The glamor of cowboying

 Yesterday’s note about a dream prompted memories.

The cow that hooked me when I was young left me bruised. But the real wound was to my pride: the dressing down I got from my grandfather for walking between a cow and her calf. That might not sound like a first-degree offense, but the underlying complaint was that I was working in a place that wasn’t without its dangers and I wasn’t paying attention.

It wasn’t my only blunder.

A 1,200-pound cow is dainty compared to a 2,000-pound bull. When the bull was in a good mood, he would stick his muzzle into my coveralls and filch range cubes from my pockets. When I once got between him and a heifer at an inappropriate time, he tossed me over a barbed-wire fence. I flew like Superman for a while and cleared the barbs but landed in a briar patch on railroad right of way.

The worst was when I was still a teenager. I was helping my grandfather — then considered ancient, but in fact younger than I am now — to give a pill to a sick calf. As you’d expect from animals that ruminate, calves have a remarkable ability to spit up pills that have been forced down their throats. So I wrestled the calf down, while my grandfather stuck a huge pill into the end of some clear plastic tubing, rammed the tube past the calf’s throat and used a supple willow switch to dislodge the pill into the calf’s stomach.

To my amazement, the calf’s mother didn’t gore and trample us, although she danced around us hysterically, bucking like a horse. When the deed was done, I released the calf and stood up, turned around and was raising my arms in victory when she kicked — both back hooves.

I still do not know how she got behind me.

I stayed in bed for several days.

My grandfather thought I ought to try hard to get into college because I wasn’t exactly stellar as a cowhand.