Origins of the Outbreak (16 page)

The Bull Rider, 5:08 a.m.

“Alright, baby. I'm headed out to start the day. Don't know what caused that ruckus with the cattle this morning.”

“Maybe they're
frettin' over that storm up north,” his wife replied and then tried to hand him a thermos. “Here's your coffee, Adam. Make sure you drink water too. It's gonna be a hot one. I'll bring some lemonade and a sandwich out to the ‘back forty’ if you're still out there by suppertime.”

“Sounds good
,” he replied, holding up his hand to tell her to hold onto the thermos.
“
Go ahead and plan on bringing lunch. I gotta put in at least eleven new fence posts and string all five lines of barbed wire, that dammed bull pulled a full hundred feet out yesterday.”

“I still say we should just butcher him and save one of the calves to stud.”

“I'm thinkin' that you may be right this time. He's cost us more than any animal has the right to.”

Debbie leaned in and kissed her husband goodbye as he sat on the stairs and laced up his boots by the front door.
She wouldn't allow him to bring them fully into the house since they were usually covered in some type of animal feces, mud or blood. He paused what he was doing and kissed her lightly on the lips before continuing to tie his boots.

Adam
finally accepted the thermos full of black coffee from Debbie and limped down the pathway towards his old truck. He'd been a rising star in the rodeo as a young man and there'd been plenty of talk about him turning pro until a bull stepped on his leg one night and shattered his femur.  He was instantly out of the bull riding business and in the hospital for over two months. Multiple surgeries and one nasty infection later and he had a steel rod fused to his bone. The damn thing never healed completely right and caused him to limp slightly, but it was always a hell of a good time at the airport when the TSA agents thought he was trying to smuggle something through.

Duke followed along behind him and Adam made sure to open the passenger door first so the dog could jump in before making his way around to the driver's side.
He'd made the mistake only once. The lab had knocked him out of the way when he opened the driver's door and he'd fallen into a mess of thistles alongside the truck. Ever since then, he always made sure to let Duke have his seat first.

The two of them drove the four hundred feet to the barn where Adam backed the truck up as close to the tack room door as he could get.
He got out and held the door open so Duke could get out and scrounge around the barnyard while he fed and watered the cows. It was menial work, but it was an honest day's livin' and he was proud to tell folks that he was a farmer.

Adam and Bettie had a small-scale cattle operation for Texas.
They only had two hundred and fifty head, but the real money-maker for them was that ornery bull. He studded out at a thousand a week and folks came from far and wide to pick him up and take him back to their farms or they purchased vials of frozen semen for artificial insemination. The thing about that bull was that he was known for producing large, healthy calves. Most of the bulls grew up to be well over eleven hundred kilograms and the cows topped in at a solid five hundred and fifty.

Adam hated that da
rn bull, but the minor profit they made from their two alfalfa harvests and slaughter cattle paled in comparison to what they earned from it. So even though it did stupid things like tear out fences and lead the herd out onto the road, the truth was that Adam and Bettie needed that animal way more than it needed them.

After he'd poured the feed and spread some hay in the troughs, Adam went about the business of loading up the supplies to mend the fence.
Fence posts, bailing wire, spools of barbed wire, fence post pounder, pliers and finally the come-along, which would stretch the wire taut so he could wire it to the posts.

When everything was loaded up, he opened the passenger side door and waited for Duke to get in.
The old fool wasn't anywhere to be seen so Adam walked around to the driver's side and hopped in. He honked the horn a few times and poured himself a cup of coffee from the thermos. Within seconds, the dog bounded up from down by the creek. He was soaking wet and made sure to shake off when he go
t
insid
e
the cab of the truck.

“Aww, dang it, Duke
!
You couldn't a done that outside?”

Duke looked at him and panted.
Bettie wa
s
right
;
it was gonna be a hot one today. He glared down into his coffee mug at the drops of creek water from the dog's coat that didn't quite blend in with the coffee. The farmer dumped the contents out of his window and poured another cup. “Boy, you're somethin' you know that?”

Duke finally took the hint that maybe he'd done something that he wasn't supposed to and lay down on the truck's bench seat.
He looked the other way and refused to meet his owner's eyes. Adam sighed and stepped out of the truck to go close the dog's door. By the time he got back around to the driver's side, he decided that he needed to take an ibuprofen to help ease the dull ache in his bum leg. The day was just starting and it was already acting up. He knew from experience that he needed to nip the pain in the bud before it became unbearable.

After he swallowed two pills he started the truck and headed down around the barn and out the gate to the cattle path.
When he'd bought the land all those years ago, he made the decision to put in a double fence, one completely encircling the property and another that closed in the areas that he planted with alfalfa for hay. That way the cattle could still move freely about the property from the barn to the lower field, the ‘back forty’ as he and Bettie called it, without disturbing the crops. He also used this cattle path as a road to drive his old pickup down when he needed to go back there with supplies.

When he got to the lower field he saw right away that the white cloth marking tape that he'd stretched across the broken fence yesterday was torn down.
He'd pulled out the old wire and used the thick two-inch material as an intermediate barrier, knowing that the cattle were docile enough to not go past it, but what the heck happened to it out here?

Adam did a quick mental headcount of his herd and he didn't remember anything out of the ordinary.
While he hadn't counted every one of them, he'd been doing this long enough to realize when some of the cattle were missing. He pulled the truck up to the side where the tape ha
d
com
e
loose and climbed out to see what had happened.

He picked up the frayed end of marking tape and held it up to the early morning light.
It looked like it had been stretched and the knot had finally gave way. “Wonder what the heck did that?” he muttered while he held it down for Duke to see. The dog sniffed the frayed end and growled low in his throat.

“Whoa, boy
!
What's the matter?”

The dog circled Adam a few times smelling the air, but when he couldn't smell anything else h
e
la
y
down in the trampled grass and began scratching his ear.

Adam reached down and patted Duke's head.
“You sure are gettin' strange in your old age, buddy.” He grinned when he began to scratch his ear and Duke's foot continued to half-scratch where his fingers dug into the dog's scalp. “Yup, you're a weirdo! Guess it's time to get to work.”

The first thing he did was put on his beat up leather work gloves.
He may have been an old cowboy, but he wasn't dumb. If a farmer let their hands get messed up, then they'd be useless for several days. Farmers can't afford to take a break, let alone be out of commission for an extended period of time.

Next he went to the old fence line and began to pull out the ruined fence posts.
His old bailing wire had held the barbed wire to the fence posts too good. When that ol' bull got tangled up in the fence, he'd bent and twisted the metal posts. It was hard work getting the posts out of the ground because they were designed to stay put and had a flared-out spade about a foot underground. The spade kept the post straight over the years, but only added to the difficulty when he was trying to pull them out.

Over an hour later, he'd pulled all eight posts that needed to be removed and was able to salvage two by using all of his bodyweight to bend them back into place.
Then he grabbed three posts and walked to the far end, dropping a post every seven feet. Normally he liked to go with around eight feet between posts, but he had to adjust the spacing because the old fence post holes wouldn't be able to support a new post.

Once he'd laid out ten posts in place of the eight he'd taken out, he limped back to the truck and took a swig of water from the jug that he'd filled up from the barn spigot.
Then he picked up the thirty pound fence post driver and made his way slowly down to the first post.

In his younger days, the fence post driver that he had was simply a metal tube that fit over the top of a fence post and had a large hunk of lead welded on the end for weight.
Now that he was older, he'd paid the extra cash for one with a spring inside it. The spring helped to propel the fence post driver back upwards and alleviated some of the effort required to pound in the posts. Even with the spring assist, the posts that he had to drive in today would probably take a good hour or more to get into the ground.

An hour and forty-five minutes later Adam was exhausted.
He surveyed the ragged line of fence posts and cursed under his breath. Ten years ago, he would have pulled them out, but he was okay with a few posts out of plumb, even if he didn't like it. As he walked over to the truck, his limp was much more pronounced. His back ached, which caused his stride to become shorter and translated into a more painful step for him. Added to that was the burning feeling in his shoulders from constantly lifting the weighted driver above his head and then slamming it back down onto the fence post.

He whistled for Duke so he could share a slice of apple with his buddy, but the dog was nowhere to be seen.
It wasn't odd for him to wander off, but he usually had a pretty good sense for when Adam was gonna take a break and he'd show up ready to eat.

Adam placed a hunk of apple on the seat and whistled louder for the dog to come back.
He scanned across the field and wondered where the dog had gotten off to. “Oh well, your loss, Duke,” he said and picked up the piece of apple. He blew it off before popping it into his mouth and then poured another cup of coffee.

He looked at his watch.
He'd been out at the fence for almost four hours and that apple wasn't gonn
a
hol
d
him over for long. Times like this, he wished that he had a cellular telephone. He could call Bettie up and have her bring down a snack. But that was one of those things that he couldn't justify, so they did without and most of the time didn't miss out on anything.

He slid out of the truck and hobbled around to the open tailgate.
“Oh man, I'm gettin' too old for this stuff,” he groaned. “Gonna need to hire one of them Murphy boys to come help out next time somethin' like this needs done.”

The Murphy boys were the typical prodigal children.
Both had grown up on the farm next door and hated the small town Texas life. One joined the Marines and the other joined the Air Force. Each had been gone exactly four years when they returned to Florence, Texas and bought acreage from their father to build homes on. The brothers and their parents all lived within a quarter of a mile from one another and they were always offering to help Adam out
.
Maybe next time I'll take 'em up on it
, he thought as he hefted the first large spool of barbed wire from the truck.

He carried it down to the wooden corner post and unwrapped a good three feet of wire from
the spool and re-wrapped it around the large post twice. From his tool belt, he pulled out a few large horseshoe nails and pounded them into place, securing the wire to the post. Next, he carefully wrapped the remaining piece around the running end of the wire to keep it in place. Then he slid an old metal rod into the center of the spool.

Adam straightened his back painfully while he held on to e
ither side of the rod and then walked backwards, letting the wire feed out behind him. When he reached the next large wooden anchor post he set the spool down and went to the truck to retrieve the come-along. He hitched the come-along's hook onto the back of the truck and then fed the cable through the machine's pulley. When he got to the spot where the spool of wire sat, he placed the come-along on the ground and measured out an extra ten feet of barbed wire before cutting it with the multi-purpose pliers from his belt.

He took the free end and bent that around the anchor post and then pulled it tight over to the come-along.
He wrapped the end of the barbed wire through the come-along's eyelet and then began to ratchet the lever on the come-along. The machine pulled the slack out of the wire and within seconds it was as tight as it could be. He limped over and pounded in a few horseshoe nails to secure the wire before making his way back to the come-along and releasing the tension.