Nacho was bellowing before dawn this morning. He trumpeted between scarfed swallows of food. Snot slung from his nostrils while belching lustful calls to the gals in the nearby field.

They ignored his impudence: such brazen, boastful manner, convinced only he could satisfy them.

“We ain’t no holler back girls.” might have been what they thought.

But Nacho wasn’t to be ignored.
He grunted with chewed cud between his teeth, tufts of dirt dangled over his lip. Nacho bellowed again. His massive neck muscle strained forward as he lifted his chin, with nostrils flared. Another bawl calls out from deep within his chest. Two more followed.

Was this an invite or an impertinent gesture? Their heads stayed close to the pasture grass, inches above the dirt.

Another bellow, feeble, and then his head dropped. He looked back toward our weedy lawn and spotted something else to mow. Each step weighted into the soft lawn as he lumbered toward our front patio. Near our gate stands an erect, eight-foot cedar pine green under a summer’s sun. Nacho was heading straight for it.

The cows remained indifferent to him. They had wandered away, further from the haystacks. Some had already moved down into the canyon to get under the shade of the cottonwoods, to be nearer the flowing creek.

Nacho crossed the road, forcing all his beef through the borrow ditch and up, setting his chest against the fence. He pushed against it. It was a weak strike; his force into the cedar had been more determined. Nacho yielded to the wire.
.
Thunder erupted, echoing from across the pasture—a second bull.
Nacho turned toward the echo and bellowed his answer.

No. 2 responded with a booming, deep-throat call out. His reply rolled over the rise, unseen, and challenged Nacho.

Nacho backed away from the fence, turned, and crushed through the borrow ditch to the gravel road. With his head lowered, he grunted weakly in reply.
No. 2 crested the rise, his shadowed silhouette dominating the horizon. The bull’s massive head appeared thick and beastly –spread between his forehead and eyes wide as a 12-inch board. He rumbled as he tracked up the hill. The beast lowered his head and pawed the ground, digging deep into the dirt. A second scraping followed. The dirt tossed beneath the immense beast. A cloud of dust followed.
No. 2 is defiant, a not-to-be-messed-with, in-his-prime bull.

But Nacho is young—a mere teenager with hormones crashing through his youthful body—and still learning. He knows he can’t compete in that pasture.  

The older bull bellows out a challenge to Nacho.

Nacho has already cleared the road, quickly slipping outside the challenger’s perimeter. He tucks himself within our thick shelter belt of cedars and hackberry trees. Nacho manages to remain unseen to the other bull. He backs down and turns toward his cows, just below the rise of the hill. His grunts of achievement hang in the air.

Nacho shoves his way through the thick, hanging branches of the cedars. Rabbits run from their dens as he plows forward, returning to his pasture through the downed fence.

His youthful heifers await his service.