Midnight Cowboy

Actually, it was between 1 o’clock and 1:30 a.m. this morning.

I was just about to head to bed when our two puppies, who very rarely bark, began to do just that.

I thought maybe the neighbors’ dogs had gotten in through the raised section of the back fence again. I grabbed a flashlight, went out the back door, and shined it in the direction they were barking. There, about 12 yards away next to the hammock, staring at me, was a bull.  

Photo taken at an earlier date; imagine it's dark.

Just outside the city of Cochabamba in the semi-rural barrio of Chilimarca where we live, a lot of people have farm animals, but those with sheep or cattle rarely have enough land for them to graze, so they bring them around to neighbors’ houses and empty lots to find grass.

Our neighbor, Germán, has a bull that he sometimes brings to our house to graze. We live on a big double-lot, shared with the house of our landlords, who spend most of the year in the U.S., and Germán takes care of the yard for them. He ties the bull to a tree. When it’s finished grazing in the area the rope allows, he comes and moves it to some other part of the yard. It’s always fairly far away from the house – sometimes we can’t even see it and only realize it’s there when we hear it mooing.

When Germán first brought the bull, in March, my plan was to take advantage of the situation: spend a lot of time with it, get used to it, learn a thing or two about handling large animals. I was a suburban kid. I’d never spent much time on a farm and I thought it was a good opportunity. I wanted my two young boys to do the same. When Germán showed us how low-key this bull was, how we could just walk up and pet it, I felt that this would be easy. The bull lowered and raised its head at me, gently, once or twice, and Germán slapped it in face. That is, he hit it on the flank of the head with his open palm, firmly but not too hard, to teach it not to rear its head up like that, explaining that otherwise it will start butting people more aggressively when it gets older. The bull was young and smallish still. For a bull.

The night before a trip to the US this past April, sometime past midnight, I had gone out to see if some clothes on the line were dry yet, and I heard a breathy sound coming from the darkness beyond the lit porch. We didn’t have puppies yet then, but the landlords had two dogs that lived in our shared yard, and I thought it was one of them. I peered out, and as my eyes adjusted to the dark, I suddenly realized the bull was standing about three yards from my face. Since I knew the bull was pretty docile, and I’d seen Germán handle it, I simply grabbed its rope, untangled it from a nearby bush, and walked it to the back of the yard where I tied it very firmly to a tree branch.

As I was tying the rope, I felt a gentle nudge on my behind. I fished tying the knot, turned around, and saw that the bull’s head was right behind me.  It took me a few seconds to realize that the bull had just every-so-subtly GORED ME IN THE ASS! Okay, not gored. But it did have horns (although they were still a little knobby) and it had pushed the flat part of its head, between the horns, into my butt. So, then I remembered Germán, and though, “Oh, geez, I’m supposed to smack him in the face!” But by then, so much time had passed that I thought the conditioning effect would be lost, so I declined to bull-slap him. I spent the whole trip to the US telling everyone I met that I fully intended to slap a bull in the face upon returning to Bolivia. I figured the opportunity would present itself quickly, and I was really getting pumped up about doing it. ‘Cause I mean, badass, right?

But when we returned to Bolivia, the bull was gone. Our lawn was all dry and he’d eaten what he could, so Germán had taken him in search of greener pastures, literally.

He’s been back a few times since, but I haven’t had a lot of time to go seek him out. When I have, he’s been very gentle. He sort of lowered his head at me once, but I had a camera in my hand and my 3-year-old with me, and I sort of slapped/brushed the bull with with one hand as I held the camera with the other, backed up, and tried to protect my slightly-freaked-out son at the same time. So, not quite the display of macho bravado I’d been hoping for.  That was the only chance I’ve had to confront the bull.

Until last night.

So, the bull was near the hammock, staring into the flashlight’s glare. I walked over toward him, hoping to once again pick up the rope, stroll him to a far corner of the yard, tie him up, and say good night. But this time, every time I got close to him, he turned toward me. He snorted a little. He did not seem to want me grabbing that rope. Also, I noticed he’d grown since April. He started snorting more and kind of rocking his head back and forth into the hammock. I tried to flash the light on the ground a few yards away, thinking that was what he was focused on, but he stayed very much focused on me.  

I finally saw that the rope went around him to the other side of the far tree holding the hammock. The bull was between the hammock and a retaining wall, about three feet high, which drops down to a concrete patio around the house. I walked on the far side of the hammock, around the far tree, and picked up the rope. But as I did this, he twitched and pushed hard into the hammock. I lead the rope around the tree to the far side of the hammock, hoping to lead him around and into the open yard. But he sort of shuddered and snorted and took a quick step toward me. I backed away around the tree, and lost him in the darkness for a moment, during which I heard hooves beating the ground and sensed his mass moving toward me, I jumped back behind the tree, and suddenly he was on the other side of the hammock, with the rope running under the hammock and around the tree to me.

The more upset the bull seemed to get, the more nervous I got. I don’t think I was shaking THAT much, but of course a small shake of my hand meant a big swing of the flashlight beam, so I was having trouble keeping the bull in the light, which was disconcerting to say the least.

He started pulling on the rope, trying to turn toward the back porch beyond the far hammock tree.  I pulled on the rope, and for a few seconds there was a tug-o-war, until he started bucking and pawing and snorting and the dogs started barking and running around me feet, and I heard him coming around the tree toward me, so I let go of the rope and jumped off the retaining wall onto the patio. He turned and ran away from me but toward the porch, and I thought he might head for the kitchen door and break some things, but then I heard him turn again, jump, and take off running quickly (do bovine “gallop?”) around the far side of the house.

I went inside, and decided to call Germán. The bull was clearly spooked and did not trust me, and it had to be tied up. This was beyond my pay grade, as they say. Waiting for Germán to come over, I walked out the front door to turn on the light at the front gate, and didn’t see the bull anywhere. But as I went back through the house and looked out the back door again, I suddenly saw a blur of black and heard the pounding of hooves has he went charging past the back porch again, heading into his second lap around the house. Then, again, silence. I walked out to the back porch quietly, arched my neck around the wall where he’d last disappeared, and saw two horns at eye level a few feet away, up against the wall of the house. My heart jumped into my throat. It was just where a person would stand if he were hiding there waiting to jump out at anyone who came around the corner.

But then I realized there was a giant barrel of water there, and his face was in it. He was having a drink. Germán came a minute later, and I told him where to find his bull. Making a quiet clicking sound with his tongue, Germán walked right up to the bull, grabbed the rope about a foot from the horns it was tied to, and never broke stride. The bull followed him off into the darkness to be tied up, a couple minutes later I heard Germán call, “Gracias, Don Daniel, buenas noches!” from the front gate, and it was all over.

There’s no great cultural or political point to be made with this story. But it is definitely a snapshot of life in Bolivia that is more than a little bit different from my life anywhere else I’ve ever lived.

This morning I got up, got dressed, and headed right out to the bull, who was tied up near a gazebo behind the landlords’ house. He was lying down. He barely acknowledged me as I walked up. I patted him on the face and shoulder, said good morning, and walked away. Easy as that. I think it may have been the flashlight that spooked him last night. Anyway, we seem to be friends again.

Go ahead, make my day.

Maybe tomorrow I’ll really smack him.