Welcome To The Bullpen
Cowboy Billy Meets the Red Cow Disease
Dave Cox
If you think mad cow disease was bad, you ain’t heard nothing yet until you hear about the dreaded red cow disease. This is the story of the horrific red cow disease and how it came to pass.
Cowboy Billy came from North Carolina and he grew up on Westerns. He had seen them all: Hoppy, Gene, Roy, Johnny Mack Brown, Sky King, Tim Holt, Matt Dillon, Paladin, Rowdy Yates, Mr. Favor, the Rifleman, John Wayne, Randolph Scott, Shane, Audie Murphy, Jimmy Stewart and on and on and on. If it was a Western on TV or at the movies he saw it. He knew his mission in life, he was going west and be a cowboy.
He tarred roofs, cooked hamburgers, sold newspapers, pumped gas, whatever he could find to fix up his old truck and head for Wyoming. Wyoming was where he settled on after reading about Buffalo Bill Cody and seeing a film about Yellowstone Park at school. He even had a friend that owned two horses and showed him how to saddle and bridle ‘em and he rode them every chance he got. Yeah, he was sure he was a cowboy. He bought complete sets of duds from Sears and Roebuck and Monkey Wards. He had one item he was particularly proud of that he had bought at a gun show in Charlotte, a belt buckle with a Lone Star that said Texas across the star. The buckle was so big it was almost as big as his head and some people said they thought the buckle was smarter. Bill was almost 6’ 4’’ and weighed 140 lbs’ soaking wet and had no butt so the buckle from a distance looked like a hubcap or aluminum pie plate.
His first disappointment came on the drive out as when he spotted his first working cowboy on horseback fixin’ fence he had on a baseball cap. This seemed at least a violation of the cowboy code or worse some trespass of the morality code of the west. He not only should have had a cowboy hat on but a white hat at that. After all except for rustlers, land grabbers and thieves weren’t all cowboys good guys?
After washing dishes and sweeping floors he finally got his first ranch job. Can you believe it they actually wanted people that knew how to work with cattle? At first he irrigated hay fields, farmed, and dug fence post, put in dust bags for the bulls and any other ranch chore that needed doing. Then his big day came. He was to take the hay out to the pastures and feed the cow herds everyday from now on. If he did well at this then there would be some real cowboy stuff to do like bringing in the sick bulls from the hills, real horseback work. He was bound and determined not to screw this up.
The first day things were going along pretty good then he saw a dead cow with a bright red stripe down its back. The more loads of hay the more dead cows with bright red stripes down their spines he was seeing. Even though this was a large cattle outfit when he saw about his twelfth cow with a red spine he decided this was important; it might even be an epidemic. He unhitched the trailer from the tractor and went hell bent for tractor seat to the foreman’s house to report what he had seen.
He rushed into the kitchen where he and some of the hands and even the ranch manager were having coffee and says, “Something’s wrong with the cattle; they’re dying of some disease and their spines are turning bright red!”
You could have heard a pin drop. The quiet was even loud; after another few seconds or minutes passed the laughter started. I mean it came in waves and gales. People were crying and a few were literally rolling on the floor. This lasted for quite a while and in fact it is said that some quiet mornings you can still hear small echoes of laughter off the canyon walls. Here is the lesson that Cowboy Billy, who by the way, is now called Red learned that day.
On large ranches whenever the cowboys find a dead cow, steer or calf they spray paint the backbone red so the pilot that flies over the ranch can keep an accurate count of the dead cattle.
|
|
