Chapter Eight: A Wreck

Slim broke the silence. “Okay, we’ve got two cowboys, one rope, and one dog. How are we going to get the bone out?”

“You sit on the hood with the rope. I’ll drive and give you a shot.”

“Forget the hood. I’ll ride in the back.”

“You’d get a closer shot on the hood.”

“Yeah, and if I fell off, you’d run over me, and probably enjoy it too.”

Loper chuckled. “Fine, do it the hard way, I don’t care. If you happen to slop a loop on her, dally the rope to the headache rack. We’ll let her fight the rope till she chokes down, walk down the rope, open her mouth, pull out the bone, take off the rope, and go home. Ten minutes and we’re done.”

“We should have brought horses.”

“Hurry up, will you? I’ve got things to do.” Slim said no more. He found a catch-rope behind the seat, climbed into the bed of the pickup, and built a loop. When he had stepped outside the pickup and slammed the door, Loper muttered, “That is the slowest human being I ever saw.”

Slim yelled, “All right, let’s do it!”

Loper shifted into first gear and drove toward the cow. In theory, this promised to be an easy job: drive up close to the cow and pitch a loop around her neck. If cows were made of stone, cowboy plans would work every time, but cows are alive, and when a pickup comes toward them, they move.

She moved away as the pickup approached. Slim threw long and missed. He reloaded, made another long shot, and missed again. He was starting to get mad. “For crying out loud, get closer and give me a shot!”

“I told you to sit on the hood. Okay, hang on.” Loper tromped on the gas and we roared after the cow. She ran, of course, but this time, Loper jerked the wheel to the left and stayed right on her tail. We waited for Slim to make his throw.

At that moment, we heard a racket coming from the bed of the pickup. Loper looked through the back window. “Where’d he go?”

He seemed to be asking me. How was I supposed to know?

It was then that we saw Slim, picking himself off the ground. Gee, he must have fallen out. He slammed his hat down on his head and stomped over to Loper’s open window. He didn’t look too cheerful.

“Did you have to stick your foot plumb through the carburetor?”

“You said you wanted a close shot, I gave you a close shot. And I told you to hang on.”

“Thunder, I didn’t know you were going to play NASCAR.”

Loper grunted and glanced at his watch. “I swear, it’s hard to find good help these days.”

“I agree, and since this was your big idea, why don’t you show me how it’s done?”

They glared at each other for a long moment, then Loper said, “By grabs, I’ll take a piece of that. Five bucks says we’ll be done and out of here in ten minutes—that is, if you don’t mess up the driving too.”

Slim shook his head. “Not five bucks, Loper. Ten.”

“You’re on, son. Kiss your ten goodbye.” He burst out of the cab. “Give me that rope.”

He snatched the rope away from Slim. In a flash, he built a loop, made two quick twirls, and pitched a hoolihan loop around a clump of broom weed. He gave Slim a wink and a smirk. “That’s how it’s done in the Big Time. And I’ll show you another trick. Pay attention.”

He went to the front of the pickup and tied the home-end of his rope to the grill guard, then hopped up on the hood. “This is where you want to be when you rope out of a pickup. Can you drive without falling out of the cab?”

Slim barked a laugh. “Loper, you beat it all.”

Slim started the pickup and we moved toward the cow. Up on the pickup hood, Loper had his loop cocked and ready to fire. Closer and closer. The cow watched us with an evil eye and shook her head. When she turned to run, Loper saw his shot.

In one rapid motion, he flicked out a loop that dropped over the cow’s head and settled around her neck. He jerked the slack and turned around and showed Slim a grin that seemed to say, “That’s how it’s done.”

Inside the cab, Slim muttered, “That was dumb luck. I think I just lost ten bucks.”

It was a pretty piece of cowboy work, for sure, but let me pause here to discuss some of the broader aspects of ranch management. See, if a top-of-the-line, blue-ribbon cowdog had been in charge this operation, he wouldn’t have put troops into combat until he had answered one simple question:

“Is the pickup’s grill guard stout enough to hold the jerk of a full-grown cow?”

It was a simple, obvious question, and the answer was absolutely crucial to the success of the mission, but I was pretty sure that neither Loper nor Slim had paused to ask it.

I knew these guys, I had worked beside them for years and knew how they approached a job of work. In a word, slap-dash. See, they’d exhausted all their mental assets figuring out how to pitch a noose around the neck of something big and mean, and had no mental reserves left to figure out what might happen if they succeeded—or, for that matter, how they might get their rope back.

Every cowboy should ask how he’s going to get his rope back, but they seldom do. You know who wonders about such things? The dogs. See, for decades, loyal cowdogs have been sitting in ranch pickups, observing roping fiascos that turned absolutely bizarre. I mean, no circus master, no writer of comedy, no carnival owner could invent the scenes of chaos and mayhem that we dogs observe in the course of a normal day’s work.

Just when we think we’ve seen it all, we find that we’ve seen only the beginning. There’s more, always more.

Are you still with me? I hope so, because it’s fixing to get wild and western.

Okay, when Loper tied the end of his rope to the grill guard, it never occurred to him to wonder if the bolts that held it to the frame of the pickup were worn and rusted. You’d suppose this might be a matter of interest, considering that 1) most ranch pickups are old; 2) ranch roads are rough and hard on bolts; 3) it sometimes rains and snows in the Texas Panhandle, and moisture is the leading cause of rust; and 4) bolts that are old, worn, and rusted tend to break under stress.

Loper didn’t wonder about any of this. I, sitting in the pickup, wondered about it, but also knew that our people don’t want to know what their dogs are thinking, so I sat in silence and didn’t raise even a squeak of concern.

The most important question of the day was soon answered: No, the grill guard was not stout enough to take the jerk of a full-grown cow.

When she hit the end of the rope, we heard a loud, sickening CRUNCH. And two cowboys watched in amazement as the cow ran off, dragging the grill guard behind her. I was amazed that they were amazed. I mean, where do these guys live? What kind of cotton balls do they have inside their heads?

Oh brother.

Slim watched with an open mouth, then burst out laughing. “Good honk, will you look at that!”

Loper was nowhere close to laughing. “Don’t just sit there. Grab the rope!”

Oh, the stories we dogs could tell if we only had a chance!

Loper bailed off the hood of the pickup and Slim exploded out the door, and the two of them sprinted after the cow. Well, this had turned into the disaster I had predicted, and I had let it go on long enough. I went sailing out the window. These yo-yoes needed help, before someone got maimed or killed.

Once on the ground, I kicked the jets up to Turbo Four, and began…I refuse to take the blame for tripping Slim. He was an adult male, a grown man, and should have been watching where he was going. My eyes were locked on the radar screen and, well, we had a little collision and he took a nasty fall.

Of course, he blamed ME. “Hank, for crying out loud, get out of the way!”

See? I live with this all the time.

The chase continued. Loper was the first to reach the grill guard, which had now become a sled made out of steel pipe and angle iron. He jumped on it. A moment later, Slim arrived and jumped on it too.

Maybe they thought their weight would stop the cow, but they were wrong. She might have been thin and weak, but she gave the boys quite a ride, circled the windmill, and threw up a choking cloud of dust around the sled.

Flying blind through dust, I intercepted the beast just south of the windmill. I punched the targeting information into the computer and got a blinking red light to Launch the Weapon.

In this kind of combat situation, we target the nose, not the heels. Firing barks and bites at the rear of the brute will cause her to run faster, so when our objective is to stop the cow, we go for the nose. That’s what I did, took a double-jawed bite on her nose and hung on.

That shut her down, and it gave Loper enough time to dig a knife out of his pocket. He managed to cut the rope and unhitch it from the grill guard. At last, we were getting a handle on this situation, but we weren’t quite out of the woods yet.

The cow gave her head a mighty jerk and sent me flying through the air. Oof! I leaped to my feet and turned to face the…yipes, her eyes were flaming, and coils of steam hissed out of her nostrils.

She had decided to kill a certain dog. Me. And here she came!

Only a dunce would have stood there, waiting to see if she could do it. I whirled around and ran for my life, and within seconds, she was breathing fire on my tail section.

Perhaps you’re wondering what the cowboys were doing while all this was going on. Great question, but you won’t believe the answer. Loper grabbed the end of the rope, wrapped it around his hips, dug his heels into the dirt, and leaned back, with the apparent intention of stopping the cow.

I don’t want to seem judgmental, but…what can you say? This was one of the DUMBEST stunts I had ever witnessed. What do you suppose happens to a one hundred and eighty pound rancher when a thousand-pound cow hits the end of a rope? I mean, it should have been obvious.

I suppose we can give him credit for being brave, but the result wasn’t pretty. He got jerked out of his tracks like a tent peg, and was soon being dragged by the same cow that was trying to eat me. And she was getting closer by the second.

At that point, I did what any normal, intelligent, American cowdog would have done. I dived into the overflow pond, knowing that she would never follow me into the water.