Regina Ochoa

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It’s All Bull!

Free Nacho

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.

The cows turned away. With three-foot fly swatters, they flicked their hindquarters.
 

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

Nacho tugged at a wad of alfalfa sprouting in our yard, rooted between our clover and weeds— thistle, Mullen, and black medic. Nacho, our neighbor’s bull, had pushed over the barbed-wire fence between his pasture and our yard. Our clover, bright green with spots of purple alfalfa, must have been too much to resist. He had to come up and try the weeds on this side of his fence. The 5-strand barbed wire hardly deterred this 3000-pound male bovine determined to graze on greener grasses.
 
A newly built fence, its barbed wire stranded tight between beefy posts, now stood firm between Nacho’s calls and 30 desirous cows on the other side of the road. Nacho moved closer to them, hollered across the fence, and waited. His ears clicked right, then left.
 
They did not answer.
 

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.

He lowered his head nearing it, then pushed his way through the bottom stiff branches, crushing through lodged underbrush of dried tumbleweeds. Nacho ignored their spiny burs, his hide too thick to penetrate. His head rubbed up and down, across and back between the cedar’s branches. Needles stayed put throughout the massage. He grunted with satisfaction. With ears flicked forward, then back, tender twigs scratched around the inner pinks of exposed skin. 
 
Nacho shoved his whole body into the cedar, the limbs catching and bending under Nacho’s weight, giving in to the immense pressure. Some snapped as Nacho pleasured himself.
 
And when he was done, he withdrew from the tree. Its branches are sullen.
 
Nacho turned again toward the cows across the road; a fence hadn’t deterred his needs.
 

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.

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