One of the things I’ve noticed about getting old is that specific dates elude you but events stick in your mind. The exact date your child spoke his/her first cognizant sentence might be lost in the Neverland, but what they said will stick with you forever.

It must have been 1985 or ‘86 because my youngest daughter was talking (sort of) and her older brother was old enough to “cuss” passably. That was the year I became (albeit accidentally) a cattle rustler. (It was pure accident, but I did it). It’s a wonder I wasn’t hung for it.

Whereas, I was never a professional truck driver I would upon occasion take the wheel to raise the rent money or “cut some slack” for a road-burned partner. We usually hauled cows and sometimes the trip was a little too much for them.

We would start out in Como and progress southward picking up 10 head here and five or 50 there and  usually before we hit the Georgia state line we’d have our limit of 80,000 pounds. We’d head for a feed lot in Texas or Oklahoma and occasionally to Colorado.

There would always be at the auction barns or pickup places, some lazy old buzzard whose only job seemed to be watching soap operas or Jay Leno and counting the cows we were hauling.

As y’all probably know by now, I’m not a particularly a compassionate man, but I did feel sorry for those cows, especially those from Como. After all they had to ride from Panola County all the way to Ocala, Fla. just to get the truck loaded and then all the way to Conifer Springs, Colo. with no food and only 1,000-mile-per-shot at a drink of water. That involved an unloading and reloading procedure which I’m sure was a stressful situation for them, because after about 2,500 miles the hot sticks needed new batteries. They had obviously started to feel like they had walked back in that old “bull wagon” one too many times.

Those old cow-hauler boxes are not just a big ventilated van with a herd of cows in it. There are all sorts of compartments on three different levels. If the driver has to get creative in a curve, they can’t all shift to one side at the same time or the truck might turn over in a ravine or run off some mountain or bridge.The very front upper section is rather small, positioned over the fifth wheel of the tractor, and is called the “bull nose.” That is where the “first on, last off crowd” gets to enjoy the scenic ride to the fattening pen.

Back in the anterior part of the trailer (upstairs) is a smaller holding pen called the jail house. It’s just big enough to hold two mature bulls or four yearling calves.

Well, we got the herd delivered with minimal collateral damage and a blind octogenarian retired cowboy came out and counted them until they matched the tally sheet signed us out. We headed back to Strayhorn with my co-driver behind the wheel and me in the sleeper not sleeping but praying he could stay awake at least as far as Little Rock so we could swap places and I could scare the hell  out of him for the last few miles. We were both sleep deprived and “road burnt.”

Let me say that I never got out of the truck during its unloading. I backed that old Kenworth up the loading chute and crawled into the sleeper and let my partner and the Old Geezer unload the cattle. As far as I could reasonably be expected to know, we were without cattle and barefoot of beef until we stopped for fuel at Fort Smith, Ark.

Then I felt a bump and heard a moo while we were parked at the pumps. Lo and behold, in spite of all that counting those blind jackasses did, there were not one, but three rustled yearlings in the jailhouse. I figured my partner and I were very soon be in one too!

We had crossed two state lines with those accidentally rustled beeves and there’s still a law on the books that allows for you to be hung for rustling in the state of Texas and I’m pretty sure Oklahoma sees that sort of behavior from a similar point of view.

I couldn’t think of a decent way to fix that mess. It was too far to turn back and that poor old blind cowboy would have probably gotten fired. We couldn’t even be sure it was his fault. One of those other old reprobates at the pickup points might have let ‘em slip by at their barn.

Rather than get somebody fired, especially us, we went for the only viable option and drove straight on thru Panola County and consumed the evidence as expediently as was humanly possible.

As you may well imagine a Moccasin Bend deer skinner knows his way around a 500-pound steer, too.

Always trying to do the right thing,
Ricky Harpole
(Contact Harpole at www.facebook.com/harpolive or www.colespointrecords.com)