corral.” The bull jerked the rope and I let him pull us. “Cole, you take the rope,” I yelled. It seemed like a good point to give Tequila a break. I loosened the taut rope and threw Cole the slack; he dallied on his saddle horn. The bull must have felt the rope’s tension change, because as soon as Cole dallied up that big old lug took off, practically pulling Cole’s horse on her nose. Her nine hundred pounds were no match for his brute strength. I could see this was a mistake.

The bull climbed up the levee and veered through the open gate. Tequila and I galloped up next to Cole and reclaimed the rope. Tequila gave it another all. She grunted, tightened her shoulders, leaned back, and locked her legs. The bull slowed, but didn’t stop. He was furious that he was still roped and in a fix. He hunched forward and stomped down the levee toward the cotton field. Out of the corner of my eye, I noticed a red dirt bike at the edge of the field. I could see two teenagers in a row of cotton, hoeing weeds. They must have arrived while we were chasing the bull in the riverbed.

The bull caught site of the cycle and made a beeline for it. Tequila lost her leverage and galloped behind him. That ornery beast made for the bike as if he was a bull in a Spanish ring charging the matador’s red cape. One of the boys stood up and pointed. “Hey, that’s our bike,” he hollered. “Leave it alone.” They started running toward it.

“Get away. I can’t control him,” I yelled, motioning them to turn back. I could feel the bull’s strength and determination pulling the rope. All I could do was hang on and pray he was more interested in the bike than the boys.

The bull never paused. He ran right up to that motorcycle, hooked his horns under it, and tossed it in the air like it was a play toy. Everything halted—the boys, the bull, Tequila, Cole—except the bike. We watched that two-wheeler fly twenty feet in the air, then plummet toward earth. It landed with a metal-crunching thud. The boys took off running in the opposite direction. Shit. They probably saved up a year’s salary of cotton-hoeing money to buy that motorcycle. Now there it lay, crumpled to death.

The bull shook his head, snorted, and stamped a few times. Tequila raised her head. She wasn’t going to let him get the last laugh if she could help it. He looked around as if contemplating what more damage he could do. He charged forward, jerking Tequila. She followed for a few steps, then splayed her feet and leaned back as hard as she could. I could feel her shoulders shake.

“Hang in there, girl,” I said. “Maybe he’ll head for the corral.”

Her quivering muscles told me her shoulders were sore and she was having a hard time holding the bull. She couldn’t dig in enough and we had to give slack when he pulled. Desperation hovered around the scene. If I let the bull go, he could turn and charge Cole or me or run after the boys. None of us wanted to see an angry, horned, one-ton animal barreling toward him. I heard a motor sputtering behind me. I turned in the saddle enough to see Charlie Clouse coming up the levee on his old popping Johnny, a 4020 John Deere tractor with a front-end loader. He must have seen our predicament because he wheeled in through the gate and pulled up beside me.

“Looks like the battle’s in full swing,” he shouted. “Can I help out?”

“Lord, I hope so. We’re just about overmatched here.” The bull stopped and turned to look at us, deciding whether to go forward or retrace his steps toward us. Charlie accelerated. He steered the tractor in front of Tequila and bumped that old bull none too gently. The bull wheeled around and took off straight toward the corral. Our convoy followed at high speed. Along the edge of the cotton field we went, then the alfalfa field. The bull stopped abruptly and looked back. Charlie was on him with the John Deere, and off the bull ran, not happy about being bumped again. The alfalfa field bordered the corral.

“Tequila, we gotta get him in the corral.” She pulled back a little, tightening the rope. The bull pulled to the right in response. If he kept on running, he’d go through the corral gate in less than a minute.

Vince stood at the ready, both hands on the open gate. Cole hazed the bull on one side and Charlie rode the tractor close on the other side. That big old red bull was running straight as an arrow. I unwound the dally and held the rope in my hand. The bull ran through the corral gate. I tossed the rope in behind him and Vince slammed the gate shut.

The bull stopped in the middle of the small corral. He swung his head in both directions, stomped around in a one-eighty, and went to snorting and pawing. He was one pissed-off dude at having lost the battle.

“Tequila, you get the purple heart,” I said, patting her shoulder. I was so proud of the way she hung in there to the very end. If I had known it was going to be such a huge chore, I wouldn’t have subjected her to it. Every once in a while I bit off more than I could chew and this was one of those times. I dismounted and let the reins drop. She wasn’t going anywhere. She was exhausted, sore, and used up. My heart went out to her. “You’ll get extra grain tonight, sweetheart, after we get this bad boy home.” I rubbed on her neck and nose.

Charlie, Cole, Vince, and I spent the next quarter hour trying to get the bull up the loading chute into the trailer. We swung long sticks in front of him, yelled, did everything we could think of. If we had had a red cape, we would have stood at the top of the chute and waved it. But that gol-darn animal stood his ground, flames jumping out of his eyes, looking for something to vent his fury on. When the mercury on our frustration thermometer began to top out, Vince volunteered to do the insane.

“I’ll run across the corral,” he said, like he had done it before a dozen times. “He’s going to charge me. But just before I get to the chute, I’ll jump for the fence. The bull will run under me and up the chute. Problem solved.” He shrugged his shoulders like it was no big deal.

Vince was fast and young, but this was Mr. Macho he was talking about, stud of the bull kingdom. I said, “You sure you want to do that? I’ve seen this guy run and you can be damn sure he’ll give you a chase.”

Vince eyed his competitor. He gave another casual cowboy shrug that said risking his life was no big deal. “I can do it, Boss. How else are we going to get him up that ramp?”

Standing there in the heat of a stalemate, I couldn’t answer his question. “Okay,” I said, my glass of confidence half-empty. “But put some fire in those boots.”

Vince slipped around to the other side of the corral and climbed over the fence. He hit the ground running and yelling. He ran like a jackrabbit, but that bull’s muscles were spring-loaded and ready to snap. He lurched into a run. Vince threw a hand and foot on the fence at the same time the bull hiked his horns under Vince’s butt. Vince became airborne and went flying over the corral fence, head over tail. I winced. He thumped down on his back. The bull surveyed his work and clopped up the wooden chute into the trailer.

Vince didn’t move for a few moments. The wind in him had to be knocked from here to Lazy B. Cole hustled to secure the bull in the trailer, and Charlie and I jogged over to Vince prepared to give first aid. Before we got to him, Vince stood up, wobbled a step, and said with a grin, “Got that sonofabitch, didn’t I?”

“You practicing to be a rodeo clown?” said Charlie, slapping him on the back.

I was glad he was in one piece.

Back at Lazy B, we unloaded the bull into his own corral where he stomped around for the rest of the day.

I led Tequila out of the trailer. She limped her way into the horse corral. “You stay here for a rest, girl. Eat some hay, take it easy.” I put a hand on each shoulder and rubbed. I didn’t like to see her in pain. “I couldn’t be more proud of you, Tequila. You gave me everything you had and never quit even when it got down and dirty.” She nosed my shirt.

We left the bull in the corral. Every time I looked his way, he got pissed and made me understand that he was not the forgiving type. He had lost his way of life and wasn’t going to give in to rehab easily. Every few days, one of the cowboys would load hay in the pickup, drive it into the corral, and get out to throw it in the feed manger. That bull would charge and he’d have to jump back in the truck. I made a judgment call to never turn that animal out again. If we did and went to gather him, he might charge us or catch someone unaware and really do some damage. The following week I loaded him into the trailer and hauled him to the livestock auction. He made a lot of hamburger for someone.

Charlie told me who the kids were that owned the motorcycle. I called them and said if you can’t fix your motorcycle, I’ll buy you a new one. And that’s what I ended up doing.

I gave Tequila a week in the corral and fed her extra hay. She walked around with a stiff gait, a sign of strained shoulder muscles. I thought it best to give her a long rest, so I turned her out for six months in the horse pasture, then brought her in, but she was still lame. Her shoulders had not healed right and she walked with a limp. I felt twinges of sadness and regret every time I looked at her. She was still handsome and young, much too good a horse to sell, so I turned her out with the broodmares to raise colts, and she raised some really fine ones.

11.

A Wormy Mess

John caught up with me in the shop where I was repairing a windmill part. “Found another dead horse this morning,” he said. “On the northeast end of the meadow. It must have died last night because it wasn’t out there yesterday when we passed through. Coyotes already had it skinned to the bones.”

This wasn’t news I wanted to hear. Last week two horses died, and two others the week before. Counting the one today that brought the total to five head dead in two weeks. That was more than coincidence or the result of old age. Something was amok in windswept paradise. I pushed the windmill blade into position on the band and pinched my finger. “Goddamnit,” I said, both to the pinch and the mystery of the horses dying. “We’ve got to get to the bottom of this.”

John suggested I call Doc Burford, cousin to Bob Burford, head of the
BLM
. He was reputed to be the best horse vet in the area. Over the phone we devised a plan. Anyone who found a dead horse on the ranch was to radio headquarters and stay with the carcass to keep the coyotes at bay. Whoever was at headquarters would call Doc Burford, who agreed to drop what he was doing and hightail it out to conduct a postmortem on the horse. It didn’t take but two days before I put in the call to the vet’s office.

Doc Burford arrived within two hours. We hopped in his truck and bounced out to the meadow. He cast an experienced eye over the herd as we drove through it.

“Well, these horses look fine. Beautiful, in fact,” he added. They did look fine with their coats shining in the sun, calmly grazing on the blanket of newly sprouted grass. A bubble of pride floated up in me.

Near the northeast corner, I could see Russ waving us down. Doc pulled the truck up alongside a palomino mare. She lay on her side, legs out, head back. She wasn’t thin and didn’t look unhealthy in any way. She just looked like she was sleeping.

The back of Doc’s truck was a hospital on wheels. He opened compartments and laid out his instruments on the hinged door that flipped out, then put on a rubber bib and pulled on latex gloves up to his elbows. He asked us to roll the horse on her back and spraddle the front and back legs. Choosing a butcher’s skinning knife and starting at the brisket, he made a neat cut all the way down through the stomach clear to her bag. He skinned the hide back a good twelve inches on each side. Another cut opened up the gut cavity. He started pulling out entrails, stomach first, followed by small intestine.

“Hold your nose,” he said, as he sliced through the stomach. The stench of partially digested food hit the air. With a gloved hand, he pulled out a handful of greenish matter. “Uh oh,” he said. “See these?” He flicked a tiny translucent speck among the pieces of wet hay and grass. “These are worms. Not the kind that kill, but often the kind that accompany the killers. Let’s check out the small intestine and find out what’s hiding there.”

He sliced the intestine, reached in, pulled out fecal matter, and examined it. “Just as I suspected. Here’s what’s killing your horses.” I could see worms moving. “You have several types of worms, but this one here,” he said, pointing, “this is the one that kills.”

“Have the worms developed since she arrived, which might have been five months ago?” I asked.

“No, it takes worms a long time to multiply, so this horse definitely was infected well before you received her.”

My background didn’t give me much knowledge about worm infection. At Lazy B we never needed to worm because the dry climate was a natural deterrent. Worms can’t survive in dust. Was it possible that worms were threatening the lives of twelve hundred horses?

“So what do we do now?”

Doc Buford snapped off his gloves. “You need to worm the horses. All of them, because you don’t know which ones are infected and which ones aren’t. And you need to do it right away. There are several different methods of worming. If it were only one horse, you could put a tube down its throat and inject the serum into the stomach. But with this large a herd, you don’t want to head catch each one. I recommend Ivomec. It’s a full-spectrum wormer and you can inject it into the muscle of the shoulder or neck. It’s a bit more expensive, but every bit as effective.”

John and I looked at each other, neither of us able to speak. In less than ten minutes, Doc Buford nailed the problem and it was a biggie. The thermostat of frustration had just been turned up. The
BLM
had sent me wormy horses. My contract with them called for them to deworm the horses before shipping. Where in the bureaucratic maze did that one get lost? Not only did this breach of contract affect the horses, it affected the land, which in turn threatened my code of honor to always leave the land better than I had found it. I wasn’t a worm expert, but any rancher knows the cycle of worms. They grow in the horses, drop to the ground in the horses’ poop, bury themselves in the soil, hatch as flies, sting the horses, and implant their larvae under the horses’ skin. But as a result of someone’s carelessness, the unwanted insects had taken up residence on Mustang Meadows Ranch and now horses were dying on my watch.

First thing I did after thanking Doc Burford was order the Ivomec. It would arrive by Monday. John assured me we had a sufficient supply of vaccine guns. Next I called the
BLM
office in Sturgis.

“I’ve got a disaster here,” I said to the voice at the other end. “You sent me wormy horses. I’m going to have to worm the entire herd, because someone in the shipping department didn’t worm all of them and there’s no way of tracking which ones have been wormed and which haven’t.”

After hearing my story, the voice proceeded to say that oh no, the horses can’t be wormed now. There’s no money.

“Well, I’m worming them next Tuesday.”

The voice: “We can’t get the Ivomec there that soon, and besides, you can’t worm all those horses in one day. There are too many. It’ll take you five days.”

“No,” I said, “that’s not the plan. We’re going to worm them on Tuesday. I’ve already ordered the Ivomec and it will be here by then. Furthermore, it won’t take us a full day. I’ve trained the horses. We’ll line them up in the chute and we’ll just reach over and vaccinate them as they go by. We’ll be done by two o’clock.”

The voice rose. “Look, we’ve been in the horse business for forty years. Wild horses don’t go up the chute that easily. Every time one gets turned around, you have to unload the whole chute and start fresh. You might even need a week.”

“No,” I said, “I’ve trained these horses. I know they’ll file through without doing that.” The voice wanted to argue.

“Look,” I said, interrupting the cycle of this conversation. “I already ordered the vaccine and I intend for you to pay for it because this mess is your mistake. We’re scheduled to vaccinate next Tuesday. If you want your people to learn something, send some representatives down. They can get up on the fence and watch, but they have to stay out of our way.”

I slammed down the phone. The breeze blew in one window and out the other. I’m sure my words were scattered all over headquarters.

Tuesday arrived along with three
BLM
reps. I was setting up the vaccinating station in the back of the Suburban, parked alongside the chute. I went over and greeted the men and offered coffee but had no takers. I pointed out an unobtrusive place where they could stand and have a clear view of the action.

Everyone had his assignment. Russ would load the vaccine guns, ten doses per gun. John was horseback and would feed the horses into the rear of the chute. Carlos and Ramon would work the gates. Marty and I would vaccinate.

A dozen horses filed into the chute and Carlos shut the gate behind them. I pushed the needle into the first horse’s shoulder and squeezed the handle of the vaccinating gun. Click. Done. Just like giving someone a punch on the shoulder. I walked toward the next horse in the chute. The horse flinched slightly as I inserted the needle. Squeeze. Click. Next horse. Squeeze, click. After ten horses and one minute, my gun was empty. Marty took over with his gun and I walked over to Russ to pick up a freshly loaded gun. When Marty was done, I took over. And so it went for five hours. We didn’t use alcohol and rub. We did it cowboy style. There was no small talk. We started at nine and at quarter to two, I handed the guns to John, and he went straight to the bunkhouse to disassemble them and sanitize all the parts. I walked over to talk to the
BLM
reps, who hadn’t budged.

“You put on a heck of a show,” one of them said.

His coworker chimed in. “We expected to see horses balk and run. But golly, they marched through it like they had done this ten times before.”

“Well we’ve worked with them quite a little,” I said. If only they knew. “We’ve made friends and when we ask them to do something, they pretty much oblige.”

“Boy, these corrals lend themselves to letting the horses flow through them. Could you train us to handle horses like that?”

Yes, I could, but I didn’t tell them that. I was pleased at the day’s results but still pissed so I let loose a cocky answer. “Strange that you’ve been in the wild horse business for forty years and I’ve been in it for six months and you’re asking me if I can teach you? What’s wrong with this picture?” It was a stupid thing to say.

“Well, we’ll tell the boss how well this went today. He might want to have you give some classes on horse handling.”

No one from the
BLM
ever called. Maybe if I courted them a little they would have. Maybe not. As it was, we had to vaccinate each year after that. We never had a problem with worms again, nor with the
BLM
putting up a stink about paying. They paid for all the vaccines, including the Ivomec we used that day. I don’t know what level they had to climb up to in order to find the money, but they did. Or maybe they didn’t have to climb at all. What mattered most was that we intercepted a disaster.

No cowboy likes to have a sick—or worse, dead—horse. But the reality is that it’s as impossible for all ranch horses to stay healthy as it is for all human beings. Sickness and health are part of nature. What makes a difference is how you deal with each.

We didn’t breed too many black horses at Lazy B, but we had a few and, by far, my favorite was Blackberry. Often black horses have white stockings or a star on their forehead. Not Blackberry. She was pure black and shiny. What really set her apart, however, was her demeanor. When we weaned her, she was the quickest of the group to respond to petting and gentleness. If she noticed me walk into the corral, she sauntered over to say hello and rested her head on my shoulder while I rubbed on her neck. If I was working on the other side of the fence, she came over to see what was up, a curious, intelligent look in her eyes. Always eager to please, she quickly learned to lead and load in a trailer. Once she and the other colts learned these basics, they moved up to Robb’s Well.

All the Lazy B horses spent at least a year at Robb’s Well, a hilly place with grass poking through a ground cover of rocks and boulders. We turned them out there and let them fend for themselves on what nature provided. Sure, we could have kept them at the corrals, ridden, fed, and cared for them, and they would have grown even larger, but we bred some pretty big horses as it was. There was a factor that overrode size and availability. The cogs of a busy, fully operating, 198,000-acre ranch are greased by self-reliance. Our horses needed to know how to traverse rocky terrain because they most likely would be doing that for the rest of their lives. They needed to learn to endure the heat of high-desert summers and adjust to the short but deep chill of winter, all beneath a giant roof of clear sky. They needed to learn to subsist on native ranch grass, not on the grain and hay that pampered horses receive when kept in stalls and corrals. Was it tough love? For sure. Were our horses loved? Just as kids with eight or nine siblings are loved by parents, grandparents, and a hoard of aunts and uncles, these rock-raised horses were loved too. In all my years of ranching, we didn’t lose even a one of those horses out at Robb’s Well to disease or predators.

One day Cole Webb and I went out to repair a well and decided to drive by the pasture to check on the colts and fillies, something we periodically did. The horses were scattered around the hillside, grazing. All appeared copacetic until I focused the binoculars on Blackberry. She had developed a limp. Cole and I got out of the truck to investigate. Blackberry noticed us and started to half-walk, half-trot unevenly down the hill toward us.

“Hey girl,” I said, rubbing her nose. “What’s going on with you?” She did a full-body shake as if trying to shake off the problem, whatever it was.

“It’s her right shoulder,” said Cole. I stepped around to look. Sure enough, at the bottom of her shoulder was a weeping wound about an inch wide. The hair around it had crusted over. “Looks like a puncture wound,” he said. Besides being the ranch foreman, Cole served as our self-trained ranch doctor. “We’re going to need to bring her in and see what’s stuck in there.”

We went back and hauled the trailer up to Robb’s Well, loaded Blackberry, and returned to headquarters. Cole probed around in the wound and pulled out a piece of stick. He gave her an oral antibiotic and we returned her to Robb’s Well. Each week, we checked on her. She seemed to be healing well until about week three, when the slightest of limps returned. By week four, all vestiges of Cole’s surgery had disappeared and she was right back where she started—with an open, running sore and a full limp.

Cole said, “Maybe I better try again.” This time he went deeper and shot antibiotics directly into the wound.

We watched her some more, but the infection wouldn’t heal. She didn’t complain. Every time I visited her, she acknowledged me with a whinny, friendly as ever. I’d ask her how she was doing and love on her, then she’d escort me to the gate and say goodbye. Just being around her set my day right. For six months, she had that infection, but never bad enough to warrant a call to the vet. The main side effect seemed to be that it stunted her growth. All the other horses had gained weight and stature. Not Blackberry. The infection consumed her energy and kept her short and kind of squat.