Stupid Bull!

July 4, 2007, 10:00 am; posted by Chloe
Filed under Articles, Chloe | No Comments

The first time I saw him was last week, on the dirt road up to my grandma’s house. His behemoth head was in the lane and I almost hit him with my Dodge. When he stood up to avoid the growling diesel, I realized he was bigger than my truck, and I thought he was going to pulverize the passenger side door. That was the beginning.

We called him Fernando. He left two-inch holes in the packed dirt and gravel of the walkway when he wandered into the yard. He drank half the water in the brimming sixty-gallon rain barrel. When I talked on the phone, the person on the other end could hear him braying from ten acres away. “Shut up, bull!,” I would yell. He didn’t know English.

The last straw was Sunday, when Grandma and I couldn’t walk the dogs because Fernando was only about fifty yards from the porch. We took a big stick with us and watched him carefully while the dogs did their business close to the house. Then it happened. Grandma passed by her flower bed, and her eyes fell on the remnants of what had started out as a bunch of beautiful sunflowers. They had been eaten.

“Get the shotgun and clear out the freezer, Chloe,” she ordered. Only a few flowers had been decapitated, but when you live off well water in New Mexico, your flower bed is meager at best, and a few lost flowers is a big empty space.

After dinner, Grandma and I went to the front yard and, protected by a chain link fence, yelled insults at the bull in a sort of vengeance for the fallen flowers. We encouraged the dogs, who had gotten used to Francisco’s presence and even started taking their tea with him in the afternoons, to bark at him. We also said a few things about his mother.

Then we called Alvin, a friend of Grandma’s who had already removed other wayward cattle from her property. He assured her he would send someone soon.

So how do you get a gigantic piece of armed beef out of a fenced-in area of land? Why, with a horse and a Stetson, of course.

In they rode, dressed in cowboy boots, button-down shirts and ten-gallon hats, looking as though they’d been born on their horses and never bothered to get off. The sun was just beginning to set behind the mountains as the men reached the fence, and I swear I heard a harmonica play somewhere as the older one tipped his hat to Grandma. “Evening, Ma’am. Where’s that bull?”

We watched them drive Fernando off into the distance as the harmonica swelled into a triumphant crescendo and the sun disappeared behind the mountains in a satisfyingly conclusive manner.

Well, no, that’s not true. The bull kept breaking the drive and running off. Plus, there was no harmonica. But the sun did disappear behind the mountains.

Stupid Bull!

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