One thing about working for day wages that makes things interesting is that you almost never know what you will be doing from day to day or where you’ll be doing it. A few years ago, I was in New Mexico and got a call from a friend managing a place up in Colorado. Besides running several hundred head of cows and a couple thousand head of bison, they were running a couple thousand yearling heifers. The man in charge of doctoring the heifers was laid up. Seems that he stepped off his horse and ran a nail through his foot. He tried keeping up with his doctoring for a few days before his foot got infected. Needless to say, it didn’t take long for the bad eyes and foot rots to get out of hand, and Clyde gave me a call. Because this was starting out to only be a one-day job with no warning to get the health papers on my horse, I left the old dink behind to ride whatever Clyde had. I left about four in the morning and pulled into the ranch by eight thirty, and the wreck was already on. Clyde had just started on this outfit a few weeks previous, and he was still more or less learning the place and the neighbors. But he knew his cows, and he spotted a couple of bulls next to the road that did not belong to the ranch. The way things turned out, doctoring the heifers would have to wait until the next day. Driving through the cows and trying to figure out what the brand was on the strange bulls, we noticed that the brand on the cows matched that of the brand on the bulls . . . well at least most of them were matching. Now this was rather confusing. Being new to the area, this was a new brand to Clyde so we headed to a phone to call the brand inspector to see where they came from. It turned out to be a neighbor who had taken his cattle up the mountain. He then went to haying and did not know his cattle had drifted back down to the valley. Since cattle are sociable creatures, and they decided to visit awhile. Between figuring out who the cattle belonged to, getting a hold of their owners, straightening the mess out, and fixing fence, we spent all that first day and almost ran out of daylight the next. Nothing was that difficult, and everything went smoothly, but it was just time consuming, as many of the brands in both herds were borderline unreadable. Finally, on the third day, we saddled up to doctor heifers. Clyde mounted me on a fairly good-looking, bald-faced gelding, and he came along with Joe. Now Joe wasn’t gong to be that much help. His main duties were with maintenance and irrigation, but he wanted to learn to be a cowboy. We also had a fourth man, Fred, who was a pretty good local team roper, who was going to meet us in the pasture. I generally like to keep things calm when I’m doctoring. Yearling heifers are actually kind of easy to get calmed down for my style of doctoring because they are curious and will gather up around my horse. Now the man who had been doctoring on these heifers would chase every single animal he doctored, which meant as soon as you built a loop the girls would scatter, and the chase was on. As will sometimes happen, this ranch was scattered with old abandoned homesteads, which meant there were pieces of barbed wire scattered around, adding a little extra challenge to things. The other challenge was the water. Artesian wells and springs were bountiful in this country. The water would flow from these wells and springs, creating small lakes that might be several acres in surface area, but only six inches to a foot deep.

Things were going pretty smoothly, and we had several head doctored before Fred showed up. His arrival speeded things up quite a bit, and things were probably going a little too smoothly. I spotted a heifer with foot rot and managed to get up to within about thirty-five feet, pitched out a long loop and caught her going at a walk. About the time I started to lope up and get her closer for Fred to heel, old Baldy sort of froze, then started getting real fidgety. Looking down I saw that his feet were tangled with old barbed wire and threw my rope away. I was really beginning to like old Baldy. He let me step down and cut that wire off of him without hardly flinching. Once untangled, I went to give Fred a hand doctoring the heifer . . . well actually as much to get my rope back as to help him. This didn’t take us long, and we were off to doctor our last heifer. When we spotted her she was just a little high headed, and I was the closest one so I built to her. Not only was she a little high headed, she was also fast and fresher than old Baldy, and it was turning into quite a foot race between the two. In such a situation, you don’t even notice that the rest of the world of the world disappears until you are in a wreck of some sort. The only things you see are your horse’s head and the animal you are after. Everything else is a blurred background of browns and greens. It never dawns upon you that there might be a badger hole, brick wall . . . or lake, in your path. Just as I was ready to throw my rope, the heifer did a one eighty on me, and it was lucky she ran through the loop because as Baldy started to turn with her, the whole world became a blurred background . . . and sort of wet! In sitting down to stop and turn with the heifer, Baldy slid into one of those shallow lakes and never finished his turn—at least not on his feet. Before I knew it, Baldy was on his right side sliding and spinning through the water. We were probably doing close to thirty miles an hour when we hit, so the force was with us, and we kept going and going and also spinning around and around. After what seemed about three tickets worth at the carnival, things started to straighten out, and this was where I started to worry. Splashdown occurred so fast that I never had a chance to adjust myself, and I was still straddling old Baldy, with both feet in the stirrups. Now that his spinning had stopped, he was on top of my right leg and pushing me across the shallow lake by my crotch. Luckily, right after the thought crossed my mind that he was going to roll over the top of me, we came to a halt. I kicked my feet out of the stirrups as Baldy got up, then I jumped up myself, neither of us worse for the wear. Of course we were both soaking wet and covered with long blades of the grass we had just mowed, but we were uninjured. Joe came loping up, his eyes big as a serving platter in an all-you-can-eat steakhouse. “Are you OK?” he asked. I replied, “Heck, Yeah! I’m OK . . . Don’t you know anything about the romance of this business? This is as good as it gets.” Clyde and Fred had been through that sort of thing themselves and didn’t think much of it, but Joe was a different story. He couldn’t figure out why no one was rattled over the incident, so on the way back to the house, we started telling him about different wrecks we had all been in. Even though I wasn’t hurt in that crash and splash, it, along with our stories, kind of rattled old Joe, and he quit a few weeks later. I was just glad it was a summertime wreck because in the winter, that little spill would have shown no mercy when all of the lakes were frozen solid.    Bob Kinford can be contacted via e-mail.