The Old Man and the Open Cows
by Bo Brock
(or the other title for this story could be…. NO BULL)
I can remember looking down and seeing “8:02” on the digital clock in the pickup as I pulled up to the ranch.
I use the term “ranch” loosely because this gentleman had only seventeen cows. We had a busy morning scheduled, and with any luck, I would be back to the clinic by nine o’clock and could start getting caught up. After all, how long could it take to palpate seventeen cows for pregnancy? At some of the ranches my associate and I go to, we can palpate 750 to 800 head in a day.
I had never met this fellow but I was not surprised to see that he was old. His voice on the phone sounded like each breath could have been his last. I watched him mosey out of the front door of a stucco house that had not been painted or repaired in any way for what looked like about fifty years. He must have been about six foot five inches and weighed about 125 pounds. He was so thin and wore such tight jeans that it looked as if his legs bent four or five times before they connected with his feet. He was wearing one of those Western shirts with snaps for buttons and had a giant bandana tied around his neck. His boots were straight out of a grade-B Western movie. They were so pointed that his toes just had to be setting one atop the other in order to conform to the shape they were forced to comply with.
The only piece of attire that did not fit the Western motif was his hat. The hat looked like the one that the engineer on Petticoat Junction wore. It was made out of striped mattress ticking material and had been worn so much that it had taken on a lean to the left side of his head.
He never spoke a word as he approached. He just pointed over to a set of run-down sheds and a working pen about the size of a football field.
I put the pickup back in drive and headed over. He ambled across the yard at a snail’s pace and began to talk long before I could hear what he was saying.
I began to size up the situation. Seventeen cows of various sizes and shapes stood in the middle of a one-acre trap. In the center of the trap was the oldest squeeze chute I had ever seen. There were no alleys leading to the chute at all. It just sat alone like a centerpiece on a Thanksgiving table. In fact, there was no fence in the entire trap, except the one that made up the perimeter.
It was obvious that he had coaxed the cattle in from a large pasture that was out the south end of the trap. These cows did not look like they had been handled much. They were looking at me with wide nostrils and high heads.
He was still mumbling as he approached, but I was not concerned with what he was saying. I was concentrating on the logistics of an eighty-year-old man and a thirty-five-year-old veterinarian getting seventeen snorting cows through a squeeze chute with no alleys leading to it. I was beginning to think that this was going to put me a little behind on the tidy schedule the secretary had booked for the day.
When his ramblings finally penetrated the my wall of thoughts, I was contemplating, it became apparent that one of the cows might be a little dangerous. He called the red one “a bit snakey.” Having been around old cowboy dudes all my life, I knew what this meant: look out! He was not kidding, either. The rascal would leave the pack and charge anything that came into the pen.
Here is the situation: Grandpa and I were going to carry twenty pipe panels that probably weigh about 300 pounds each from a barn a hundred yards away to construct an alley leading to an antique chute, all while ducking a “snakey” red cow. This guy took a full five minutes to walk across the yard. It was becoming clear that I was going to be more than a little behind when I got back to the clinic.
The red, glowing letters on the dash of the pickup said 10:29 as I plopped into the seat for a drink of water. Just two and a half hours were required to “throw up a few panels.” My back was aching, and my patience totally gone.
The red cow liked the old man. It was me she wanted to charge. She would run back and forth around him, and he would never even change expressions. She must have blown two gallons of snot on me, and I must have kicked two tons of dirt on her. If those panels weighed 300 pounds apiece, I was carrying 285 pounds, and he was carrying fifteen. But that was not the bad part. Because he walked so slowly, I had to carry 285 pounds about five times longer than I would have if I had pulled each one of them over by myself. Oh, but he insisted on helping.
The clock in the pickup read 12:02 as I sat in the front seat wondering why not one cow was pregnant. He had “run” up to the house to get some paperwork, while I wondered how I was going to salvage the rest of the day. By now, most of the early appointments had probably left, and the later ones were pacing the floor and calling me names.
My right index finger had been mashed in the mechanical squeeze chute. You see, I would push the cattle up, catch the head, squeeze her, open the tailgate, put a pipe behind each one, palpate her, mark on her with a paint stick, and finally let her go. His contribution to the entire process was to give me a verbal history of every cow.
When he finally returned, I told him that since every cow was open, we really needed to test his bull.
To this he replied, “What bull? I ain’t got no bull. Haven’t had one in over a year!”
I could feel my blood pressure going up. What in the world was this guy thinking? I spent all morning palpating cows that he said should have been having calves three months ago, only to find out that he doesn’t even have a bull. I was about to explode with some “anger-inspired” statements, when he interrupted me with a quote that I will never forget: “I don’t need no bull. Been feedin’ ’em them there breeder’s cubes for about a year now.”
Oh my, was my recurring theme as I drove home. Three dollars a head, crossed my mind a few times as I cruised along. That’s right. Fifty-one bucks plus a small call fee was what I had to show for my morning’s effort. It had crossed my mind as we constructed the working pens that none of those cows looked pregnant. It had crossed my mind a few times that there was no bull. It had crossed my mind a few times that I should have been getting a history while we worked. But it never crossed my mind that anyone would ever think that “breeder’s cubes” would make a cow pregnant.
