Stories from the Amazon - Crazy Bull part 1

I married a Brazilian rodeo cowboy. He was a bull rider.  Well, he tried to be at least. He wasn't very good at staying on the bulls for the whole 8 seconds. He was also a wheeler dealer and like to do trading and all sorts of deals. We won't go into some of the really frustrating deals he did, but one of them involved acquiring a herd of bucking bulls. He figured that if he couldn't be a champion bull rider like he dreamed, then he could be a stock contractor and put on rodeos. I liked that idea much better. However, he ended up going to ranches and bringing guys to try out the young bulls and see if they'd like to buck. They always made a day of it which included barbeque and plenty of beer. I guess they figured that if they drank enough it would make getting bucked off an unknown crazy bull a bit better. I definitely didn't approve of that part of it, but to be a supportive wife, I usually tagged along and gave my opinions on the bulls. The bulls that didn't end up being good bucking bulls went to the local butcher and we made at least a little money back on them.

We had a rodeo arena with bucking chutes and the whole works. I think he traded a car for it or something. It was portable and could be set up at different locations to hold a rodeo. Actually, most rodeos in Brazil consisted of bull riding and maybe a few saddle broncs. There wasn't much of the roping events or any of the other normal rodeo events that you would see here in the USA. He would invite all his rodeo buddies over every week to practice riding the bulls in hopes that they would improve and that they would train the bulls to buck better. I learned to pull the bucking strap and to help with all the work involved in that.

There was one bull, a rank Charlois/Brahman cross, who didn't buck very well and who mostly just tried to kill you if you fell off. We decided that it was time for him to go to the butcher. Now, usually we would call the butcher and he would come out and slaughter the bull and haul him back to the butcher shop in his truck, all quartered up. He would pay us a certain amount and that would be it. So we arranged the day and we got all the bulls into the arena. For some reason we let all the other ones out and just kept the butcher bull in the arena by himself. Looking back, I'm not sure why we did that... .

Well, somehow the bull knew it was the butcher's truck when he pulled in and came down the hill towards the arena. He took one look at it and took off, through the fence, head through the huge steel panel, galloping full speed through the tall grass with the large arena panel firmly attached to his head and all of us watching with horror! I think he may have had a small sting of panels that stayed attached for a while before letting loose. At some point he managed to get his head free of the panel and he was gone, headed for the jungle. The guys grabbed some horses and guns and followed. The girls went to the horse barn and watched. The bull ran up the hill towards the jungle on the left side of the property. One of the men took a shot at him. We thought , Yay, now they killed him and the butcher could drive up the hill and get him. But instead, the bull came charging back down the hill towards the neighbors to the right, bellowing and furious. We perched up high on top of the horse stalls in case he would try to attack us in his rage. The men galloped in full pursuit.  We heard another shot and again thought they had managed to kill him. But instead, the same thing happened! Back and forth several times. Later the guys said he kept jumping all the cross fences and the boundary fences.

Finally at dusk, one of the guys came back to the barn and said they managed to get the bull dead, but in the farthest back corner of the pasture, with several cross fences and lots of jungle and no way for the truck to get back there. We would have to drag the bull with the horses. Now, my horses weren't particularly strong or ranch horses and the bull was huge, so we decided we probably needed at least three horses to drag him out. The butcher had long since gone back to town and told us to call him when we caught the bull. This time I got on a horse also to help drag the bull out. It worked, the horses were tired, the men were tired and the bull was probably the toughest meat anyone ever ate but such was the nature of life, especially in that culture.

Hopefully this story won't offend anyone but it was a very eventful adventure in my life. Stay tuned for crazy bull story part 2! It might just be a little crazier.