Herding Cattle

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Texas has a reputation as the home state to a lot of cowboys. There used to be quite a few and there are still some cowboys in Texas. There is a much larger number of guys in Texas who pretend to be cowboys but really know nothing about it beyond the type of boots. We call them “all hat and no cattle.” I never pretended in any way to be a cowboy. I have known a few and I am definitely not experienced in that line of work.

But I did herd cattle, just once.  When I was a teen-ager, my girlfriend arranged for us to borrow a couple of horses from someone she knew. We were riding in a field, really enjoying riding the horses, and the old gentleman (a real cowboy) who owned the land and the horses came out in the field in his pickup. We all talked for a couple of minutes and then he nailed me. He told me to go round up the cows that were scattered all over a hill just to the east of us, and bring them to where we were. He did this with a completely straight face, not even a hint of a grin, as if it were just a normal thing that somebody my age who had rarely even been close to a cow would know how round up and move a herd.

I was a teen-aged boy, so of course I knew everything about everything. Of course herding cows would be easy. I rode that horse over to the cows just as if I knew what to do and how to do it. I managed to get one cow to move over close to another. When I went to get a third one, the first two went off in different directions. I went back and crowded one into getting back in the vicinity of the other. Again, when I went after a third, they wandered off. I got frustrated and rode all over that hill, never managing to get more than four cows in one place.

Then I caught on. I was a teen-aged boy, but I was not completely stupid. I realized that when I was trying to move a cow towards the small group I had assembled, any time the cow started to drift off the horse would move just a bit and head that animal back in the right direction. The light bulb in my head came on. If you are into Zen, the word is satori. I was suddenly and completely aware of the solution to my dilemma. I do not know how to herd cattle, BUT THE HORSE DOES. I slacked the reins and sat on the horse rather than actually ride him. “We” bunched all those cows in no time and headed them back toward the pickup.

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The old gentleman grinned at me and said “thanks.” I confessed the truth to him. I told him I didn’t do it; the horse did. He said “Yep. That’s how it’s done. That horse has done it a hundred times and he knows how.”