Million
To One Odds (Times five)
Foreword
Ain’t A Horse That Can’t
Be Rode
(But don't bet on any rodeo)
Bull Ridin’ Bug
Letter Of Resignation
Double Whammy
Blue Heelers in Town
Gagged
Mad, Dogless and Dumb
Day of the Raven
Cleanup
The Amateur Stampede &
Rodeo
A little Cold (A lot
Stupid)
Farmerin’ Down On The Old
ULC
The Breeze
Allbe And The Fingers
Dude String Romance
Billie Jean duh Mule
Kowboyz ‘n Vetuhnareeuns
Mechanic’an
Reverse Barbecue
Wild West
Bad Winter
Rowdy
Loony Poonz
Buckin’ Bad Time
Ravioli
Tas
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Foreword (By Lee
Pitts)
Bob Kinford is an oxymoron. No,
I am not making a judgment on Bob mental capacity. I'm told an oxymoron
is a combination of contradictory words like dry lake. Bob is a cowboy
writer, two words
seldom seen together in the same sentence. Bob's publishing empire, Too
Lazy For You Livestock and Literary Company, is also an
oxymoron and may be the only for-profit enterprise in America combining
literature and cows. Writing and riding is a rare
combination.
Whereas
cowboying is mostly physical, writing
is occasionally mental. Put a cowboy afoot and he gets lost faster than
a day-old calf in a roundup. To write you must read and it has been my
experience that most cowboys read only when forced to in the powder
room. Put a cowboy in front of a computer screen and he
starts quivering and his eyes get as big as saucers. Sure, any cowboy
worth his buckle and boots can tell a good story, but
actually write it down? That's another matter entirely.
That's why
Bob Kinford is so unique. Normally
cowboys have better things to do than jot down a story after coming in
from a grueling day. Not only do they not have the time, most also lack
the
desire to put on paper what they're thinking. The fact that Bob took
the time to commit all these great stories to print says a lot
about his social life, or lack of one.
Bob
says he
writes about true lies: Yet another
oxymoron. But anyone who has ever looked at the back end of a cow knows
what Bob means. The stories in the pages that follow have to be true
because
nobody could make up what Bob calls the miscomBOBulations in this book.
They are stories inspired by an
original event but are made funnier by Bob's storytelling ability.
I
first met
Bob at a bull sale in Yerington, Nevada.
Now, you really have to like cattle and cattle people to spend a
Saturday at a bull sale in Yerington. We hit it off immediately and not
just because
we're in the same line of work. We both told each other a few lies and
promised to swap our latest books in the mail. I was a bit
skeptical at first because, although he definitely looked the part of a
cowboy and knew the right bureaucrats to cuss, Bob also knew about
things like web pages, nouns and verbs.
When
I got
Bob's first book, Cowboy Romance, I was
happy for two reasons: It contained no cowboy poetry, a field that is
rapidly being overrun by plumbers and pharmaceutical salesmen who wear
cowboy
hats with feathers in them and think that because they can rhyme
democrat North Platte they are the second coming of Baxter
Black.
Secondly, I
could tell that Bob Kinford was the real
deal and not an oxymoronic, original reproduction. He's a cowboy of the
non-drugstore variety who writes about what he knows. He has ridden
rank bulls, strung fence, calved heifers, worked for day wages and
received at least part of his salary each month in beef. He. got
the right letters after his name too: not PhD, MS or BS ,but initials
like NM and NV, places he temporarily called home and lived in a state
of cowboy.
First
time
authors are often one-shotwonders because
they use up all their good subject matter in their first book. I'm
happy to report after reading this volume that Bob did not use up all
his
good stuff in his first outing. After the success of his first book Bob
did not give up on the cowboy way of life to become an armchair pundit,
nor did he choose an easier lifestyle and spend the rest of his life
indoors writing about how he remembered the cowboy life to
be. No, Bob remained a cowboy because he knew his success as a writer
was based on gathering fresh material. And this
book is full of it. And I mean that in a kind way.
Bob
Kinford is what the bureaucrats he
despises would call an
endangered species. A one-of-a-kind cowboy who knows how to write. He
ought to be preserved for posterity. With this book the
cowboy part of him will be.
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Crash and Splash
One thing about working for
day wages that makes things
interesting is that you almost
never know what you will
be doing from day to day or
where you'll be doing it. A few
years ago, I was in New
Mexico and got a call from a
friend managing a place up in Colorado. Besides running several hundred head of
cows and a couple thousand
head of bison, they were
running a couple thousand yearling heifers. The man in charge of doctoring
the heifers was laid up. Seems
that he stepped off his horse
and ran a nail through his foot. He tried keeping up with his doctoring for a
few days before his foot got
infected. Needless to say, it
didn't take long for the bad eyes and foot rots to get out of hand, and Clyde gave
me a call.
Because this was starting
out to only be a one-day job
with no warning to get the health
papers on my horse, I
left the old dink behind to
ride whatever Clyde had. I left about four in the morning and pulled into the ranch by eight thirty, and the wreck was already
on.
Clyde had just started on this outfit a few weeks previous, and he was still more or
less learning the place and
the neighbors. But he knew his
cows, and he spotted a couple of bulls next to the road that did not belong to
the ranch. The way things
turned out, doctoring the
heifers would have to wait until the next day. Driving through the cows and trying
to figure out what the brand
was on the strange bulls, we
noticed that the brand on the cows matched that of the brand on the bulls .
. .well at least most of them
were matching. Now this was
rather confusing. Being new to
the area, this was a new brand to Clyde so we headed to a phone to call the brand
inspector to see where they
came from. It turned out to be
a neighbor who had taken his cattle up the mountain. He then went to haying and did not know his cattle had drifted back down to the valley. Since cattle are
sociable creatures, and they
decided to visit awhile.
Between figuring out who the cattle belonged to, getting a hold of their owners,
straightening
the mess out, and fixing
fence, we spent all that first
day and almost ran out of daylight
the next. Nothing was
that difficult, and everything
went smoothly, but it was just
time consuming, as many
of the brands in both herds
were borderline unreadable.
Finally, on the third day, we saddled up to doctor heifers. Clyde mounted me on a
fairly good-looking,
bald-faced gelding, and he came
along with Joe. Now Joe wasn't gong to be that much help. His main duties were with
maintenance and irrigation,
but he wanted to learn to be a
cowboy. We also had a fourth man, Fred, who was a pretty good local team roper,
who was going to meet us in
the pasture.
I generally like to keep
things calm when I'm
doctoring. Yearling heifers are actually kind
of easy to get calmed
down for my style of doctoring
because they are curious and will
gather up around my
horse. Now the man who had
been doctoring on these heifers
would chase every single
animal he doctored, which
meant as soon as you built a loop the girls would scatter, and the chase was
on. As will sometimes happen,
this ranch was scattered with
old abandoned homesteads, which
meant there were pieces of barbed wire scattered around, adding a little extra challenge to things. The other challenge was the
water.
Artesian wells and springs were bountiful in this country. The water would flow from
these wells and springs,
creating small lakes that
might be several acres in surface area, but only six inches to a foot deep. Things were going pretty smoothly, and we had several head doctored before Fred showed up. His arrival speeded things up
quite a bit, and things were
probably going a little too
smoothly. I spotted a heifer with foot rot
and managed to get up to
within about thirtyfive feet,
pitched out a long loop and caught
her going at a walk.
About the time I started to
lope up and get her closer for Fred to heel, old Baldy sort of froze, then started getting
real fidgety. Looking down I
saw that his feet were tangled
with old barbed wire and threw myrope away. I was really beginning to like
old Baldy. He let me step down
and cut that wire off of him
without hardly flinching. Once untangled, I went to give Fred a hand doctoring the heifer . . . well actually as much to
get my rope back as to help
him. This didn't take us long,
and we were off to doctor our last heifer.
When we
spotted her she was just a little high headed, and I was the closest one so
I
built to her. Not only
was she a little high headed,
she was also fast and fresher than old
Baldy, and it was turning
into quite a foot race between
the two. In such a situation, you don't even notice that the rest of the world of
the world disappears until you
are in a wreck of some sort.
The only things you see are your
horse's head and the animal you are after. Everything else is a blurred background of browns and greens. It never dawns upon you that there might be a badger hole, brick
wall ... or lake, in your path.
Just as I was ready to throw my rope, the heifer did a one eighty on me, and it was
lucky she ran through the loop
because as Baldy started to
turn with her, the whole world became a blurred background . . . and sort of wet! In sitting down to stop and turn
with the heifer, Baldy slid
into one of those shallow
lakes and never finished his turn, at least not on his feet. Before I knew it, Baldy was
on his right side sliding and
spinning through the water. We
were probably doing close to thirty miles an hour when we hit, so the force
was with us, and we kept going
and going and also spinning
around and around. After what
seemed about three tickets worth at the carnival, things started to straighten out, and this was where I started to worry. Splashdown occurred so fast that I never had a
chance to adjust myself, and I
was still straddling old
Baldy, with both feet in the stirrups. Now that his spinning had stopped, he was on top of
my right leg and pushing
me across the shallow lake by
my crotch. Luckily, right
after the thought crossed
my mind that he was going to
roll over the top of me, we came
to a halt. I kicked my
feet out of the stirrups as
Baldy got up, then I jumped up myself,
neither of us worse for
the wear. Of course we were
both soaking wet and covered with
long blades of the grass
we had just mowed, but we were
uninjured. Joe came loping up,
his eyes big as a serving
platter in an all-youcan-eat
steakhouse.
"Are you OK?" he asked.
I replied, "Heck, Yeah!
I'm OK . . . Don't you know
anything about the romance of this
business? This is as good
as it gets."
Clyde and Fred had been through that sort of thing themselves and didn't think
much of it, but Joe was a
different story. He couldn't
figure out why no one was rattled
over the incident, so on
the way back to the house, we
started telling him about different
wrecks we had all been
in. Even though I wasn't hurt
in that crash and splash, it,
along with our stories, kind of rattled old Joe, and he quit a few weeks later. I was just
glad
it was a summertime wreck
because in the winter, that
little spill would have shown no
mercy when all of the
lakes were froze.
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