Summer of the Bull
Long legs help went running from a bull.
During the slow, dog days of summer, the first helicopters start circling over pastures, getting fresh footage for the nightly news. Sometimes they’ll fly over a whole herd grazing a hillside, which is sure to spike ratings for the lead story, “Farmer Gored by Bull: Second Attack into Two Weeks.” Sometimes they’ll even get a shot of cows stampeding toward a feed bunk in a so-called “feeding frenzy.”
“Did you see the news?” my neighbor Buddy asked, after stopping by my farm to watch me work. I had been twining late-planted tomatoes, so the chance to converse gave me a good reason to attempt standing upright again.
“No,” I said.
“Ralph got gored again,” he said.
“Is he okay?”
“Yeah, he was wearing his Kevlar vest,” he said. “But raising rodeo bulls ain’t for the faint of heart.”
“Why was it on the news?” I asked.
“Ralph’s in cahoots with the news station. This time of year, they’re always hunting for something sensational to talk about, and it gives his rodeo bulls some free publicity. But it’s a shame because it’s really cut back on the tourists. Nobody is going to want to camp on farms and search for Knobby, if they think they’re going to get gored by a bull.”
Knobby is the name of our local bigfoot. He is most often seen in the upper part of the county, near Hickory Knob in South Mountains State Park. But he gets around and has been sighted all over the place throughout the years, even as far south as our area.
I’m not sure if Buddy believes in bigfoot, but he believes in making money. After the last local Knobby sighting made national news (a farmer in the upper end of the county who was possibly inebriated called 911 and told the operator that Knobby had a “beautiful head of hair”) Buddy quickly capitalized on the notoriety by having the local screen printer print a run of Knobby t-shirts, which he sold to bigfoot enthusiasts who were a large part of his clientele. To diversify his income, Buddy had created a few woodland campsites, which he charged folks $40 per night to use. At first, campsite rentals and T-shirt sales were brisk, but they slowly tapered off once Knobby went back into hiding. Buddy still had lots of shirts left to sell.
“That gives me an idea,” he said.
“Uh, oh,” I said. Although I have always admired his ability to squeeze money from a turnip, in all the years I have known Buddy, I have come to the realization that his ideas should be avoided at all costs. “I don’t want to know,” I said.
And I didn’t know until I saw the news report.
“BULL CHASES BIGFOOT,” the news scion read. I’m not sure who Buddy got to play bigfoot--he certainly couldn’t run that fast himself--but a few days later I did see Ralph wearing a Knobby T-shirt, which he said Buddy gave him for free. Buddy would never give anybody anything for free, so I have my suspicions.
