Hugh lived on an enormous wheat and ranching farm in Alberta, Canada, and I lived in Great Falls, Montana.  Three hours of wheat-edged and windswept asphalt separated us, with a glowing ember of a border crossing in the middle.  Hugh is my cousin, and we were best friends.  Each summer either I would head north to spend two weeks riding horses and driving combines, or he would head south for two weeks of flirting with ‘city girls’ and floating on the Missouri river.  It was my summer to be a Canadian.

The third character in this story was our uncle,  Uncle Paul, a mentally retarded ogre of a man whose penchant for cruelty to children and whose tell-all testimonies during monthly open-mic services at his local Mormon meeting house made him the focus of much fear throughout the province.  Uncle Paul once tickled my brother until he peed his pants, leaving finger shaped bruises all over his torso.  Uncle Paul once told his Mormon congregation that his sister and caretaker (Hugh’s mother) had tried to poison him, and that she would burn in hell, and that he would laugh on her grave, a sentiment he closed, “In the name of Jesus Christ, Amen.”  I’m not sure what to call Uncle Paul’s technical condition.  It wasn’t Down’s Syndrome.  Uncle Paul’s fingers were bony talons; his face was a wizened mask; his body was razor thin and strong.  In other words he was only ogre-like in his disposition.  Physically he bore stronger resemblance to one of the emaciated zombies in 28 Day Later, a comparison that reminds me of a time he once searched me out after brushing his teeth so he could spew a mouthful of congealed toothpaste and sputum all over me.  Who does something like that?  Uncle Paul, who was also schizophrenic and had been physically castrated as a young teen.

The fact that Uncle Paul had been castrated is a gruesome and personal detail that serves no other purpose in this narrative than to bridge between the description of Uncle Paul and the actual matter of the story.   Uncle Paul was castrated in a way that reportedly made sexual congress a physical impossibility, a fact that conjured in my young mind’s eye images of the tripartite worm monster from the film version of Dune.  His castration was my grandparents’ response to his sexual interest in his younger sibling.  Castration was apparently the socially acceptable thing to do with sexually curious mentally retarded children at that time.  I would like to think that his schizophrenia and anger stemmed, in part, from resentment over his mutilation.  Then again it might also have been the product of too many genetic feedback loops among our polygamous ancestors who had left Utah and headed to Canada to continue living Mormonism’s unique celestial order of marriage.  Who knows?  I hope the artful reader will make some meaningful connection between poor Uncle Paul’s misfortune and the actual matter of the story, which is the transformation of male calves into steers.

Earlier in the spring the new calves had arrived on Hugh’s ranch.  In just a few short months the calves had put on incredible weight, had been weaned from milk to feed, and were now stout enough to endure what I have to imagine would be the single most traumatic day of their lives, a day when a branding iron would melt through their coat, sear into their flesh, and leave them screaming in agony.  For the males, the branding was the least of their concern (or so I project).  Just when it would seem that the pain could be no worse, they would have their scrotums split, their testicles ripped from the winking hole, the empty sack sprayed with a stinging antiseptic, and the loose skin cinched up with an elastic band.  No longer calves, the newly minted cows and steers would huddle sorely near the chutes, commiserating and literally crying.  These were babies, only a few months old, but in the accelerated life that starts in a barn and ends in a slaughter house, this was their coming of age.

The apparatus of this procession consisted of a barbed wire pasture leading into a wood-fenced holding pen, leading into a funneled chute leading to a steel cage.  The cage was big enough for a single calf and operated on a massive pivot.  Once locked in with its hooves secured, the cage would turn on the pivot, flipping the calf onto its side to better expose its testicles and minimize thrashing about, which could cause a messy brand.  A quiver of branding irons were heating in a nearby fire.  Though they could be heated to cherry-red, Hugh’s father would wait for them to cool to matte black before application, to prevent burning through the skin and into the muscle, a result which would inevitably compromise the calf’s immune system.

The tools of castration were simple.  Rubber gloves for the farmer’s hands.  What looked to me like a box cutter *snict!*  The testicles would then fall into the open air, dangling by a pair of cords.  On a bull, these cords would lift and drop the testicles to regulate their temperature.  The farmer would then grab the testes in one hand, scrunch up the scrotum around the cords like an accordioned pair of nylons, and a second farmer would cut the cords at the cow-side with a big pair of wire cutters.  The balls with cords were dropped into a five-gallon bucket.  The farmer would then insert the head of a spray bottle into the open wound. *squeak* *squeak*  The white antiseptic would run out of the hole, now pink with rivulets of bright red.  Finally, the farmer applied an elastic band, knotting it several times by hand.  The calf would then be righted and released.

Hugh and I had been tasked with pushing calves through the chutes.  To do this we wore big rubber boots and pushed the calves, from the guacamole side, toward the funnel portion of the corral.  The calves were understandably resistant, and our efforts were exhausting.  Uncle Paul had been given a job that seemed uniquely suited to his sadistic temperament.  He handled the Hot Shot, which is an electric cattle prod, about three feet long with a pair of prongs on the end.  At the push of a button an electric arc would crackle across the prongs.  The television series COPs had not been invented yet, so I had never seen anything like this.  As far as I know, the Hot Shot was a taser on a stick.

At first Uncle Paul performed his assignment well, gleefully shocking the most stubborn calves toward steerhood.  Eventually the thrill of this sadism was not enough, and Uncle Paul began to shock even the compliant calves as Hugh and I were pushing them.  This caused the calves to kick at us.  Kicking livestock, even young calves, are incredibly dangerous.  Standing nearly five feet at the shoulder and weighing hundreds of pounds, a hard calf kick to the organs could rupture something.  A hard kick to the groin could turn a young ‘bull’ into a ‘steer.’  A hard kick to the leg could sever an artery.  It was no laughing matter.  In rural circles stories of deadly kickings abound.

With Uncle Paul manning the Hot Shot, the corral was too dangerous, so we hopped the fence to watch the branding and castrating.  Eventually Uncle Paul grew bored of shocking cattle without us, and came at us with the prod.  Usually we could run faster than him, but sometimes he would get the drop on us and tase us mercilessly until Hugh’s father would yell at him to “Knock it off Paul!”  The involuntary muscle contractions from the prod were like hitting your funny bone, if your funny bone were in your stomach, or leg, or wherever you got hit.  I would grab at its shaft and try to hold it away from me as the forked end popped and Uncle Paul cackled.  At one point Uncle Paul let down his guard, leaving the prod unattended.  Hugh reversed the batteries, rendering the prod impotent, and Uncle Paul never figured out how to fix it.  He came at us again, pushing the button, but there was no electric crackle.  In frustration he dropped the Hot Shot and ran to the fire to grab a branding iron.  We ran for our lives, not waiting to find out if Uncle Paul was serious or not.

When we came back some time later, Uncle Paul had left, and we were able to watch the procedure unmolested.  By that time several five gallon buckets were brimming with testes, so Hugh and I were able to get a closer look.  A bull testicle looks like a fatty piece of meat, a little bigger than a chicken egg, spider webbed with red and purple veins, and attached to an 8” cord.  We poked at them with a stick, then poked at them with a finger.  We got brave.  I picked one up by the cord, and dangled it out for Hugh to examine.  “Gross!”  I tossed it back into the bucket, briefly orbiting the cord around the ball’s center of gravity.  Then Hugh picked one up by the cord, arched back, and sent the ball flying out in the direction of the moribund herd.  The cord flipped around and around the ball in a remarkable way.  From this an idea was born.  We hauled the bucket over to a barbed wire fence and invented a game where we would throw the testicles at the fence.  The dangling cords had enough mass, and would spin in such a manner that they would catch hold of the fence and wrap tight around the wire!  By the bottom of the bucket, the fence had been thoroughly festooned.

If there is a fourth character in this story, it would have to be Cap, Hugh’s mutty looking Syberian Husky.  Cap earned his place in this story by eating the balls on the fence.  Watching good old Cap sniff at those balls, then gingerly cock has head and chomp on them, set us off.  “Good old Cap!  Go get’em.  Gobble those balls!  Good Cap!”  Back at the farmhouse, when Cap wasn’t eating balls (and we weren’t tossing them), we would armor ourselves in rolls of newspaper and try to train Cap to be an attack dog.  We worked hard at this, and eventually Cap would chase down anyone who was running away from him.  We stopped this training when Hugh’s father threatened that Cap would have to be ‘put down’ if he ever hurt anyone.  He never did, but eventually he took a liking to chicken eggs, and Hugh’s father put him down for that instead.  I think Hugh’s father had it out for old Cap from the beginning.  Poor Cap, that good old ball gobbler.  He was a victim of his own appetites.  I’ll never forget him.

By the time we had moved on to bucket no. 2, we were getting pretty good at ball tossing.  Their weight felt good in the hand, as if they had been engineered for this purpose.  We tossed them like bolas with deadly accuracy.  We developed technique:  underhand like a softball, overhand like a francisca, around the head like an ancient slingshot.  Eventually we forgot that they were testicles, so absorbed were we in technique and preparation…

Uncle Paul finally emerged from the cab of a pickup truck, where he had been napping, or listening to music, or whatever he did when he wasn’t abusing us.  He walked over to see what we were doing, since both Hugh and I were swinging something around our heads in unison.  We saw him approaching and began to focus.  He approached, and we concentrated.  We knew our accurate range.  We had planned for this.  He drew closer as the balls spun on the tethering sinews pinched between our fingers.  Then he was in range.  *whoosh!*  *whoosh!*  The balls arced through the air in all of their bloody, fatty, spermatozoic glory.  *splat!*  Hugh’s ball nailed Uncle Paul right in the chest.  *splat!*  My testicle hit him in the forehead, leaving a pink slime trail on his face.  He roared.  We reached for the bucket and continued the barrage of balls.  It was two on one, and he had no chance.  We stopped grabbing them by the cords and plucked them up like snowballs, one after another, pelting Uncle Paul under a withering fusillade.  He ran, making one of the few nasal sounding squawking noises that was unique to his particular handicap, and didn’t stop until he was far out of our range.  The enemy had been vanquished.

That night, back at the farmhouse, we showered, scrubbing most of the blood and manure out from under our fingernails.  We could hardly sleep that night, telling and retelling the story from that day’s events.  At church the next morning the Sunday School lesson was David and Goliath.  Or at least that is how I remember it.