Along the Way

Back in my cowboy days, Little Billy Brady and I were rounding up cattle on the W-Triangle, 20-some miles south of the Grand Canyon on the Cataract Plains. Billy, along with some other hands, had volunteered to teach me how to rope. For this lesson, Billy said, "We will start with that cow over there eye-balling us from the shade of that cedar tree."

I said, "That does not look like a cow to me, Billy. I would say it is a very large buck deer."

"We will start with it anyway," Billy said, and he put the spurs to his horse. Naturally my horse, Dollar, wanted to be in on the fun and leapt forward after Billy's horse with no encouragement from me.

Virgil Martin, a horse breaker who was stationed at Anita, put me into this B-movie situation. At the time, I was a Grand Canyon guide. Western dress, incorrectly called "cow-boy clothes," was worn by every local except on-duty National Park Service rangers. It took a practiced eye to tell cowboys from noncowboys.

I lived in the Cowboy Dorm, directly across from the mule corral and sometimes helped mule skinners unsaddle the dude string, at which times you cannot avoid stepping in mule residual. Not only did I look authentic, I very often smelled authentic. I bumped into Virgil after an unsaddling adventure, and he said, "What is that on your boots?"

"A protective coating," I replied.

Cowboys love this kind of exchange, and it may have incited Virgil to get revenge. "We're drivin' 300 head of cattle from Buck Tank to Anita," he said. "We have lots of horses, but we're short of cowboys."

On a horse named Fleet, along with four real cowboys, I helped push the aforemenOne time Virgil and I were looking I SEE BY MY for missing horses. At Redland, he rounded up some fresh OUTFIT THAT I AM mounts, and I immediately recognized mine as Granite, the A COWBOΥ! equine equivalent of a powerful sports car, but, in truth, too much horse for me.

When Virgil opened the corral gate, Granite shot out with all four feet off the ground. I was still descending when he made a second try to get into orbit. Only my ears kept him from punching my head completely through my hat.

I remember some cowboy saying, "If the stirrups are too short, your legs hurt; if they are too long, your butt hurts; if they are just right, both your legs and your butt hurt."

I had readjusted my stirrups 40 times. My muscles felt like guitar strings after the Woodstock rock concert. Enough hide was rubbed off my inner thighs and calves to supply a skin-graft bank for weeks.

Maybe it's the saddle, I thought. A few days later, I bought a roper saddle, chaps, and lariat advertised for sale on the post-office bulletin board, then mail ordered some spurs. Cowboying seemed to be becoming a regular part of my life.

Somehow I managed to jerk the horse's head up, and just as swiftly as the action started, it stopped.

Virgil said, "Did you hook him with a spur?"

"Naw," I replied, "but I was afraid I might." Then I pulled the spurs from my mackinaw pocket.

Virgil almost strangled. He got off his horse and staggered in circles, laughing like a madman. His eyes gushed tears. He collapsed on a rock with his head in his hands. And why not? This was the funniest thing Virgil had seen in his entire life. No cowboy ever takes off his spurs, not even I would later learn when they fly airplanes.

It was close to the end of my cowboy days when Little Billy Brady demonstrated roping the buck deer. One of the dangers of riding a horse is not how fast it goes but how quickly it stops, and my prime worry was that I might continue a considerable distance without Dollar.

When the deer jumped a fence, I expected the horses to do the same, but, anticlimactically, Billy reined his up, and Dollar followed suit.

"You didn't shake out your loop [lariat]," Little Billy said.

"Of course not," I said. "I am here to learn." And I had learned a lot, including understatement.

One day, after pushing a bunch of cattle up to a water hole before shipping them, a dozen of us sat on our horses watching them as they filled up.

The foreman rode up and looked at me, sitting atop a roping sad-dle, dusty, bedraggled in worn Western clothing set off with stained chaps, spurs now on (though rarely used or needed), leaning across the horn comfortably, reins dangling loosely and confidently in hand. He said, "Jim, you have become a regular cowboy."

Funny, I can't remember his last name first was Frank but I'll never forget what he said, nor the approval that lay behind it."