City Slickers

(Photo does not depict the dude discussed below, but another city slicker showing off. And really, I shouldn't make fun. I'm sure we all look like this at times in our lives.)

Risky cattle drive today with a man grandly named Duke-- a Jewish New Yorker who idolizes our head cowboy. "You know the movie City Slickers? That's me." (I can't make this stuff up.) Wears special deerskin gloves to maintain his smooth lawyer handshake, and English-style full-zip suede schooling chaps. Tells me he made his own major in college, studying the communication between wild animals, "so I pick up a lot of horse behavior that other people miss out on."

Rushed cows through the brush above the dump road. When we came out, all the cowboys were complaining, "That was some jungle!" "Hellauva country to ride through!" etc. I had the feeling I was supposed to be impressed; I said nothing. A ride through scrub oak at SFR was tougher than that nonsense. While riding home, once we'd lapsed into easy silence, a cowboy complimented the machete I carry in a leather sheath on my back cinch billet. I replied, "I came from brushy country." As if that could explain the half of it...