Swell. I’m in a Joel McCrea movie.

I was one of the indians watching from that mesa over there. No lines, no camera time, but “I know they’re out there.”

I’ve been slowly, reluctantly clearing out J&H’s house, sort of as the mood strikes me and the wind permits, and got a call from H yesterday asking if I wouldn’t please hurry it up. Okay, so this morning I went out early to get a few hours in and beat the wind. (Y’know, spend a few hours in and around their house when the wind is really blasting, up on that totally unprotected ridge, and you can kind of develop a little more feeling for why they might have gotten sick of living there.)

Anyway, around eleven I was running out of steam and planning to wrap it up. I came outside with another wheelbarrow full of crap and I heard cattle lowing. Hell, I heard cattle bugling.

I’m not a big expert on the life and habits of cattle. I’ve lived around them just enough to despise them and the ground they foul with their massively stupid presence. But I have learned, more or less by osmosis, that cattle making that much noise are unhappy cattle. And nothing seems to make cattle quite as unhappy as being driven.

I hiked over to the edge of the ridge, overlooking the road maybe half a mile away and a hundred feet straight down. And sure enough I saw cattle. Dozens of cattle, including a bunch of small calves. All bunched up and made miserable by a couple of cow ponies doing what cow ponies do – cow ponies are trained to have about as much respect for cattle as I do – who in turn were ridden by a couple of cowboys looking like they’d enjoyed as much of this as they cared to.

Which made a certain amount of sense, because they were on the road! Why were they on the road? The road is for cars as the wash is for water: It chooses its own path and that is not by any means the most direct path. Plus I wouldn’t be surprised if they’d met a car or two on the way, and the cattle would most certainly have expressed an opinion about that. If they really took the bulldozed roads all the way from the county road where they must have emptied their stock trailers, well…I don’t care that it was only eleven in the morning, they’d already put in a full day’s work. Mongo impressed.

But the most important part was that the cattle have finally arrived. Haven’t gone to check yet but I assume the cowboys drove them into the now waterlogged holding pen they built around the new waterer. Guess I’ll find out later today, since I have to drive by there. Probably the plan is to leave them there a day or to so their pea-brains will retain the knowledge that there’s water there, and then release them to befoul all my friends’ properties.

Not much of that is really unusual, I mean I’ve dealt with cattle every summer I’ve been here and I don’t know these guys will be any worse about resident dogs than the last guy was. Problem is, the last guy was a bastard, and he didn’t rebuild the watering station that puts me and my dogs smack between the county road and the cattle. I try to keep Ghost away from the meat-rats, but this year that’s going to be hard.

I’ve already gone to some effort on the dogs’ part. The person most likely to be a problem, I’ve been told, is a local Mormon kid named Carson. I sought him out, introduced myself, told him of my concern, gave him my phone number. No doubt he was one of those black-hatted figures down there. Should have taken note of his horse when I had a chance to see it in his trailer, then I’d know which he was. Soon we’d know how much of a problem he was really going to be.

This is open range country. Laws relating to cattle on open range date from the 19th century. It amounts to this: You can fence them out, but if you don’t do that you don’t have very many rights. Any cattleman can shoot any cattle-chasing dog, and if you happen to own the dog you can suck it.

Okay, now, let it be said that Little Bear. left to his own devices, would take great joy in chasing a calf to exhaustion and would probably then kill it and eat as much of it as he could hold. LB is a predator. If I were a cowboy, I’d take a very dim view of LB.

But LB is also cabled to the Lair. It’s Ghost I’m concerned about. Back in his younger days he also enjoyed a good cattle chase, and he is not cabled to the Lair. Nor would he ever forgive me for doing that to him. But Ghost isn’t as young as he used to be and by himself he’s no threat to the cattle. The cattle, through the cattlemen, are possibly a threat to him. That’s the issue that’s been bugging me about this whole thing. I had this discussion with Carson, and the time now comes when we find out if we’re going to be enemies. Leave my dogs alone and we’ll get along fine.

Once the herd had passed I headed home. Maybe the cowboys would return by the road – if so, there’d be no incident today. But if they took the more direct route via the wash, today was the day they’d meet Ghost.

Ghost once also liked to chase horses, but he’s older and wiser now. Now he’ll just get behind them and bark. The neighbors’ horses aren’t impressed with him, and probably these tired and experienced cow ponies wouldn’t be. So if the cowboys didn’t seek confrontation there wouldn’t be one. If they did, this was at last the time when all hell would break loose. Because I can’t keep him locked up every time they might possibly come by, and I’m not going to take it passively if they try to hurt my dog.

Weather’s supposed to sock in again, so I wanted to get some laundry washed. I let the boys out and got to work. Ghost took himself for a walk and then settled down in the shadow of the Jeep – one of his favorite places, which alas allows him to look out over the wash.

Maybe forty five minutes later, Ghost let out a bark and launched toward the wash. Little Bear was frustrated in his desire to join him: There was chaos and mayhem to be wrought! Ghost of course completely ignored my calls. I saw black cowboy hats in the wash, bobbing just over the intervening brush, and knew the time had come. My prior precautions would either work out and the cowboys would ignore the dog, or we were going to have us some senseless violence right here.

My heart was in my throat, but I’ve long since given up trying to control Ghost in situations like this. I’d done as much as I could and it would either work out or it wouldn’t. I could avenge him – which would start a war that would certainly destroy me – but I couldn’t protect him.

Fortunately the cowboys did the right thing, which was nothing. They ignored him and kept riding, he hounded them out of his territory and came straight home proud of himself. End of confrontation.

So they’ve decided to honor the truce, at least for now. We’ll see if it holds.