Today has been a day of contrasts, the fear of galloping across boulder-strewn paths, past angry rattle snakes and under the outstretched wings of soaring eagles, the wonderment of looking across endless acres of rolling wilderness, the simple pleasure of sharing a tortilla wrap on a windswept outcrop with good companions and some real dorks. I’m at the ranch in Colorado now and after three days of hard riding I’m very, very sore… and not in a nice way. The heat of last week has been replaced by chilly mornings and the occasional thunderstorm. Today we rode up on a huge rattlesnake, which struck the lead horse in the party ahead of us. A large stick wielded by the horny hands of Luke, our wrangler, quickly dispatched the snake; Luke is no stranger to rattlesnakes, and has killed many of them in his time, but today was special as he got another rattler on the ride back home. He now has two nice specimens to add to his impressive snakeskin collection (I told him he could make a really nice handbag to carry his chewing tobacco in, but I think he’d rather have a belt). Luke is a tall, good-looking cowboy, with a deep, resonant voice and a gentle manner. His face is framed by a fine set of gingery whiskers and he’s a walking, talking advert for the outdoor life. But his healthy demeanour is marred by one thing - Luke is a real lover of ‘chew’. He tries his hardest to get all his fellow riders to try a pinch, some of his more innocent guests take up the offer, and most, if not all of them end up puking over the side of their horse a few moments later. The little round tin of Copenhagen tobacco looks so innocent, sitting snugly as it does in the pocket of his leather chaps, and when he gets it out and gives it a rap to settle the contents into pinchable lump, or ‘dip’, I almost feel like asking for a try. It is dark and moist and one could be forgiven for thinking that it tastes as good as it looks; but looks can be deceptive. Dip is dangerous stuff, and contains not only tobacco, but also large quantities of sugar and fibreglass. Left tucked between lip and jaw that little pinch of chew can rot your teeth and give you lip cancer before you have time to spit. That doesn’t seem to worry Luke, and he’ll happily hold a pinch of chew in his lip for four hours straight. He declares it a cure for every ailment, and is so convincing as he extols the virtues of the horrid stuff that you almost end up believing him. Cowboys are a strange lot, but I have to say that if I had a son, I’d like him to grow up just like Luke; tall and handsome, affable and polite… only without the chew.

I’ve just had a delicious supper and now I’m sitting in the lodge whilst the other guests listen to a history talk by a hoary mountain man. I’ve heard the talk twice now, and I can honestly say that I now know all I need to know about beavers. They say you can never have too much beaver, but I have to disagree.

I’m trying to write, but I keep being distracted by a tiny mouse that’s running back and forth in front of the fireplace. It’s hard to keep the critters out of such an old building; the main lodge of the ranch was built in 1886, when an entrepreneurial settler family turned a small homestead into a bustling hotel and resort. The place has a lot of history and the ground floor rooms are now filled with antique western paraphernalia, a pool table and various board games which keep the children amused after supper each evening. It’s usually a pretty popular place, but tonight there’s only me and a mouse for company. The guests at the ranch are quite an odd lot this year. Firstly, they all seem to be doctors, which in itself isn’t a bad thing, but one of the doctors is a man who I could happily ride my horse over without so much as a backward glance. I don’t mind people who have an opinion - God knows I’m outspoken pretty much all of the time, but this guy is never wrong. If you have a black cat, he’s got one that’s blacker. He caught a trout yesterday and declared it to be ‘an enormous rainbow’. I looked at the fish, which was no bigger than a couple of pounds, and said, ‘That’s not a big rainbow.’ I’ve fished since the age of seven and so I felt like I could back up my statement pretty well, but that didn’t seem to trouble the doctor, he insisted that it was a monster fish and would brook no repost. If he said the fish was eighteen inches long, then by dint of the fact that he wanted it to be so, it was. We could all see a foot long trout in his hand, but in his head the trout was far bigger.

Now, my friend Sharon reckoned the good doctor had potential when she first saw him, being as he was single and a man, (my criterion for a suitable mate aren’t very demanding.) But, having spent a couple of days in his company I think I have a pretty good idea what he’d be like on a date. Our conversation would probably go a little like this…’Kate, how would you like your coffee?’ ‘Oh, black please.’ ‘Waiter, one black coffee, and I’d like mine blacker.’ And sometime later…

‘There’s nothing average about me, I’m blessed in so many ways.’
‘Um, I’m not sure I was really ready to see that, but since you insisted on showing it to me I have to agree that there is nothing average about what you have in your hand - I’m not an expert, but I would say that it’s just like a penis, only smaller.’


© Kate Boydell 2004. All rights reserved. e-mail: [email protected]. Close window.