Little Bird

Growing up on the V-V Ranch as a young boy in the 1970’s was full of freedom and excitement. I often wonder how many kids get to experience anything like that today.

Even though I was legally blind with only 20/200 vision at that point in my life, (and my hearing was just fine) my guess is that you might not have even known it.

There were the dire warnings from eye doctors to not be involved in physical, contact sports, but for the most part I did not really heed them. I did stop playing baseball at school because I realized that one day, I wasn’t going to see a ball in time, and I would end up catching it with my face instead of my glove. That wasn’t too big of a sacrifice because I would sit behind the backstop and play my guitar for all the girls!

I limited my rodeo activities to the real, impromptu kind that tends to happen on any ranch, and I never did get to play hockey for the Montreal Canadiens, but that was about it!

No, for the most part I likely did way more than most boys did at my age. My wife Dawn thinks I did more by the time that I was 15 than most people get to do in a lifetime. That might just be true!

At school, I was on the Cessford Cougars basketball and volleyball teams. I played endless floor hockey games and did everything else in the Physical Education class that everyone else did.

At home, by the time I was 8 years old, I was helping to build the feedlot. I unloaded semitrucks loaded with grain at our big hammermill and dad would take me out to a swather and drop me off with lunch and a can of gas. He would come back later in the day and find me still going around in circles on that thing. He said I was good with machinery because things didn’t seem to breakdown when I drove them.

If it had wheels, I learned to drive it, and if it didn’t have wheels then it had tracks and I learned to drive those too!

I loved riding my horse Pedro, and often I would just saddle him up to go for a ride after school if there was nothing else I had to do.

There were fabulous cattle drives with what I always thought must have been the last of the real cowboys.

Then there was my dirt bike Gus that I rode all over those seventy-two-thousand acres. I went places no one ever knew about, and I was a wild man. I subscribed to Dirt Bike Magazine, and I was always racing against Bob Hurricane Hannah who was hard on my tail, but he could never catch me. I had amazing, spectacular wipeouts ten miles from home, but I never got hurt too badly. I did knock myself unconscious once and woke up in a cactus patch, but the only thing I was really concerned about was my bike. I ran over to check on Gus and he seemed to be ok, so everything was good!

I may have drove back home a little bit slower, but just that time.

Gus and I were responsible for 1600 acres of flood irrigation corn, and we loved all that mud. Gus and I jumped over everything I could find. One particularly challenging jump required that you had to brake hard after you landed to avoid going through a barbed wire fence. Do not try this at home. 🙂

There were pool games in the bunkhouse and jam sessions too, which were not always safe, but that is a story for another day!

I am NOT going to tell you about the day that I played with the gunpowder a bit too much.

My brother-in-law taught me a lot about archery and guns too.

I really loved archery, and I became a pretty good shot. I actually won an archery competition at a music festival once. My friends couldn’t believe it when it was announced that I had the best score that day out of the many who had participated.

I had access to a BB gun, then a pellet gun, a couple of 22’s, a 12-gauge shotgun and even a 243 rifle. I learned how to handle them safely and oddly enough, I became a pretty good shot with those too. If I could see it, I could hit it. Pop cans, beer bottles. Anything we could devise as a target was fair game.

One of the things I did a lot of was work in the Vet Shack. When you have 15 – 20,000 head of cattle someone has to take care of their medical needs. Every morning, cowboys would “ride pens” and “pull” (remove) cattle that needed to go to the “hospital” as we sometimes called it. Dad had a degree in Animal Husbandry from the California Polytechnic State University, so he knew a lot about how to treat cattle for just about any ailment that they might have, and he even did operations from time to time. I learned a great deal about the diagnoses and treatment of these animals. So much so that by the time I was 13 or 14, dad would leave me to run the Vet Shack sometimes.

There was another aspect to this job which I did not enjoy. One day dad said, “Greg, this heifer isn’t going to make it. She has pneumonia and she is struggling badly to just breathe. Go get your 22 and put her down.”

So, I did.

I knew it was a mercy killing. We saved the lives of scores of animals, but sometimes this would happen.

I found it very hard to do, but I do understand that sometimes in life a hard job like that has to be met with a certain hardness.

Perhaps I acquired a little bit too much hardness.

By this time, I had graduated from pop cans for target practice, and I had been shooting sparrows off powerlines for a while. Then it was the Muskrats in the Blood Indian Creek that ran right beside our house.

One day I was right in our front yard with a pellet gun, and I easily popped a sparrow off of the powerline above me.

He had been sitting up there innocently and happily singing away with his buddies, but now he was silently lying on the ground. I had ended his life, but what for?

I could think of no reason at all except that I had been so selfish as to use one of God’s beautiful creations just for mindless sport.

I wept.

This was not exactly what a tough cowboy-in-training was supposed to do was it?

I apologized to God for needlessly and selfishly taking the life of his creation, and I apologized to that beautiful little bird too.

I determined right then and there to never just kill something for no reason at all. Yes, if I ever needed food for my family, I would gladly hunt, but I would never kill again just for sport.

I encountered God for the first time that day, and it would not be the last.