BULL OF THE WOODS

From the Chapter "The Stuff of Legends"

If you have not been in South Georgia in the middle of summer then you would be hard pressed to imagine how hot it gets.  Envision living day after day in dripping-wet humidity, extreme heat, without air conditioning, or any real way of keeping cool, other than fanning with a funeral home fan, sitting under a shade tree while sweating and fighting gnats, or going swimming.  Late most Sunday afternoons, after all the company was gone, the Deriso boys would strike out for the Nancy Hole, their favorite swimming place.

The boys learned to swim in this particularly deep hole formed by a sandbar in the crook of a small creek that ran behind the farm up the road a piece.  Learning to swim, to these farm boys, was just as natural as learning how to plow a mule.  Aficionados of proper grammar will quickly point out my error in not describing it as how to plow with, or, plow using a mule.  Sorry, but plow a mule worked then and it works now, for those who have been below the Mason-Dixon Line .

To get to the Nancy Hole they had to climb over a fence and run across the corner of a pecan orchard belonging to a nearby farmer.  This orchard also served as the pasture for the farmer’s livestock.  The big Kahuna of the livestock in the pasture was a big, strong, mean, ill-tempered Hereford bull that had an intense dislike for trespassers.  If the bull had been a dog he would have been described as territorial.

The boys usually saw the bull in plenty of time to outrun him to the back fence, climbing over the fence before the bull could inflict any serious bodily damage.  The bull would stick his head over the fence, watch the boys running away, and snort and paw the earth, as if issuing a warning, and a dare, for the boys to come back.  The boys always gave him another chance when they returned home from swimming, but the bull was not smart enough to lie in wait for them at the fence where they crossed.  He was usually up near the barn hanging out with the young milk cows.  Actually, he wasn’t so dumb after all.

One weekend the boys made new flips (slingshots) from forked chinaberry branches, strips of rubber inner tube, and pieces of shoe-tongue leather for the pouch.  They decided to go to the swimming hole and cool off and try out their new flips.  When they came to the pasture they crossed the fence, and instead of running, they stood their ground, whistling and yelling, confident their new weapons would protect them from the bull.  Here came the bull running at full speed, ready to kick some trespassing farm boy butt.  They wouldn’t get away this time!

The boys had small creek rocks in the pockets of their overalls to use as ammunition for their flips.  As the boys loaded up with small, smooth rocks it never occurred to them the amount of force it would actually take to stop or deter an eight hundred pound, infuriated Hereford bull, running wide open at fifteen miles per hour, with death and destruction on his mind.

One of the boys had come upon a small steel front wheel ball bearing about the size of a marble at the filling station, and was dying to try it out in his new flip.  He loaded the steel ball bearing into the flap of his flip, pulled it back as far as he could, aimed at the bull’s front shoulder, and let fly.  The ball bearing probably had an initial flip velocity of between three hundred fifty and five hundred feet per second.  This velocity is less than the muzzle velocity of a .22 caliber rim-fire bullet, but you still would not want to get hit with that ball bearing.  A flip, like a pistol, is not extremely accurate much beyond ten feet.  The bull was about thirty feet away when my uncle opened fire.  He did not hit the bull in the front shoulder.  In fact, he did not hit the bull in his front at all.  What he did do was hit the bull in the bull’s most private of his private parts. 

The bull came to an immediate stop, whuffed, sat down, and his eyes rolled back in his head until all you could see was the whites.  The bull gave a low, human-like moan, realized what he was sitting on, and stood back up, as if standing up would hurt less than sitting down.  He immediately sat back down and gave another low, pitiful moan.  He repeated this up and down procedure five or six more times, evidently decided that there was no position that would provide him any kind of relief, and gingerly half-walked, half-limped across the pasture, back to the barn.

The bull never bothered the Deriso boys again, but the young female cows would come down to that part of the pasture and give them mean and dirty looks when they crossed the pasture on the way to the swimming hole.

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