Today, in all the vast cow country of the west, there’s hardly a wild cow left. By a wild cow I mean your real old sneaky-smart scalawag who dodges every roundup. The kind that spends all day lying hiding in some thicket and does his watering and grazing by night. The kind that takes fierce pride in his solitary freedom and will battle you to his last hot snorting breath to maintain it.
Such a cow brute, if he’s still to be found, is very likely holed up in a dark brush tangle somewhere along the Nueces River in South Texas. But as far as Ed Cassin, Jr., is concerned, any such outlaw can stay right there till he dies of old age.
Ed is a young cowman of Batesville, Texas, with the figure, looks, and bearing to merit the lead role in any of Hollywood’s grade-A westerns. He’s spent the bigger part of the past 10 years catching the wild ones out of the brush and has finally come to the conclusion that there’s no real future in the business.
Ed caught his first wild cow back about 1939 when he was only 16. On his father’s ranch south of San Antonio were a lot of brush-wild cattle that still showed the Lonhorn strain. Some had escaped every roundup for years. Like many another cowman, Ed Cassin, Sr., set out to clear them from his pastures and make room for gentler animals that packed more meat. To make a clean roundup, the senior Cassin had a crew of topnotch cowhands called “brushpoppers.” It wasn’t long till they had caught out and shipped the last wild cow.
The last, that is, except for one old brown half-Brahman who still wore the bell somebody had strapped on her years before while trying to break her to milking. One bad cow on a ranch is enough to spoil all the gentle ones. She’ll lure them, a few at a time, into the brush and gradually teach them all the wild tricks. But, not even the best brushpopper can catch a cow he can’t find. The hands knew she was still in the pasture because they’d sometimes hear her bell of a night when she came out of hiding to graze in a prickly pear flat. But, the next morning they saw neither hide nor hair of her. Wherever she had her hideaway, she had a good one; and she lay in it so still that the clapper never touched the sides of the bell hard enough to ring it.
It was a ridiculous situation, one that the Cassin riders didn’t like to have talked around. One old cow outwitting a whole crew of top riders. And her with a bell on! Ed was supposed to be too young to have a lot of cow savvy, but he hatched off an idea about catching that cow. And the first moonlight night that came along he rode out to make a test of it.
He rode alone, of course. He knew a cowhand’s reputation could be made – or broken – for life on just such a wild stunt he was about to pull. He’d no more than reached the edge of the broad prickly pear flats than his ear picked up the faint bonding of a bell. Ed pulled his horse to a halt in a dark chunk of shadow cast by a mesquite thicket. He sat in his saddle, listening. Then it came again, louder this time – the deep-toned ringing of the cow-bell.
Ed felt his heart leap under his brush-frayed jacket. He licked a finger and held it up in the still night air. Taking note of the side that cooled first, he started riding a half circle around the sound of the bell. If he hoped to get in roping distance, he sure had to have the wind right. He rode clear of any brush that might drag and rattle against his chaps, and he kept his horse to a slow walk.
Ed’s precautions paid off. He was right up on the old cow when she suddenly threw up her head from behind a clump of pear for a startled look at him.
That one look was enough. With a snort she wheeled and tore out across the pear flat, her bell bonding like a fire alarm.
Ed slammed spurs to his horse. The little animal had a fast getaway and put Ed up within roping distance before the cow reached the nearest brush thicket. Ed laid the loop around those high-standing horns rocking along in the moonlight. He jerked up his rope slack and knew he had him a wild cow caught.
This article was originally published in the August 1955 issue of Western Horseman.
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