Chapter 17

    There have been many notable groups of four, both in history and in literature. The Evangelists take the palm, of course, in terms of ultimate significance, but the 13th Century Paris quartet of Albert Magnus, Thomas Aquinas, Bonaventure, and Louis IX rank a comfortable second; and then there are the Three Musketeers and D'Artagnan. And of course, in a text which must sooner or later deal with music, the Beatles. But four small heroes of my acquaintance do very well on their own behalf to bring up the train, and here is their story.

    It was a Friday noon, a week after the annual Falkland Rodeo, and Joshua, Tom, Dick, and Toby, only a month away from graduating from their first year in primary, were walking across the school yard together talking about what to do with a free afternoon. For reasons no one would ever remember, they had been given a half-day off; the sun was shining, and their heads were still full of bucking broncos, calf-roping, and the wonderfully heroic young men who had dealt with all that four-footed energy the previous weekend.

    It was actually Toby, for all that he was the newcomer to that favoured land, that held the edge on the knowledge of it all, for he it was that wandering out in the village on the previous Saturday morning, just after his breakfast and wondering what adventures this day out of school would bring him, had suddenly beheld the marvellous melee of the Shushwap cowboys bringing in the rodeo broncs. No scene on a film this affair, but the glory of a real event: thundering hooves, the wild neighing, the convulsive heave of two dozen bang tails being turned around a crucial corner on their way to the rodeo grounds. Heads flashing up and down and in every direction, flanks heaving, the dark skinned young men yelling and swinging ropes, the hooves drumming so hard he could feel it on his own stretch of gravel road a block away. He'd not even heard of the upcoming rodeo, but he was informed as soon as he returned to the house and started asking questions of their hosts, who had lived in the village for years, and the money was found for him to see it all.

    His companion for the spectacle had been Tom, who he knew lived on a parcel of land of enough acres to support a small herd of beef cattle, right at the edge of the conifer forest the village was surrounded by. They had sat on the gray wooden seats in the grandstand amazed at the spectacles of the rodeo, and adopted their own special heroes. Toby's had been a native lad, who wound up breaking a bone a two when he was finally thrown of his bronco, which meant he could never be declared grand champion, but none of this disturbed Toby's sense of loyalty. He simply liked the look of the lad, and that was good enough. The other two boys had also seen the great adventure, with their own preferences, and a superior understanding of it all from having lived in the town longer.

    "It was over too soon," Dick said, at the end of the school yard. "It should go on for a whole week."

    "But we wouldn't be allowed out of school for a whole week," Toby said. "They have to have it on the long weekend, on the Old Queen's birthday, so people are off work and out of school to see it." Toby's mother had been born of a pair of Cockneys not long off the boat, and he had been told lots about the British royalty.

    "Hey," said Tom. "We can keep it going! We can have our own rodeo. I know where we can get a bucking bronco!"

    The other boys looked at him, pausing at the edge of the school yard. There was a moment of joy, caused by memory, and then a moment of fear, caused by reality. Wherever their imaginations had taken them in the past few days, they were all astute enough to know a real bucking bronco was beyond their expertise, even if they could lay hands on one. They knew of no rodeo horses in their own fields, and the Indians had taken all theirs away.

    "Well," Tom said, "not a real horse. And that's good, 'cause a real bucking bronc would kill us. But we've got a calf at our place. He's as big as a small pony, and there's a corral and everything. It'll be like bull riding. I can get a rope to tie around his belly, and there's even a chute, like they use at the rodeo. My Dad uses it for something he does with the calves. You back the calf in and hold him there with some bars. We can do the same, hold him in while the rider climbs on his back and gets ready, then pull the bars away and turn him loose."

    "Wow! Holy Smoke! Let's go."

    "I have to go home for lunch," Toby said. "My Mom . . . ."

    "We all have to go home for lunch," Dick said. "I'm really hungry, anyway. But Tommy, what about your Dad? He ain't going to have anything to say about it?"

    "He's at work all day. He won't be home till supper time, and we'll be done by then."

    "What about your Mom?" asked Joshua. He was native, but his parents lived in the village, not on a reserve, because his father worked in the gypsum mine.

    "She's not likely to leave the house, and it's a good piece from the corral and on the other side of the trees. She'll just think we're playing cowboys and Indians. And she'll be right, because Josh'll be with us." Joshua grinned and the other boys laughed, and everyone promised to get through lunch as quickly as possible. This was going to be an exceptionally fine afternoon. To be a spectator at a rodeo was one thing, but to have a rodeo of one's own was even better.

    The calf was brown, and there really was a little chute to contain him while the rider got on board, made from a few poles, against one side of the modest area of the corral, perhaps fifteen yards by twenty, and it was definitely calf-size, with a couple of short poles across the exit, so that it worked like a chute for a bronco. As soon as the rider was in place - after the calf was caught and backed in between the sides - he was to give a yell, and another boy would yank the poles away.

    The calf pretty much entered into the spirit of the thing, allowing itself to be lassoed with regularity and herded into place for each of its cavaliers. There was, of course, neither saddle nor bridle, just a bit of rope around the beast's waist to hold on to with one or both hands, depending on the degree of confidence or past experience.

    As host, Tom went first, to test the process, and Joshua would finish off, as it was suspected by the other boys that he had done some of this before. Tom climbed up the poles on the side of the chute, dropped into place, took the rope in one hand, waved the free arm over his head and yelled "Let 'er rip!" Joshua yanked the poles of the gate and the calf sprang free. The excitement had begun.
But the calf got rid of Tom in less than twenty feet of head-long dash. Toby was surprised. He had expected that the calf would buck up and down like a horse, and that their bodily skills would parallel their imaginations much more closely, and take them the length and breadth of the corral, to the sounds of loud and repeated cheering. Well, maybe Tom was just unlucky this time.
They rounded up the calf and Dick went next. As Toby was the green-horn from the city, he was granted as long a period of observation as possible, allowing for Josh the expert finishing off. Dick said he would stay on a lot longer than Tom. But he actually bit the brown dust and pine needles of the corral a couple of feet earlier than the calf's first rider.

    Toby set the record for the shortest ride. It was hard to believe how quickly the calf got rid of him, how little control he had been able to exercise over the determined bovine. Obviously growing up in the city had done him no good at all, and he hadn't learned as much about riding as his earlier Sunday afternoon had built him up to think! But although he hit the ground with a decided thump, he was not hurt, and there would not have to be any lengthy explanations to his mother. This was good.

    There was a general expectation, now, that Joshua would be the one to control the monster and give them a real rodeo experience. He was for one thing, native, a Shuswap, from a people so long schooled with horses that it was they who brought the broncos into town for the rodeo, and were among the most skilled of the riders in the contest. Also, he was wiry little rascal, with a markedly gallant, devil-may-care, attitude about him, very much like Little Beaver in the Red Rider comics.

    To a degree, Joshua's admirers were right on the money. He certainly did stick on that damned animal longer than the rest of them, well down toward the far end of the corral. He was yelling in triumph, the other boys cheered him on, and this time, thanks to the skill of his rider, the calf had to resort to real bucking, so that Joshua, in his gleaming white shirt, tossed up and down within the ambiance of the forested corral as brilliant as a schooner full-sailed in a stout wind. Now they had their rodeo! Grown up cowboys eat your heart out!

    And then it happened. Although it took a little longer, the calf finished the day four out of four. Josh was tossed, to the left side, and into a cow pie. There were not a lot of these unpleasant items at the far end of the corral, but there were enough to get Joshua. The glorious white shirt was royally doused in cow shit, an ugly, depressing, yellow, and sticky. The king of the afternoon was suddenly the most unfortunate peasant.

    The boys rushed to his side, and very clearly heard his first words: "My Mom's gonna kill me! This shirt was brand new clean this morning before I went to school. She'll whale the ass off me! What am I gonna do?"

    The boys all stared at each other in horror. Not everyone had a father in the army, but it was war-time, and mothers generally were more ready with the belt than ordinarily. Poor Josh!

    "The creek," Dick said. "its early afternoon, and the sun's gonna be around all day. Go to the creek and wash your shirt and you'll have lots of time to dry it before you have to be in for supper."

    So they trooped down to the creek with Joshua, to a part of the stream that was pretty private, and all stood by to make sure the best of the riders became a good laundress and washed out every vestige of his mishap. When the shirt was restored to its pristine and lovely whiteness, Joshua put it back on, flinching a trifle at the cold, but confident the shirt would be dry in an hour. And it was, so then each and all of the boys could troop off to their own homes at peace with their afternoon's adventure causing no one irreparable damage.

    It had been, simply, a perfect adventure among small boys, although as I think I said earlier, they were never allowed to do near the calf again, for all that the four-legged one had consistently won all the battles hands - or hooves - down. And so for years, for Toby, it was only one more anecdote from a happy childhood, with his peers, and occasionally, a beast or two. But when he was much older, and more educated in the mores of different parts of his society, his nation, the philosophies of the times, he realized his childhood afternoon, under a Divine Providence that finds all things and event significant, had proven much. In his studies in the areas of social science and anthropology, he had learned of the attitudes of certain indigenous peoples, who refused, as a tribe or a culture, to obey the Biblical insistence on corporal punishment for children. He even encountered a classic Canadian text, albeit by a woman raised in England, in which on one hand the Ojibways were extolled for not physically chastising their children, yet on the other hand bewailed for having grown males, to a man, incapable of handling their liquor. Every evening in such and such a native encampment, all the wives had to take away all the knives before the drinking began.

    He found it a relief to know that at least one native mother in his part of the world had known the normal arrangement for small boys.