Cancer and the Cowboy
By: Patty Latham
Tags: Friendship, Cattle Ranching, Courage, Fiction Friday, Testicular Cancer

Photo by Scott Ymker on Unsplash

Cancer and the Cowboy

The old Dodge pickup rattled on the side of the dirt road and its headlight beams caught the strange leg swing of the limping man with the cane. Our horses startled in the pitch-black night. They were young enough to want to turn tail and bolt.

My husband Jim and I were the first riders down off the Cimarrona where we’d left fifty New Mexican cows and their two-week-old calves. We were close to the makeshift corral and the steep old rusted loading chute where we’d seen the cows and calves clatter off the double decker trucks hours earlier, at dusk.

It was May, the creeks were running full, and grass was leaping by inches out of the sun-warmed soil. The young aspen leaves were light green, curled and timid — not quaking this early in the year. While we waited for the trucks, the evening had seemed innocent and new, just beginning to chill with approaching night.

The cows, unloaded first, thundered and bellowed down the narrow ramp, the calves bawled and leaped, bucking down the chute. The veteran cattle rancher and a young cowboy, Mike, worried about them pairing up and we’d waited while the cows called their babies home for dinner. The evening peace was rent with noise.

Big horses with years of cattle drive experience tenderly prodded the little calves in front of them on the three-mile climb to the expanse of Cimarrona Ranch, a green inland sea of grass bordered by named pinnacles of rock — The Castle, The Needles, Blackhead Peak and Quartz Ridge. Sundown glowed pink on these guardians and the cow cacophony gave way to munching and sucking. Quiet again. We left the cattle near a clear creek just at dark. It seemed like yesteryear.

In the dark back at the corral, Mike, leaning on his cane, was trying to engage the wheels on the front end of the crotchety chute but he had neither the strength nor the stability to get the job done.

My husband, Jim, swung down off his horse and handed me the reins.

“Let me help here,” he said, biting back the words. “You shouldn’t even be trying this.” Together they wrenched the wheel lever down and the wheels shrieked into position. The horses jumped back from the angry contraption that shrieked like a wild cat in the quiet of the night.

Mike was a young man temporarily aged and disabled by cancer. His chosen life as a cowboy and the physical demands he had always made on himself as well as his indomitable spirit would be strong medicine in the challenges ahead. Mike’s ability to see beyond the day and his eagerness to share his anachronistic lifestyle made him special in our eyes.

As neighbors sometimes do, he had called us six weeks previously and asked if he could come over to talk to us. We often shared horse stories and had bought a three-year- old gelding from Mike, so we figured he had horse news. And as always, Mike showed up in his clean pressed jeans, flannel shirt covered with a grey woolen cattleman’s vest and his red paisley silk handkerchief knotted around his neck. About six foot three and trim, Mike wore tall clean cowboy boots with his jeans stuffed inside them and he carefully removed his black wool felt cowboy hat, holding it with the brim folded to the crown in one hand. He was clean shaven and his brown hair was combed. He wore his glasses this day and he looked solemn.

Mike had come to tell us that he had testicular cancer, that he was about to have surgery, all sorts of diagnostic imaging and then chemotherapy. He had a pretty painful blood clot in one leg caused by the pressure from metastatic cancer in his abdomen and he’d be on clot dissolving medication and blood thinners, too, and he couldn’t ride for a few months. Mike never cursed in the presence of a lady and he didn’t now. The smile returned to his face and the young cowboy we’d known showed through.

“This is just a bump in the road.” Mike nodded, reassuring us that he was already looking past it.

“I have 100 pairs of cows coming up from New Mexico in a couple of months, in two loads, to put on the Cimarrona and after a month there we’ll need to push them over to the permit on Porcupine. We’ll have to drive them down the Blanco, over night them at Schutz’s place, and then to Shahan’s ranch down there past Chromo before snowfall. You are sure welcome to ride along any time and we can use the help.”

Mike knew we wouldn’t be any help, greenhorns that we are, but he also knew how much we’d value the ride. Mike’s generosity in the face of his news was humbling.

We asked Mike to keep in touch with us as he went through surgery, needle biopsies of lymph nodes, CT scans, PET scans, MRI’s and oncology conferences in Denver and Albuquerque. He did, even calling us from the hospital when he was admitted suddenly because of the blood clot. Mike didn’t know then that the metastatic cancer was the size of a basketball in his abdomen and another was invading his lungs. He just knew he’d see the other side of all of this.

The oncologists told Mike that he’d have to stay in Durango…that the chemotherapy Monday through Thursday would hit him hard, that he’d be weak and nauseated, unable to drive. But after the first two days, we’d see Mike driving his red flatbed, lariat bouncing on its hook in the back window, a little slower than normal over the washboard and potholes on Mill Creek Road heading for home almost every day.

Mike would call, quietly pleased to tell us how startled the doctors and nurses had been every morning when he’d sauntered in like the sunshine, wishing them a good morning. He was the bright hope of the chemo center but he was sad about the other folks there in the lounge chairs struggling with the hell of their individual poisons.

It wasn’t all easy. The blood clot in Mike’s leg didn’t want to clear and his leg was painfully swollen with tissue fluid and rigid from the pressure. He had to lie for hours with a pressure bandage on his elevated leg. I visited him one evening in the trailer house he shared with John, his hired hand. The trailer steps were grey with age and the door creaked open. The linoleum on the kitchen floor was chipped and pitted from boot heels and spurs. In the living room Mike smiled from one couch, covered by a bright blue and orange afghan his grand mom had knitted, he’d said, and his tan and white hound dog smirked and lazed on the other.

Mike said he didn’t usually let Mojo on the couch but that the hound was taking advantage. Right. There were pictures on the wall of bands of horses he’d known while cowboying in Wyoming, and a little old TV with a diverse videotape collection of westerns, who-dunnits, horse training tips and current movies. While I was there, another handsome young cowboy and his beautiful wife and baby came by to visit. Mike played with the baby and for just a minute I could imagine the little boy he must have been and the father he could be. It was two days after that when the cows arrived from New Mexico and Mike got up to supervise the drive. He wasn’t supposed to be up, but those cows were his responsibility. He couldn’t ride, but he could direct from the Dodge.

Towards the end of autumn, Mike called to ask if we could help him look for a few missing head up on Porcupine Road. We agreed to meet in the morning.

Mike arrived with two other hands and three horses and he smiled as he saddled a rough four-year-old bay who’d only had a few rides. I was hoping that horse wouldn’t buck. Mike swept off his hat and grinned while watching our reaction to his bald head. Even his eyebrows and sideburns were gone. We grinned back.

Under the umbrella of a crystal blue sky we clung on to our horses as we followed Mike up steep wooded hillsides, horses stepping over barrel-thick downed aspen, resting for moments on narrow ledges, meandering through ponderosa forest and along century old logging trails. We rode past a camouflaged bow hunter, unseen until he stood in disgust at our intrusion on his hiding place. We topped out below Squaretop Mountain and jumped a small irrigation ditch. The grass was still lush and green and the aspen were turning shades of bright yellows and fiery orange this high up in the mountains. We found fresh evidence of cow — prints sunk deep into the rich loam, and cow manure.

Jim and I didn’t know where we were, how we got there, or certainly how to get back home. But Mike followed the tracks to the group of recalcitrant cows and calves and we quietly hazed them down an easier route through young yellow aspen thick as brush to Porcupine Road, picking up a menacing black bull and another pair in route. Mike allowed as how we should just let the bull wander along with us at will. Our horses seemed eager to head downhill, perhaps as secretly relieved as their riders.

When we reached our horse trailers, we left Mike with the real cow hands to drive the cattle on down to the lower lease. We’d come worrying that Mike would have trouble with this, his first ride, after beating the big C, but we left knowing that the spirit of the western cowboy is alive and well for yet another generation.

“Mike” has moved to lower cattle country and yes, he is a dad.