Fool's Gold (14 page)

“Yeah,” Barney said. “Those are Brahman bulls.”

Heather was quiet for a minute, and then she said, “They looked terribly—well, dangerous. Are they? Dangerous, I mean?”

Rudy got the picture. “No,” he said, catching Barney's eye and grinning. “The ones we'll be rounding up today will be cows and calves. Cows aren't dangerous, are they, Barney?”

“No,” Barney said. “Cows aren't dangerous.” But then after a minute he added, “Not unless they think you're trying to hurt their calves.”

That was all that was said about cows with calves at the time, but it was only a little later that the subject came up again. They had just reached the east fence of the Tumbleweed acreage and were about to fan out and start driving the cattle down to the home pasture. From where they had stopped to breathe their horses after the climb, they could look down and see several small groups of cows and calves sprinkled here and there over the hillside.

“But that's not all of them,” Barney said. “There's got to be a bunch more in the brush over in the gully there. I'll go that way. And Rudy, you go to the left past the spring. And Heather, you go straight back down the way we came. Pick up that bunch we just came past. Just set Applesauce toward them and she'll take care of it. Don't hurry them. Just keep them moving along slowly. And we'll be meeting you with some others down there where the hill flattens out. Got it?”

“Got it,” Rudy and Heather said in unison. Heather looked sky-high with excitement, and Rudy wasn't exactly feeling bored either.

“Okay,” Barney said. “Let's go.” He was already turning Badger to the right when he suddenly pulled up. “Listen,” he said. Then Rudy heard it too. From somewhere down toward the spring a calf was bawling. As they listened the weak, hoarse cry came again and then again. “Something's wrong,” Barney said. “Come on.” He started down the hill with Rudy and Heather following close behind.

The Tumbleweed spring was near the bottom of a narrow valley where water trickled out of a sharp rocky cliff and fell, in a thin waterfall, into a small lake below. Above and on both sides the lake was surrounded by steep and heavily wooded banks, so the only approach to the water's edge was on the downhill slope. There, a deeply worn cattle trail led through a mud flat and down to the water's edge. The mud, constantly churned by many hooves, was black and deep and squishy and smelled of cow manure and stagnant water.

They found the calf at the edge of the pond where the earth under an oak tree had been washed away on one side, leaving a network of exposed roots arching down into the mud below. The calf, a very young Brahman, had a front leg caught in among the roots. Its other front leg was bent backward and its head hung down over the trapped leg. Now and then it raised its head, bawled weakly, and then collapsed again. Barney reined Badger to a stop at the edge of the muddy area and Rudy and Heather pulled up beside him.

“Oh, the poor little thing,” Heather said. “Do you suppose its leg is broken?”

“Not broken. Stuck though,” Barney said, sounding like his granddad. When things got critical Barney always sounded like his granddad.

Rudy urged Bluebell a few steps forward into the deep mud.

“Hold it, Rudy,” Barney said. “And be quiet.” Rudy pulled up and they sat quietly listening. There was no sound except for an occasional weak cry from the calf. Barney twisted in the saddle looking around the banks of the pond and then down the trail. At last he said, “All right. The cow must have given up and gone off. Come on, Rudy. We'll get her loose.” He swung down, dropping the reins over Badger's head so that he would stand still.

“Wait a minute,” Rudy began. “Maybe we ought to look around a little more first and—”

Barney stopped and looked back, and Rudy shut up. He'd seen that look on Barney's face before and he knew that there was no use arguing. When Barney got that gleam in his eye there were only two choices—to chicken out or to yell “Geronimo” and jump. Rudy took a deep breath, looked around one more time, got down off Bluebell, and waded out into the mud.

The little heifer's leg was wedged in tightly between two thick roots. It looked a little bit swollen, and every time they tried to pry it loose she struggled and bawled with surprising strength and volume. But at last one root began to give, the space widened, and the leg came free. They had just managed to carry the calf back a few feet from the bank when a very big, very angry Brahman cow came out of the brush below the spring.

Rudy and Barney were steadying the heifer as she started to walk, using her swollen leg gingerly, when they heard Heather shout, “Look out.” And there the cow was, charging straight at them.

They ran in different directions. Instinct must have taken over and Barney's instinct, as a born-and-bred cowboy, must have been to get to the horses. He ran up the hill while Rudy ran back through the mud toward the oak trees.

Barney might have made it to Badger, except that the shouting and the charging cow was too much for the horses' training, and reins down or not, they bolted. Heather and Applesauce had started up the hill too. It was entirely Applesauce's decision. “I didn't tell her to,” Heather said later. “I was just sitting there paralyzed by fear.” So Heather and the horses went up the hill and Rudy went up a tree. And Barney was left all alone out on the open hillside.

Rudy's oak tree was an easy climb, with lots of low horizontal branches, and he'd reached a fairly high limb when he looked down and saw what was happening. The cow had stopped near her calf and was swinging her big horned head from side to side. Then she let out a bellow and started full speed toward Barney. Without waiting to get his balance Rudy bailed out and lit flat on his backside in the mud.

“Run, Barney. Run!” Rudy screamed and, jumping to his feet, started running toward the calf, waving his arms and yelling, “Here, cow. Here, cow. Come and get me.” When the cow stopped and turned in his direction Rudy came to a stop too. It wasn't until she started in his direction that he whirled around and plowed back through the mud toward the oak. He got to the tree with the cow not far behind him and, in spite of muddy hands and feet, went up it like a squirrel.

For a moment the cow stared up at him, snorting and pawing the mud before she turned away and trotted back toward her calf. Fifty yards up the hill, Barney had almost reached the horses when Badger snorted and whirled away. Holding his head sideways to avoid stepping on his reins, he trotted on up the hill, leaving Barney still stranded out in the open. Rudy was watching from his tree as the cow spotted Barney and again started after him. Rudy jumped out of the tree for the second time. He made a little better landing, more or less on his feet this time, but then lost his balance and sprawled forward flat on his belly in the stinking mud.

It wasn't until the cow had turned back once more to chase Rudy up the tree that Barney caught up with Badger, and the “Terminator Cow” episode finally came to an end.

The rest of the day was something of an anticlimax. The little heifer got her legs in working order, she and her mother joined the other cattle, and the roundup continued as planned. Except that Rudy had to do his part while wearing a fairly thick layer of mud and smelling like something that should have been buried a month ago.

He must have looked terrible too. Bad enough to scare horses, at least, because the first time he tried to get back on Bluebell she took one look and did one of her famous sideways jumps. It took quite a lot of soft talk before she would let him get close enough to get back in the saddle.

After the scare had worn off and they'd all calmed down a little, the three of them did a lot of laughing. “Here, cow. Here, cow,” one of them would say and they'd all go into hysterics. Not to mention what happened every time the others got close enough to Rudy to smell him. Rudy laughed too. He felt a lot like laughing the rest of the day—in spite of the smell.

H
E WAS A HERO.
He hadn't thought about it that way at the time. He had just seen what was about to happen to Barney and he'd done what was necessary without stopping to think about it. But that, according to Heather, was what made it heroic. And Heather wasn't the only one to say so.

Barney said it, too, in a different way. Right after they'd gotten back on their horses and convinced the man-killer cow to call off the war, Barney had ridden up beside Rudy. “Hey, thanks,” he said. “Thanks a lot, old buddy.” And then he stuck out his hand and shook Rudy's, smelly mud and all. That was all he said in words, but, knowing Barney, Rudy was able to read a lot more between the lines.

And later, when they got back to the ranch, Charlie had a few words to say on the subject. Quite a lot of words actually, considering the fact that Charlie Crookshank sometimes got by for days at a time on about half a dozen syllables. Charlie made his lengthy comments after he'd ridden out on his old buckskin to help get the Tumbleweed stock into one of the holding corrals.

As soon as he got a good look at Rudy, he did his slow, lopsided grin and asked, “Git throwed?”

“Well, no,” Rudy said. “I jumped, actually.” And then Barney and Heather took over and told Charlie the whole story and that's when Charlie really got wordy. He began by getting on Barney for trying to work with a calf without knowing exactly where its mother was.

“You know better'n that, Barney,” he said. But then he turned to Rudy and said, “Handled yourself real well, pardner. Right proud of you.” Then he looked Rudy over some more before he started up his grin again. “Go on in and wash up some. Can't get in this young lady's new car thataway.”

Heather laughed. “Thanks, Mr. Crookshank,” she said. “That little problem had occurred to me. All that gunk on my new upholstery.”

So they went inside, and the first thing they had to do was tell the whole story over again for Barney's mother.

Angela Crookshank was wearing one of her Indian outfits, a low-cut velvet blouse over a full skirt with a heavy turquoise-and-silver belt around her narrow waist. She laughed when she saw Rudy. He'd noticed before how glamorous Angela looked when she put her hands on her hips, tossed her long blond hair, and laughed. He'd seen her do the same thing at rodeos when she'd finished a barrel race or a stunt-riding demonstration. Seen her get off her horse, lead it up in front of the judges' stand, bow and make her horse bow too—and then she'd laugh, with her head thrown back and her hair blowing in the wind while the crowd roared and clapped.

There wasn't any roaring crowd in the ranch house kitchen, but Angela did the head-tossing laugh anyway when they finished telling about what happened. And then, still laughing, she said, “Rudy, you are just
too
much! How do you always manage to be the fall guy?”

When Rudy was in Barney's bathroom, taking a shower and getting into some borrowed clothing, it occurred to him what Angela hadn't mentioned. What Angela hadn't said anything about was that Barney could have been killed. She didn't seem to have noticed that part of it at all.

On the way home in the Toyota, Heather said, “You know what you were like? You were just like those rodeo clowns. You know, during the bull-riding events when the clowns keep the bulls from attacking the riders who fall off. You know, risking your neck to get the bull's attention—okay, it was only a cow, but you were risking your neck just the same.”

“Thanks a lot,” Rudy said. “That's what I like to hear. Rudy the clown.”

Heather laughed. “No. That's not the point. I didn't mean you were a clown. What I meant was that what you did took lots of guts. And what the clowns do takes a lot of courage. I've always thought that the clowns have to be the bravest ones in the whole rodeo. Don't you think so?”

Rudy hadn't thought much about rating rodeo bravery before, but when he did he had to agree. Lying in bed that night, he went over the whole thing again and decided that what Heather said was true. For one thing what the clowns did was really dangerous, there was no doubt about that. He'd often seen them in action at local rodeos and on TV, too, climbing fences or jumping into barrels with huge angry bulls about two steps behind them. And what he'd done
had
been very similar. So maybe he wasn't so chicken after all. And now, maybe, no matter what might happen in the future, people wouldn't forget that he hadn't been chicken when the cow attacked Barney. Barney, in particular, wouldn't forget. It was a good thought to go to sleep on.

The next day, Tuesday, Natasha went to Jackson to go shopping and visit some friends. She took the M and M's with her, so Rudy had the whole day to himself and no plans. So right away he called up Barney to suggest that he could help again with the roundup.

“All done. Finished last night,” Barney said in a kind of excited, upbeat tone of voice. Rudy could almost see his wide Crookshank grin. “Hey, guess what?” he went on. “I'm going to go to Montana next week with my mom and dad—to a couple of rodeos. And I might even get to compete in some of the junior events. My dad just told me today.”

“Wow,” Rudy said. “That's great. Fantastic. Amazing.” It really was pretty amazing, because it almost never happened anymore. When Barney was a little kid Jeb and Angela had taken him with them once in a while when they went on the rodeo circuit. But he hadn't gotten to go at all for a long time. Barney said it was because his folks didn't want him to miss school, but Rudy had noticed he didn't get to go during summer vacations either.

“Fantastic,” Rudy said again. “How long will you be gone?”

“Oh, for a week or so,” Rudy said. “But we don't leave until Friday, so today is okay. I could come to your place. Granddad's got some Cattlemen's Association stuff to do in town and I could ride in with him.”

“Hey,” Rudy said. “Great! We could go skateboarding at the school, or hang out downtown, or—hey, it's going to be real hot. I could call Julie and see if we can go swimming in her pool. Okay?”