by Julie Carter
The agriculture census taker was more than just a little determined to catch up with the head honcho at the ranch and showed up regularly trying to pin him down.
He'd ask the missus. "Do you know where your husband is?"
She'd smile kindly and think to herself, "You've got to be kidding me."
When a cowboy heads out in the morning, he may have a semblance of a plan for what he intends to get done in the day, but rarely does it ever work out that way.
A typical scenario would go something like this.
"I'm going to fix that hole in the fence on the north side of the Bull Pasture," he told his wife.
"Just how big is that hole?" she queried. "Didn't you do that yesterday?"
That had been his plan, but instead, this is what happened.
He'd left the house with that very project in mind, but on the way, he saw a prolapsed cow. So he went back to the house, got a horse and a trailer and herded the cow to the nearest corrals. He loaded her in the trailer and headed toward town and the vet.
On the way, he spotted his neighbor having trouble getting a very angry bull into a trailer. So he stopped to help. Noticing his neighbor had a broken spring on his trailer, he mentioned it and the pair loaded up in the pickup and went to get parts to fix it. That trip also involved stopping to fix a flat on the pickup they were driving.
After they got back and the trailer was fixed, the neighbor asks, "Got any cold beer on you?"
"No," said the cowboy, but they agreed it was probably closer to town to get cold beer than back to the house, so off to the Quik Stop Burrito and Beer store they go.
In summation, that would be the reason the fence didn't get fixed that day.
Mule-ish appetites
The rancher was headed to town for his weekly mail pickup and to buy a few groceries for himself and his hired hand. The list from the hired hand's wife was written in Spanish and he was a little concerned about selecting the correct grocery items.
However, the grocer was able to help him translate and the shopping went quickly. He loaded a dozen bags of groceries into the back of the pickup and headed toward the ranch.
A few miles out of town, an old buddy that he hadn't seen in years flagged him down. They pulled off to the side of the road, visited a spell and then decided to continue catching up at a local watering hole just up the road a ways.
The afternoon wore into the early evening and they decided it was time to get on home. At his pickup, the rancher found complete mayhem among the grocery sacks.
Flour was strung out over everything, cans rolled to the tailgate, heads of lettuce torn apart and left with but a few leaves along edges of the pickup bed. The afternoon shopping results had been turned into a garbage pile.
It seemed a rancher local to the bar area had some mules running in the pasture surrounding the establishment. While the two friends were tipping cool ones and telling tall tales, the mules had helped themselves to the groceries. What they didn't eat, they tore up.
Julie can be reached for comment at jcarternm@gmail.com
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