Redeye by Clyde Edgerton

in a tub of water to cool him off, and then do the same with the other one.
Halt
, Redeye!”
    He didn’t turn loose.
    â€œSee,” said Mr. Pittman, still looking at Redeye. “That’s what’s wrong with the son of a bitch.” He pulls his quirt off’n his belt and lunges at Redeye—“I said
halt
”—and hits him with the quirt across the back.
    Redeye drops off, but he starts circling, eying the coyote. Mr. Pittman walks over, pulls on the rope, raising the coyote, and when he gets it up out of reach he loops his rope around the stake. “
Heel
,” he says, and Redeye starts in behind him, following him on back to camp.
    It made me a little bit jumpy. I couldn’t quite figure it. “That don’t seem like it would be too much fun with something dead,” I said to Mr. Pittman.
    â€œIt don’t seem to make much difference, does it?” he says.

    Though we have found our way out of the old century and into the new, the word “cowboy” still strikes a chord of adventure and excitement. The skills they honed, the sights they saw can hardly be imagined by us mere mortals. Oh, if each of us, for only a day or two, could climb upon the back of a stalwart steed and . . .

    Next morning the pack mule, Jake, had wandered off. Once we got out of the little canyon, Zack checked ahead and didn’t find no fresh tracks, so he said Jake was probably back where we left the river. He said him and Mr. Pittman would wait with the cattle while I went back after him.
    â€œHerd him—just like you would a cow,” he said. “If that don’t work, rope him and pull.”
    â€œI ain’t really learned to lasso yet.”
    â€œAin’t learned to lasso? What the hell? And you expect to be a cowboy?”
    â€œMr. Copeland hadn’t learned me yet.”
    â€œHere. Watch this. Hell, I thought you’d have learned to lasso.” He got his rope in his hands and fed out eight or ten feet of it, and twirled it over his head. “You get it going like this and then you throw it just like you would a rock. Damn, I didn’t know you couldn’t
rope
.” He threw the rope at me and I ducked and it looped right over me and down around my shoulders. He jerked it tight, hurt a little.
    â€œThere you go,” he said. “It takes a lot of practice. Just get up close to him and drop the loop over his head if you don’t know how to use a rope yet. If he ain’t cooperating it won’t be easy.”
    A short ways back I saw Jake grazing next to the riverbed under some cottonwood trees. I figured I’d ride wide around him, and then drive him on up toward Zack and Mr. Pittman.
    When I got about, oh say, twenty feet from him he looked up at me and started trotting away from the riverbed toward the plain, and I started trying to head him up. I was holding up the rope and whistling the way I’d seen Zack do when all on a sudden he stopped dead still just short of a shallow gully. I got right up behind him and popped him on the butt with my quirt and he give a jump, but started off back the way we’d just come, so I rounded him up, but he just stopped and stood still again. I comeup beside him and popped him. He jumped a little with his front feet, dropped his ears back, and then bared his teeth, jumped a little again and snorted, so hell, I popped him again and he turned his rump at me quick, flattened his ears and kicked, but missed. Since he was standing still I just dropped the lasso over his head, tightened it, and started out. He started out too, like that’s what he expected.
    We hadn’t gone far before I seen we could trot, so I clicked up Sandy. But that old mule just stopped—stopped dead in his tracks.
    Problem was that I had the rope wrapped around my hand—mostly around my thumb—instead of the saddle horn. There was this hard snap of my arm and then I was laying in the dust. My hand