Goodfella comes calling

One of the disadvantages in trying to eke out a living in the cattle business on rented land is that the owner of the land will often be asked for access to the ranch to hunt, bird watch, shoot black powder, look for fossils or cultivate weed. And I’m not talking about crabgrass or dandelions.

One of the reasons the owner of the ranch could not say “No!” to trespassers was because he hoped to develop the ranch at some point in the future and he was gonna need some help from some pretty shady characters including city council members, bankers, planning commissioners, alternative financiers and all sorts of political types. So when one of them would call for permission to hunt, or to perform some other clandestine activity, like bury someone, the owner had to  say “yes.”

Most of the visitation requests were to hunt on the ranch for quail, pheasants, elk and wild hogs, all of which I’d never seen on the place in all the years we rented it. But this did not mean we didn’t have varmints including squirrels, rabbits, gophers, opossums, chipmunks and snakes of both the human and reptile variety. 

I was afraid Gentleman might step into a gopher hole at a breakneck walk and break a leg so I didn’t mind the squirrel hunters so much. And I’ve been told that 350 squirrels can eat as much as one cow, and I was not paying exorbitant rent just to feed 15 cows worth of squirrels. But I was concerned about hunters who didn’t know the difference between a cow and a deer and didn’t realize that just because an animal went “moo” didn’t mean it was a moose.

Sometimes it seemed like my landlord was throwing a big party on the place every weekend and I had no control over the guest list. We were infested with all kinds of guests, including one rich dude who, it was rumored, provided “alternative financing” to the ranch owner. Long before political correctness kicked in, I believe the guy would have been called a mob loanshark. 

Naturally, you don’t say “no” to a man like this.

The full article is available in our e-Edition. Click here to subscribe.