Buster and Isabella

 

Unity, Oregon

     (I heard this story from an old cowpoke in a small café over a breakfast of flapjacks and flank steak.)

     "Buster came to see me in Riggins two months after Bobby Jean left him, said he’d found us the perfect cowboy job working down in the John Day country, deep in the Strawberry Mountains. All we had to do was feed and doctor five hundred head of dry cows for the winter and they were going to give us each six hundred dollars cash money per month and two cabins. Six hundred dollars will buy a whole lot of fun.  

    I figured Buster was halfway drunk since he was usually that way even before Bobby Jean ran off with the Ford salesman, but I liked him and he had never lied to me. He was tough enough to give an enema to a cougar. I threw my bedroll and saddle in the back of his truck and into the future we sailed. 

     Two nights later we limped into the ranch with cab full of empty bottles. The main house burned twenty years before, but there were still two solid bunkhouses. Buster laid claim to the one closest to the outhouse. I moved into a little white one with a window overlooking the river.

     At sunrise, I noticed a couple of things about the ranch. First there weren’t any horses and second there weren’t any cattle. But there were loose haystacks strung all up and down the valley. I awoke my associate and questioned him about the situation.

     Buster fessed-up that he had left out a couple of details about the job. Nope, there weren’t any horses. These were oilmen that we were working for, taking advantage of a tax break, not horsemen. The cattle were still up in the hills but he had a plan. The ranch came with a stock truck. He’d drive fifty miles over to Bobby Jean’s brother’s place and borrow a couple of horses for us. Then we’d gather cattle for a couple of weeks. Oh, yeah, the haystacks. They’d been put up by twenty fellows brought up from Texas. The stacks should be fenced before we brought the cattle out of the hills. An hour later he was in the truck and I was waving goodbye to him with a set of posthole diggers. 

      You can imagine what sort of horses that your ex-brother-in-law is going to loan to you. A one-legged guy carrying a bucket of slop could’ve outrun either of them. They were no match for the cows, who were about as sociable as your average elk. Took two weeks of getting whipped in the face with pine branches to gather 462 head.  Far as I know, the other 38 are still up in the Strawberry Mountains or in somebody’s freezer.

     There wasn’t much to the job. Buster would come over to my place about six o’clock in the morning and we’d tell each other lies over a pot of coffee and cookies then take a flatbed truck to one of the stacks, roll it full of loose hay, drive across the meadow, roll the hay off to the cows and go punch a hole in the river ice so they could get to water. Pretty peachy.

     Except for one old brindle cow. She musta left her favorite sons down south to chase after the matadors because she was close to mean and determined that she was to be first at the hay, so she would be waiting for us at the gate, running around with her tail in the air and blowing snot. While one of us opened the gate, ran back to the truck and drove through, the other would be fending off the brindle with a chunk of lodgepole that was too skinny for a proper fence post, about the length of three baseball bats. We had to do the same waltz on our way back out.

     A month into this ritual, Buster said “I think we need ourselves a cow dog.  I’ll be back by dark.” I figured he was headed to John Day to drink a little more Bobby Jean off his mind, so I said I’d be plenty content to stay and watch the place. I heard him roll back into camp about midnight. 

    Next morning, there they came, Buster swinging his arms like he did, and right on his bootheels was a teenage black and white border collie mix, a female. He introduced our new teammate as Isabella. I said I had never met a female border collie that had enough starch for the old brindle cow, but he said Isabella was from a line of aggressive heelers, and that we were going give her a chance, right after we finished our coffee.

     Isabella rode up in the cab with us on the way out to the stack yard, leaning out the window.  When we pulled up to the gate, there was the old brindle cow. Isabella let out a tiny, excited yip, which was just enough to ignite the fuse on the cow. She pawed a couple times and charged the truck, hooked one horn under the passenger side running board, ripped it off like it was toilet paper, then commenced to bash in the door with little two-step charges…..boom, back off….boom, back off …..boom.

      Meanwhile, it was a like someone had tossed a pitchfork of rattlesnakes in on us. Isabella was howling, almost singing, Buster was using the Lord’s name in all kinds of ways, and I fell out the driver’s side door.  Buster finally untangled himself from the dog, came flying over the steering wheel, ran over to the gate, grabbed the prod pole, swung it over his head, and hit the old cow hard, right between the horns, yelling “Damn It, Bobby Jean, you leave Isabella alone!” The old cow went down to her knees. The dog looked down from the truck.  

     You can knock sense into some critters some of the time. When the brindle finally regained her legs, she looked up at the sky like she was checking the weather and calmly walked back to the herd.  We never had a bit more trouble with her all winter.  

      I think knowing that old cow helped to heal Buster. The next morning, he gave me the keys to the pickup, said I was to hold onto them to keep him from going to town, that he was done with Jim Beam and beer chasers. And if it was alright with me, Isabella wasn’t going to grow up to be a cowdog. She was going to become his companion dog.

     We made it the whole rest of the winter without going to town, mostly on venison and beans.  Buster took up singing and playing his guitar again.  He could do “Tying a knot in the devil’s tail” better than anyone I ever heard. By Springtime, when the oilmen showed up for payday, Isabella could do a back flip and catch a ball at the same time. Buster shook a lot of dog hair out of his bedroll when we got ready to move back north."