When the Cowboy is Away…Amy with Lily and Oscar

I hold a theory about cow camps that I think most champion cowboy wives would agree with… it is not worth living on a cow camp without a cowboy.  Things tend to fall apart fast when the man of the house is gone. 

I have one friend who calls the vet and lets him know when her husband is going to be gone.  That way he can be prepared when she calls him with her first emergency… because there IS going to be one! 

Her favorite, and most repeated, emergency is horse with snakebite.  Another of my friends refuses to burn garbage when her husband is not within a ten mile radius of the house.  She has a hair-raising story to tell about the time that she did. 

My husband is not gone often.  But, when he is, things usually happen to turn our otherwise peaceful camp into chaos.  The last time he was away, I walked out early one morning to check heifers, and lo and behold, one of them had… twins?  Uh, no.  Need a better angle… oh, yuck.  She had one calf and… a prolapsed uterus.  "Hello?  This is Amy at Davis Camp.  Yeah, I know when office hours are, but you see…."

This past Sunday took the cake in "daddy gone" disasters.  And daddy did not even go that far!  He had been home all day, but as the day cooled off, he decided to go to headquarters to shoe a horse for Billy.  The kids were happy in the swimming pool (yes, I know it is just a wading pool but they call it a swimming pool and it saves me trips to town so shhhhh).  I decided to cook several cold salads to store in the fridge against hot days when I did not want to be in the kitchen.  Pretty soon, both kids were at the kitchen door, wailing, boo hooing, sobbing!  Oscar assured me between sobs that "We're not hu..uuuurrrrt."  Fine.  Ok.  I understand.  But what is wrong!

I had handed them a bag of old biscuits a few minutes earlier with instructions to throw them over the fence to daddy's horse.  They decided to go inside the horse lot instead and feed them to daddy's horse by hand…. Leaving the gate open, of course.  All would have ended well if they had not taken a detour to the horse trough to look at the gold fish.  And, yes, you guessed it!  Daddy's jingle horse trotted out past them into a huge pasture. 

I assured them that while they had acted irresponsibly and Daddy would probably be mad, that it was not the end of the world.  We all began putting on our shoes so we could try to put him back in afoot.  While I was tying my second tennis shoe, the dog began to bark.  We have a rare ranch dog who rarely barks.  I looked out the door and he seemed to be intently studying something in the front yard.  When I walked out of the house, our brave ranch dog quickly scurried to a strategic position behind me… better to protect my rear, I guess.  I walked over to where he had been barking and saw a huge diamond back rattlesnake, coiled in his "I may not be bigger than you, but I am one hell meaner" pose.  After I caught my breath, swallowed my heart back down where it belonged and stepped on the dog's tail, I made the brilliant observation that someone needed to kill that snake. 

Do you realize that a snake can strike his own body length?  Do you realize that when he is coiled up, you can't tell what his body length is?  I grabbed a shovel and proceeded to have a Mexican standoff with a creature who, in my mind, epitomizes evil.  When I heard the screen door slam behind me, I yelled for the kids to stay in the house.  Then, I yelled for Oscar to bring me rocks.  Consistency is the formula most espoused for good parenting, but the evil was trying to crawl off and I could not abide the thought of him going under my house or to the barn.  As Oscar brought me decorative rocks from my flowerbed, he wailed that he could not find his glasses that he took off to go swimming.  So… a blind child was bringing me rocks, which I was hurling with impaired accuracy at a snake that was longer than my leg.  Finally, I hurled the shovel like a javelin and succeeded in driving the snake behind a cross tie that lines one of my flowerbeds.  He must have felt secure back there, because he laid in as if for a siege. 

With the snake still and unable to do harm, I called for my daughter (not the blind son who had gone back in to search for his glasses) to bring me the phone.  She cried all the way out to me because my kids are terrified of snakes.  It may have something to do with conditioning.  They think we are part Indian because their middle names are "Watch-For-Snakes" and "Are-You-Watching-For-Snakes".  As she handed me the phone, she sobbed out, "I know where the gun is… it's in the pickup with Daaaaddddddyyyy!"  Yeah.  That is all I needed.  A gun added into the equation. 

I pride myself on how calm my phone call to headquarters was.  I reached Randall and asked him if Nick was still at the barn.  Then I asked him to go down and tell Nick NOT to stay and visit, NOT to drink a beer, NOT to pass go, and even if it was lying in the middle of the road, NOT to collect $200.  Briefly, my message was COME HOME, SNAKE IN YARD.  To make a long story short (YES, I DO know how to do that), my champion cowboy husband made twelve miles in 6 minutes… that man straightened out some curves! 

You know, it is hard to be mad about your jingle horse having gotten loose when you have just killed a huge rattlesnake and everyone is safe and happy.  Besides, the horse trotted back up to the house about an hour later, ready to be let into his usual stomping grounds.  And the glasses were finally found when Mom could do the searching… and we don't like it when our Daddy is gone!
 

By Amy Auker

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