Sometimes I think, life is just a rodeo...

The fall afternoon was like new blown glass: sharp, clear and perfect. Barehanded, I tied old barbed wire to newly driven tee-posts with rusty steeple pullers. The too-long handles of the pullers banged against the wire, slowing the routine process. Even in the middle of perfect nowhere, problems arise.

Fence building finished on a Sunday afternoon, my brother and I hurried on to search for the newest addition to his herd, a starkly red, bald face bull calf born barely 16 hours before. The little one's mama had begun bawling to set the nerves of every living thing on sharp edge. Not even intuition was required to know something was wrong.

Just in case, we armed ourselves respectively. Bubba is given to a 12-guage shotgun while I prefer a lighter, single shot .410. We loaded a quick hundred pounds of cattle cake onto the back of the souped-up Honda four-wheeler that substitutes for a stout horse these days. The need to haul feed left me riding on the front grill as Bubba gunned the engine. I took a deep seat and got a faraway look in my eye as I clenched the fingers of one hand behind me on the nearest rollbar to save my own life. The other hand I threw into the air for the sheer effect of it all. Bubba gave out a rebel yell into the crisp fall afternoon. I hadn't bargained on adventure but, at 45, you take it where you can get it. In many ways, I was born a cowboy. A song from my strong years filled my head, John Fogerty clipping to the tune of electric guitars, "Sometimes I think, life is just a rodeo. The trick is to ride and make to the end."

He drove like a banshee, if for no other reason than he could. I turned my hat around backwards and ducked my head to keep at least some of the flying mud off my bifocals. A long sprint through the creek bed tested our resistance. I bobbed and weaved on the front of the motorcyle but my instincts are not what they once were and a stray branch found its mark, opening up a gash on my forearm that I would later close with super glue and steri-strips, foregoing stitches.

No sign of the calf and we had hurtled a quarter mile over terrain that should only have been traversed by men in boots. Bubba slowed the growling four-wheeler at the base of a burly log fallen haphazardly over the muddy creek and we prepared ourselves to go forward on foot.

A faint sense of alarm sounded in my head as I pulled my shotgun from its sheath. Deep in my heart, I am fundamental and believe in the concept of an eye for an eye. I will kill or be killed. I will kill for my children and I will kill for principle. Looking back, I did not want to kill on a perfect Sunday afternoon in the Fall of October, 2006. Still yet, a deadly weapon rests easily in my hands. I know intimately my place at the top of the food chain.

We walked along the soggy creek as predators do, careful not to alert the seemingly benign world. What had been a headlong hurtle into a place where we did not completely belong became our deliberate assimilation into an environment we seek to control.

My female ancestors survived on the unforgiving and endless prairie because of their ability to discern the smallest difference. This allowed us to save our young from certain danger in the space of a moment's breath and therefore propagate the species. Give a throwback office dweller a weapon and a mission on a day when the very atmosphere reeks of survial and she will react as her grandmothers did.

I was the first to see the calf. He lay in a hollow of washed out creek bank, probably where he fell as he tottered too far from mama on legs that had not yet completely mastered the fine art of navigation. The calf did not appear hurt and the place he lay was snug and sheltered and overhung with trees just beginning to show color matching the red of his newborn pelt.

Close behind me, Bubba saw the baby a bare moment after I did and. smiling, started toward him. I think the vision of men must be linear, causing the goddess to often make amused excuses for their existence. I placed a quick and stern hand on his forearm and, to his credit, he became immediately still, watching me intently to understand what he did not see.

The branches of a sprawling autumn willow made the the bower that sheltered the calf. I saw that along the sturdiest of those branches stretched a lithe, compact and yellow-eyed bobcat, so focused on the tiny calf that he had neither seen nor smelled my brother and I. In the span of seconds, the well-concealed cat crept noticably closer to the oblivious and genetically domesticated tiny animal on the ground.

The next moments became negative-hued frames in the slow-motion of memory. Within a breath, the situation was revealed without doubt. In the same whisper of moments, I was reminded of how the world works. As bobcats will, the sturdy, wild feline in the tree surely intended to kill the calf, probably to drag it off as a feast for a mate and perhaps even late season kittens. The calf, on the other hand, belonged to my brother. No question.

Shooting is, like basketball, football and other sports, basically about hand-eye coordination. The results are necessarily more tragic. I live close to the Earth and Sky. My weapon came up instinctively, the butt of the worn rifle settling easy into my shoulder, as it has so many times before. I shot as an extension of breath, the unseen shell taking the bobcat right through the heart, as I would have wished it.

My brother gasped with surprise as the predator he had yet to see fell heavily onto the damp, branch-strewn ground just at our feet. The dead thud of the falling body produced another emotion entirely in me. There was no life in the bobcat's perfect body as I crouched beside it, my rifle discarded in the mud. I had saved the calf, yes, and he struggled sleepily to his small feet to perhaps live until he is slaughtered without remorse for meat to feed us.

But the cat was a thinking, feeling symbol of the Goddess, miles above the calf except in American dollars. The cat's fur was still vital and his essence warm when I touched him, cradling an oversized paw in the very hands that had sent the shell that ended his life. I squeezed my eyes shut and offered up a feeble explantion to the Spirit. I'm not sure that She understands the need to serve the bottom line but perhaps there is a chance. I focused on that chance as I gouged a hole in the Earth to house the bobcat's remains. I did many things but I did not leave him lie.

Bubba carried the bald faced red calf back to his mama like a proud father. I lagged behind, taking another path until he revved up the four-wheeler in the distance. In the interim silence, I tried to own my action...

"Goddess, in this moment, I have taken the life of a precious spirit. I did so with good intentions and to protect my own. Please guide the Bobcat's way easy into the next life. He died Hunting just as I killed with the Spirit of the Hunter. Bless both the four-footed Brother and the bipedal Sister and make us one to feel the other's heart. And Goddess, I doubt you have ever listened to John Fogerty but perhaps there is some truth in his simple words: 'Sometimes I think life is just a rodeo. The trick is to ride and make it to the end.'"