Regulator Robert...Epic Lamour style.

It dawned on me this morning that I hadn't blogged about a great story that happened over the weekend.

If you have read this blog you know my dad was born about 150 years to late. He would rather head cross-country in a covered wagon or on a horse with his 6 gun on his hip. He has a love of all things of the Old West.

With a break in the freezing cold temps last Sunday he took one of his horses out for a ride near his "ranch", and that's when it got "western"....and now I will get L'Amour-ish.................................

There he was, just a lone cowboy on the prairie, a few miles due East of the James River Valley, or as the locals called it...The Jim.

It was a regular day for this ranch boss, checking on his horses and longhorns as the January wind nipped at his life-weathered face. He turned up the collar of his ranch coat, and pulled his silk scarf a little bit higher on his neck to block nature's attack. His hands, dried and cracked from hours of hard labor, needed no gloves. Time had turned them into iron.

It was turning into a long winter on the flat and desolate plains, the cold seemed colder, the nights seemed longer and the warm company of his fine wife made it harder to force his beaten and scarred body out of bed in the mornings. This is the kind of winters that Laura Ingalls would write about, or as the native Sioux called this time of year...The Moon of the Popping Tree.

It entered his mind, that this might be the last season on the ranch, time for a younger to take over. But he knew, in his family, he was the last of his breed.

His daughter's husband was a preacher-man in the plains of Kansas, a good man with a great heart, but his thin build and feeble back was not cut out for the work of a ranch boss.

His only son, the last hope for the family ranch was a writer...a sissy-boy by his account. More content to prose, and to wax on with a pen and paper. That mama's boy couldn't even pull a calf on a sloppy March day or sack out a 3 year-old gelding for it's first saddle. Where did he go wrong with that one, he would often think. Knowing full well that a life on the ranch was a hard one. He didn't wish on anyone, but it made him proud to see all that he had, right there on those acres of his life.

Times had gotten harder in the last few seasons...commodity prices on the rise and the invention of GPS driven combines had made the dirt farming folk successful. That new fangled technology never did serve the cowboy well.

So then and there, on the back of that dun gelding with the sunlight warming his work-widened back, he decided to plod on, as long as his body could handle it, he would run this ranch. If his brother-in-law the banker had to come reposses it out of his unwilling hands, or if he died in these pasture lands...well, all the better. That's how his daddy went and that's how he would go, working his craft right to the very end.

He continued to ride that Sunday through some naked trees, and shrubary, he noticed rabbits, a few deer tracks and antler rubbings, things you notice when you are in tune with nature, and one with the land.

His attention came on an old busted off pine tree, and a smile creased the cheeks of his wind-whipped face. He and Penny used to share many a summer picnic under that old pine, good memories. That pine was a stoic beauty until the storm back in '05. Ice came down so hard almost every tree in the area broke in some way. Just another story of his survival.

Just past the fall tree of memories was a clearing, his trusty horse Cookie stepped out of the belt of trees and his ears perked.

The old cowboy noticed.

"What's that, boy? You hear something?"

(to be continued)