The Dead Bull

One summer when I was fifteen, sixteen, seventeen, who knows, around 1950, there was a fire guard up at the Ranger Station. Two people I was googoo over were the fire guard and Nita Williams. The fire guard said he’d love to have some cow horns. I said, “Well, there’s bound to be some around here somewhere. I’ll keep an eye open.”

A little later Mom and I were over at the Kings and I was talking about how I would love to find some cow horns. Frank said he’d heard there was a dead bull up Chilson Creek a ways. Shouldn’t be much more than a mile or so.

So I walked up the canyon, up the creek, but I didn’t come to it. I went back to the cabin and said I couldn’t find it, so Mom said she’d walk up with me. She said maybe I didn’t go far enough. So we walked further up the canyon and, lo and behold, we came to a big bull lying there that had a nice set of horns. We looked at him and then we looked up and about two hundred feet further there was another bull lying there dead. There was blood on its nose, the eyes were still in it and the yellowjackets were just starting to come. There was a little tiny slit in the stomach skin where somebody had been pulling on it. Mother and I looked at each other. We didn’t say a word. We turned around and we took off at the run. Whoever shot that bull was still there. Later on we kidded that we needed to put a notice up at the Post Office. “Whoever shot the bull up in Chilson Canyon, we didn’t see you.”

For a while there was a Post Office at the saw mill when it was active. Anna Horne, Oakley’s wife, was the Post Mistress. Since they went back and forth all the time, it was the Post Office for a few years. And then there was the summer the vegetable truck came up. The guy would come up on one day of the week, say a Thursday. He’d bring the mail and he’d take orders for fresh vegetables. We’d order meat and buy vegetables whenever he came up, so it got to be a place where everybody met. I saw Louie the Indian after not having seen him for years and years down at the vegetable truck.

In fact, that’s where I got the letter that snared Ken Harris. Because Zoanne and I had been up there for a week and a letter came to me from Ken and he said, among other things, “I’m putting it in writing. Will you marry me?” After that he was caught. In those days they had, what did they call it when you begged off after asking someone to marry you? Breach of promise?

We hunted a lot. Most every day somebody went out hunting. Fritz and I used to hunt quail because if you went up to the Squaw Pocket Mine on the edge of the meadow during the day, especially in the morning. Quail would come down from high up in the hills where they nested down to the meadow where they could hide in the grass and get water. We knew enough about the mountain quail calls to know what they were talking about. As they moved down in a covey, you could hear one over here talking and anther over there talking, and you could tell that they were moving along. Now if something spooked them, you could immediately tell that, too. So what we’d do is we’d try to figure out where they were coming down and we’d hide in ambush. As soon as they came in sight, we’d try to shoot two or three, just whatever we needed.

I used to take the .22 and go up to the willows. They had “willow caves.” They’d go back four or five feet and I used to chase them into the caves. I never, ever got a quail that way.