The Cowboy and his Elephant (6 page)

T
he cowboy and his animals lived for one another. Their life was simple, needing only a horizon. “It’s two in the morning, and you get up out of a warm bed and ride through the snow and run your hand up a cow’s butt to pull a calf, and the snow’s blowin’ on your neck and it’s twenty below zero; the cow’s trying to gore you, and the horse’s kickin’, and you get run over in a corral, and kicked, and you do it. You do it because you love the life.

“Not to go on about this, but a little while ago, I was on my horse, Big Bob, sortin’ cows, and I was wearing my rock grinder spurs in tight quarters; I should have worn my ball spurs. This big ol’ calf spun around and jammed up against me, and she caught my foot and I ran that rock grinder in Big Bob’s side and he spun around like
that,
and I was off, hangin’ on, and the corral is about ten feet wide with steel posts, and he spun me off, and I didn’t want to get dragged, and Bob’s stompin’ on me while he’s spinnin’, and I hit that goddamned post right on the top of my head. And sumbitch, it raised a knot.”

A
flamboyance that Bob had inherited from his mother’s family energized his fantasy of the cowboy’s life. His grand-uncle John Gates, called “Bet a Million,” symbolized the buccaneering spirit of the West that Bob yearned to take part in before it was too late. Gates was as brash as he was flush, a gambler to the core who bet the ranchers around San Antonio that he could stampede a herd of longhorns into a stock fence made of thirty strands of the barbed wire he wanted to sell them. They took his bet, and when the wire held against the steers, the wire made Gates a fortune, which he parlayed into railroads, steel, and oil in a company plainly enough called the Texas Company.

After his death in 1911 part of his wealth was passed on to Bob’s mother, who had been his favorite niece.

And Gates’s little oil company in East Texas by then had changed its name to Texaco.

_____

T
here was no room in the Ivy League for Bob’s horse, and he was not going away without his horse to Yale, which had recruited him as a swimmer. So he went instead to the University of Kentucky, where horses
were
allowed, and for four years he studied animal husbandry and agriculture. In some respects he already knew more than his teachers. The habits and behavior of horses and cows, and their thoughts and peculiarities, were as familiar to Bob as he was to himself. In class he learned the animals’ anatomies, their bones and musculatures. He was trying, through the formal study of animals, he guessed, to study himself.

He wanted to be a cowboy, but he was, after all, the son of a rich businessman. Bob did not know how to become what he wanted to be, and he hoped the university might show him a way, since that was what higher education was meant to be for. Meanwhile he bided his time.

For one thing he played football at Kentucky for Paul “Bear” Bryant (Bryant coached at Kentucky before his celebrated tenure at the University of Alabama), who taught him more than just the game.

In the spring of his freshman year, while the team was practicing in a snow flurry on a field under Bryant’s flinty eye, one of Bob’s teammates was knocked unconscious. Bob ran to his aid. He was easing the player’s helmet off when Coach Bryant, sitting on his perch, shouted at Bob, who recalled him saying, “Don’t touch that man!”

“Yes, sir, I’ll get a stretcher,” said Bob, misunderstanding.

“No you won’t. Keep playing.”

Another thirty-five minutes went by until Bryant finally hollered, “Break!”

Bob ran for a stretcher. Covered with wet snow, his friend was still unconscious. Bob lifted him up, carried him off the field, and laid him down in the backseat of his car. When they reached the hospital, doctors diagnosed a concussion.

Bob could not sleep that night. He was angry, and he was torn and sad for his teammate and his coach. He loved to play football, but he had lost respect for Bryant. The next day he walked into Bryant’s office carrying his football uniform and told him to “shove it.” “Coach,” he went on, “that man is a friend of mine. None of us mind getting hurt, but what you did was
wrong.”

I
n the summer of 1949, he signed on as a cowboy riding the chuck wagon on the Waggoner’s 3-D Ranch in Vernon, Texas, to get a
feel
for the life. From the start it was as he had expected, and more, all the years he had waited for the fantasy to come true, all of it—the cattle drives and stampedes, sleeping in a Tucson bed (the hard ground with a saddle for a pillow), chuck wagons, and the potwalloper’s gracious grub call, “Come an’ git it afore I drap it in the dirt!” The ranch manager turned the wranglers out of bed with a kick, to the sound of a clanging breakfast triangle at three in
the morning. Bob was “duckin’ rattlesnakes” to reach his horse on the remuda and saddle up. He rode a horse named Coyote. They shifted fifteen hundred almost wild steers under bone-dry skies. Sleeping rough, again with rattlesnakes and horned toads, eating beans off metal plates, alongside men who were older and rougher than himself, Bob kept his mouth shut and his eyes open. The regular hands on the 3-D had little use for a college boy until he earned their respect through his actions as a man and a cowboy.

That moment came for Bob at the end of the summer during cattle-shipping time. The ranch manager was opening a gate to allow the herd to cross a two-lane county highway. A white sun rising on an eastern horizon meant another hot and dusty day ahead for the cowboys and the cows. Bob was riding drag on Coyote as usual, behind the herd. The steers were moving forward at their grudging pace through the gate.

Other cowboys were working that morning, but Bob was the first to look up the highway. Not a car had gone by for hours. Now he froze at the sight of a gaudy red Buick convertible speeding at one hundred miles an hour, headed straight—and, Bob thought, unavoidably—for the steers. The driver saw what he was about to hit and sounded his horn. At the sudden shocking sound, the steers exploded back into the gate in a frenzy, stamping straight toward Bob and Coyote, and a couple of his cowboy companions.

With skill and speed Bob moved Coyote out of the way, as the steers kicked up a cloud of dust. Everything had happened fast. Bob spurred Coyote, who knew what he was being asked to do. They ran along with the stampede over a mile. Bob and the two other cowboys slowed them down by turning them, and finally stopped them.

The ranch manager, whom Bob looked up to, told him, “You know how to cowboy now. Come on into the office later and I’ll start to teach you the ranchin’ business.”

T
he next summer he worked for the legendary cattleman Colonel Jack Lapham on the Flying L Ranch in Bandera, Texas. Lapham was a fighter pilot in World War I and a flying instructor in World War II, and halfway through the summer, he saw promise in Bob, deciding that the time had come, of all unlikely things for a cowboy, for him to fly.

Bob had no burning desire to learn; indeed, at first he had the impression that the colonel was taking him up for a joy ride in his wood-framed and fabric-covered Piper Cub J-3. Up in the air the colonel told him to take over the controls. Bob’s cowboy boots were too big to fit the rudder pedals on the floor. As the Cub waffled in the air, he hurriedly slipped off the boots and flew the plane barefoot in a wide circle, with the colonel quietly instructing him over his shoulder. And when they landed, after three hours of instructions, the colonel got out and lit a cigarette and took a couple of drags.

“Take it up,” he told Bob, sitting in the airplane.

“What did you say?” Bob asked.

“The airplane. Take it up.”

“You think I’m ready for it?” Bob asked, because he certainly didn’t think so himself.

“Yup,” said the colonel. “You just take it up, and don’t go flyin’ around the country, neither.”

“Well, all right,” said Bob. He shut the window and somehow left the ground. He didn’t fly around the country. Yelling out loud with relief, he brought the Cub in to land with a bump and a shudder. He taxied up to where the colonel was standing, cigarette still in his fingers. He opened the window and smiled, and asked the colonel what he thought.

“Now you can fly,” he told him.

When he had calmed his nerves, Bob had the sense that the experience of flying solo applied to being a cowboy too. You didn’t talk about it or study it, you just did it.

G
irls went weak in the knees at the sight of Bob and his brother, Lester, Jr., nicknamed Brud. The girls’ parents, though, often went weak in the stomach at the mention of their names. The boys’ reputation for recklessness preceded them: They rode horses fast and drove cars faster, and they chased girls with lightning speed. They played hard, and fought with bare fists over girls, and often won their choices. Bob knew what young women looked good to him.
Because he knew he had a fine eye for horses, he believed that he had a fine eye for women. He appreciated both on approximately the same terms, as he said, “with no disrespect meant to either one.” He knew horses even better than women, and when choosing a woman, he compared her with a filly. He looked for style, class, and spirit. He said, “If a woman has class and style, she stands out. You know,
eye
appeal. That’s different for every man alive. What suits me to a T may not suit you to a T. And that’s why everybody doesn’t want the same woman.”

A young lass whose beauty turned others pale had already caught his eye in high school. Jane Wright suited every boy’s dreams, but Bob was the only one with the nerve to tell her so. He walked her home from school, and he carried her books. Before they had even kissed he made up his mind to marry her. He was a realist who knew that his parents would not let him elope. He set a date in his mind, June 10, 1950—six years away. “I just hoped I’d live to be that old. I just wanted to live long enough to get married to Jane. I prayed for it—‘Just let me, Lord.’ ”

In the meantime Jane chose to marry another man. The betrothed couple signed the deed on a new house. Invitations went out; flowers were ordered; wedding gifts piled up on the Wrights’ dining room table. Jane bought a gown with a long train.

Bob was dreaming up ways to split them apart.

“I might have killed him, or he might have killed me. I
think
I’d have killed him. He was a no good sumbitch. No, I
know
I would have killed him. But anyway—I got lucky.”

At the last moment Jane realized that she was making a mistake. She called off the wedding, and as soon as her parents recovered from the shock, she accepted Bob’s proposal without regrets in 1950. A couple of years went by, with Bob managing a farm in Illinois, before he decided that his future lay in the West as a cowboy, and he and Jane drove out to Colorado to find a place to start a ranch and begin a family.

I
n time they settled on a spread near Colorado Springs, which would become one of the larger cattle ranches in the whole of Colorado. Bob registered the “T Cross” brand for his cattle. The ranching life was all that he and Jane had hoped for. The wide-open spaces were a blessing to Bob, of animals galore, blue skies and vast horizons, tumbleweeds and sage, children and family. The great Texas longhorn herds had once traveled to railheads over their land, and the Western legends of Cripple Creek, Pike’s Peak, and the Black Forest gave it spirit. On their own ranch, and with their own cattle and horses, they lived as people of that region had lived for a century and more.

B
ob set out to raise a family, earn a reputation, and make a living as a cowboy.

He and Jane were noticed as different from the start, however. With her beauty and his handsomeness, they were
as striking as any couple ever seen in that part of Colorado. His Wranglers and boots, a plain-fronted shirt with mother-of-pearl snaps, and a Resistol brand hat somehow looked better and more natural on his thin, muscular six-foot-two frame. He
was
handsome, with a broad, lazy smile, hooded brown eyes, and a complexion that the sun and wind off the Rockies had etched with ruggedness.

Jane was more muted. With the birth of their children she had matured into an elegant woman with black hair and delicate features. Anyone could see that she was besotted with Bob. She laughed at his jokes, thrilled at his daring, admired his constancy, and, always—behind the excitement and the glamor, the hard work and hard times—worried over his safety. Only part of her, the part that loved the ranch life and endured its hardships willingly, accepted the risks. A worrier with much to occupy her, as a mother of four growing, healthy children and a husband who believed in the virtue of self-sufficiency as an article of faith, Jane drew a sharp line between which risks seemed necessary and which seemed mere bravado. She and Bob never saw eye to eye on this issue, which remained with them for years to come.

She had always known what animals meant to Bob, but she was still puzzled by the time and the energy he gave them. He just sometimes seemed to lose touch with people, even with her and the children, when he was around his animals. She was almost certain he would not know what she meant if she brought it up.

She had her own work to do as a homemaker, and the
days were filled with activity. She understood his business was to raise animals on 63,000 acres of grazing land, with three thousand mother cows, and thirty to forty horses in all stages of wildness and temper. She also accepted that horses injured their riders. When Big Bob kicked Bob full in the chest and smashed his ribs and sternum, Jane nursed her husband back to health without a scolding word. But when her sons rode recklessly and fell, and came home with broken bones, she could be less understanding. Adverse to risk herself as a mother, she did not understand when those she loved took chances that she considered unnecessary.

In their community their neighbors respected the Norrises for their honesty and character. They lived as people who “wouldn’t mind selling [their] pet parrot to the town gossip,” to borrow a line from Will Rogers, whom Bob sounded like when he talked with the same honeyed drawl. He lived by his word, which was the bond of the Western landowner. He attended church regularly with his family, though he said that his T Cross ranch served as ample evidence of the Almighty’s hand. He knew its contours as other men knew their own signatures. He watched how it was rapidly changing with the arrival of families who also wanted a piece of the West. Almost as soon as he began to ranch, Bob saw himself as a member of a vanishing breed.