Bull Whipped
by
Jansen Estrup
Being bull whipped was not something I put on my bucket list intentionally or with any particular pride. Not a bucket list, really – not a thing to do. Rather it is a thing done, a negative accomplishment, sort of 'what did you do in the war, Daddy,' list, or 'That's Life' log.
It happened almost 40 years ago, when I was becoming middle-aged. Perhaps I did it as part of a midlife crisis. I say 'did it' rather than 'it happened to me' because it was reckless, even arrogant. Certainly it was stupid and I should have known better.
He was massive, this bull, but without the horns of those I'd been familiar with as a child. Of English origin, the Red Poll breed has had its horns genetically scrubbed. Perhaps I let that minimize the danger, or, more likely, I was just happy to get the damned thing off my new property.
Except for a couple of pigeons, all of the other livestock had already been removed. Soon, with this bull's departure, I'd be free to start tearing down the fences and pens of this homestead, to begin remaking it in my own vision. I'd also be free of the rather obnoxious previous owner, a bullish man himself, of German stock immigrated from Argentina; a gaucho wannabe.
He drove out to take the animal, a literal ton of him, in a tiny Datsun pickup truck. He intended to take him fifty miles over winding roads to the desert, his new home. With him as a helper he brought his eldest son, a mere boy. Another flag, red as the bull.
I knew it wouldn't work. That's where my own arrogance and stupidity, come in. I was still on active duty in the Navy, a Senior Chief Petty Officer, invincible. The 'go-to guy' ... 'Ask the Chief' bullshit. It wouldn't work, and somehow I had to fix it, at least to help.
He backed his little truck up to the gate and produced a pail of grain, which he set inside. Then he took a length of rope about 15 feet long, a lariat, a lasso made stiff with a wire core. The loop he dropped around the bait and handed the free end to me, indicating that I should wind it around the corner post, a good foot in diameter, stout as a tree. No Bosun, I thought sure the rope was strong enough hold the beast.
But there is a weak link in every plan. In this case, me.
I did that and stood six feet or so beyond, holding the frayed end. For an instant I must have been alarmed, flashing back to my long-ago childhood when I was handed a burlap bag and told to catch any 'snipe' the older boys herded in my direction out of the moonless, wilderness night.
But before the rest of that story flashed through my mind the bull approached the pail and stuck his great head in for a feeding. The gaucho pulled the noose up over the his ears and the bull, startled, backed up two steps.
At the other end of the rope, I held on instinctively and was drawn as if nothing right up to the fence post. I remember that it was smoking under the friction like those fire starters the Boy Scouts teach us that Indians used in the olden days.
The red bull raised his head to look around, a kind of slow-motion act that made an arc of the stiff rope, a sort of rodeo rainbow.
He took another step back.
The bitter end of the rope was ripped from my hands.
The rest is vacuous, the kindness our brain does when trauma is eminent and in progress.
My wife filled in the blank. Up at the house, a couple of hundred feet away, she heard it; a rifle shot. She thought we'd had to shoot the bull and rushed down the slope to the pasture.
When she saw me doubled up on my knees, she thought it was I who had been shot.
I dimly recall her running our old VW's gears like a rally driver, up the winding pass, down the desert roads to the nearest dispensary.
It didn't hurt. Oddly disinterested, I recall marvelling at the bone showing at my ribs and elbow, the ligaments, curious that the wounds didn't bleed more. What blood there was quickly coagulated on my ripped up tee shirt.
I stifled a scream, though, when the medics started cleaning it all up.
The foreigner and his boy didn't need my help. The English bull didn't either. All of them were gone when next I visited our new holding.
Not sure which of the lessons was most humiliating, I check it off my That's Life List with grim acceptance. And, with healing of time, a smile.
