Adios Harley Cotton. We Barely Knew You

ADIOS HARLEY COTTON, I HARDLY KNEW YOU

I'm sitting here at one of the back tables of the Santa Elena Cantina, watching a fat, little blonde-haired Mexican kid poke an equally fat but decidedly-less amused scorpion around with a stick and I'm trying to remember what Harley Cotton looked like - and I'm having a difficult time doing that.

It has been two days since Harley's mud-encrusted red roan horse came ambling back into the line camp sans "Big H", as Harley was known to the ranch cowboys and other wild-cattle trackers working the current USDA contract I signed on for.We work the Texas side of the Rio Grande River a few miles outside Lajitas.
Harley and the roan horse had been out for two days, not uncommon in this particular job. But the horse had made it's way back without Harley, who hailed from Thackerville, Oklahoma and had been a USDA contract rider for several years. Harley was a big man, standing just over 6'5" and built like a OU linebacker. He was a quiet fella and he played the guitar and sometimes filled in for the camp cook.

Now, anytime a horse that previously leaves a given location with a rider, then sub sequentially returns without said rider demands a swift response from those aware of this sort of development. Happily, I can say that the other boys here did that very thing; teams on horseback went to backtracking Big H's roan's return to the line-camp, the USDA Inspector who was tagging along on this contract put the word out via his government-issued SAT uplink devices and one of the other ranch hands made the necessary 911 calls to the Sheriff's Department and (their south of the border amigos, the Mexican Federales over there in the State of Coahula); just in case Harley had gotten lost and crossed the Rio Grande without noticing.

Unfortunately as it turns out, Harley wasn't in Old Mexico, although he got close to it.

A state police helicopter spotted him in a switchback canyon less than eight hundred yards from where the Rio snakes its way into a maze of ravines and then meanders back out of this section of greasewood and cactus-filled arroyos on its journey to the Gulf of Mexico.
There had been a series of heavy thunderstorms that had swelled up from the south the afternoon that Harlet lit out and they had rumbled their way north to Ft. Davis before drying up and blowing away. It seems that Harley, had gotten caught up in one of these storms and the resultant flash-flood that followed.
Harley, the horse and a days-old-baby calf had been swept away in the sudden torrent. They found Harley in a tangle of broken cottonwood branches, battered and drowned, with the also equally dead, battered and drowned calf still clutched in his beefy arms.

The horse, being the stronger of the three, had survived.

I wasn't there, but the other boys said that Big H looked peaceful when they found him and the calf, despite the fact that he and the calf had taken a beating in the struggle to escape.

I can't say that I knew Harley "Big H" Cotton very well. We'd say hello to each other on occasion when we passed each other on a ride out, and there was the time we ran into each other here at the Santa Elena Cantina and shared a shot of tequila over a Kristofferson song that was playing on the juke.
I can say that Harley seemed to have a gentle way about him and a quick smile always, but, no, I didn't have a reason to know him or him to know me for that matter. Out of respect for him I'm kind of glad we never reached that point; you come to know someone like that and then, one day they get snatched away from you and everyone else blessed to have known them and you miss them even more.

Know what I mean?

Adios Compadre'