Steve and His Axe

My next-door neighbor is a rancher.  His family has been out here for generations and he raises cattle. We live on the Osage Indian reservation and most of the folks who own large amounts of land out here are Osage and they. either do Oklahoma Crude or cattle. 

Steve’s granddaddy, being an Osage, was given a whole passel of land by the federal government in return for refraining from shooting arrows at the boys and girls who were stealing the land from them back in the nineteenth century. Well he just sat on it for all his life.  Steve’s dad and mom took it over after he died and formed a real estate company.  They sold parcels of the land to support them all their lives.  Steve’s not happy about that.  He’s watched his holdings dwindle all the time he was growing up.  My land used to belong to him.  He used to own all this land but now he lives on eight acres.  He uses that to keep horses or steers/bulls from his herds who need special attention.  The rest of his herds are spread out on parcels of land that he owns over by the lake and by Barnsdahl and Hominy.

So, Steve’s a cowboy and an Indian.

He was out on the range the other day.  It was cold.  A pond had frozen and the steers needed to drink.  Steve got into his truck and got an axe and went down to the pond to bust some holes so the cows could get to the water.  He busted open a few places and, as people do, edged a little too far out into the danger zone.  He crunched through the ice.  He went down into the ice-cold water about three feet and then kept on going another couple of feet into the mud.  He got stuck. It was around zero degrees.  The water was even colder than zero degrees.  And Steve was all by himself out on the range, stuck in the mud in the frozen water. 

It isn’t easy to get yourself out of the ice and mud water.  It’s slick.  You’re stuck.  Most people would panic but Steve is a cowboy.  He just looked around and thought about it and then took the axe and slammed it into the ice about two or three feet away.  Then he used the axe handle to pull himself out of the mud and up onto the ice.  Then he did it again.  And in a very chilly short time, he got himself out of the mud and off the ice and out of the pond. 

A normal person – a non-cowboy – a non-Osage Indian would have been in the newspaper next day.  “Local man found dead in frozen pond”.

He got home and left his jeans and things out in the garage at the entryway to the backdoor of the house.  He bundled up in a blanket and sat in front of the fire thawing.  Janet, his wife, came home from work and saw his boots with goop on them.  Saw his jeans with strange goop on them and came in to say, “What the hell did you do.  Shit yourself?”

Thank you dear, for your concern.