My sneaky cousins held me down and put a castration band on my nuts.  I looked down and saw that they were turning dark and dying, and then I fainted.

            I was probably only out for a few minutes before one of the guys splashed some cold water on my face and I came to.  I tried to reach down and touch my nuts but discovered my hands were again in Paul’s tight grip.  I was then aware of another hand on my balls, this time tugging them, and I looked down to again see the glint of light on polished metal.   I was sure that they were going cut my balls off and I struggled to get free.

            “Hold still for a second, damn it!”  Paul commanded.  A second later I felt a vicious snapping sting as the elastrator band around my nuts was cut loose. I looked down to see that the polished metal that I’d assumed was the knife that would be used to castrate me was actually a pair of toenail clippers.  All three of my cousins sat back laughing while I held my balls and fumed.

            Mom is an English Lit professor at a community college and she has repeated drilled it into my head not to swear and I usually don’t, but I’ve heard just about every dirty word there is and now most all of them applied to my three cousins.  “God damn, damn, damn….shitheads!”  I finally managed to blurt out when I was sure that my nuts were still intact.  “You assholes!  That hurt!”  All they did was continue to laugh.  Like they always say, if you want Sympathy look in the dictionary.  It’s right there between Shit and Syphilis.

            “Man, you should have seen your face!”  Jason said.  “You were white as a sheet!”

            I guess that I’d deserved it.  I had been asking some pretty dumb questions about steers and they’d just answered them.  It was after ten by then and I was beat.  I pulled up my covers and was asleep in an instant, but kept waking up holding my balls and with a hard on.  I hadn’t jacked off in almost a week and knew that if I didn’t do it pretty soon I’d leave a mess in the sheets, so I got up and silently walked over and knelt in front of the toilet and whacked off into a wad of toilet paper.  I threw the paper into the toilet and noticed that there was already two other clumps in there but no turds.

            I went back to bed and just before I went back to sleep I saw Paul roll out of his bed and head for the toilet, his tented out skivvies pointing the way.

            Vince and I slept in the next morning while Jason and Paul changed the irrigation pipes.  They woke me up when they came back in and the first thing I did was check my balls.  There was a faint red abrasion in one spot where the band had been but no other damage.  It had scared the crap out of me and I was pissed about them messing with my balls but they hadn’t meant any harm and I guess in a way it was kind of funny, so I laughed it off and figured that sooner or later I find a way to pay them back.

            “How about you guys going over to the Whitehorse Ranch today?”  Uncle Floyd said as we ate breakfast.  “Henry called and said that he has a hydraulic pump that he wants me to look at.  You can stop by Fields on the way back and pick up the mail.”

            “Can we go across the desert?”  Paul asked, “That would be a good place for Jeff to try driving.”

            “Sure, but keep the speed down and watch out for soft spots,” his dad answered.

            All four of us piled into the wide front seat of the pickup truck and Paul drove down to the edge of the dry lake while showing me how to work the throttle, brake, clutch, and gearshift.  I’d ridden all over LA but had never tried to drive and I was pretty klutzy for a while but finally got the hang of it.  “Head right for that highest peak,” Paul said, pointing out the windshield.  “Those are the Trout Creek Mountains, and we’ll hit the road right at the edge of the dry lake.  Also, don’t drive across any places where the ground looks a little darker.  Those are wet spots and are soft enough to get us stuck.”  It was a lot of fun but I kept trying to go faster and Paul kept ragging on me to slow down.

            We finally got to the gravel road at the other end of the dry lake and Paul took over and drove us another fifteen miles to the Whitehorse Ranch.  I saw right away that there was a landing strip there and another hangar building and kind of wondered why Uncle Floyd hadn’t just flown over in his Cessna but I didn’t ask and we soon had the pump loaded and were on our way back.  Jason drove this time.  “Do you have a license?”  I asked.

            “No, just a learner’s permit, but that’s no good anyway because someone at least eighteen has to be with me,” Jason replied.

            “Don’t the cops ever hassle you? They’d pick up on something like that right away in LA and be on you like stink.”

            “Nah, they don’t much care what the ranch people do out here, and as long as you’re not raising hell or doing something else wrong they leave you alone,” he said.  We finally intercepted a paved road- I wasn’t so sure there was any such thing out here-and a few minutes later we rolled into beautiful downtown Fields.

            “Is this all there is here?”  I asked as we pulled to a stop in front of a small store.

            “Yeah,” Vince answered.  “Neat, huh?”  He then went on to explain that the store was also the gas station, Post Office, restaurant, motel, and really the only business in town. Paul went in a picked up a few days accumulation of mail and also got us each a can of soda.

            “Is that where you go to school?” I pointed across the road to a small school building.

            “We all used to,” Jason answered.  “It’s just up through eighth grade. This fall we’ll all go to Crane.”

            “Where’s that?”  I asked.

            “About sixty miles North,” Vince answered.

            “Jeez,” I said.  “It looks like you’d take all day just getting there and back.”

            “It’s like a boarding school, only publicly owned,” Paul explained.  The bus picks us up on Monday morning and we don’t come back home until Friday afternoon.  I think it’s the only one like it in the State.”

            “Are there, like, girls there too?” The possibilities seemed endless.

            “Yeah, we share classes and all that, but their dorm is strictly off limits. You can’t even put one foot on their stairway,” Paul said.

            “But you can still go into town, right?”  I asked.

            “The town is about the size of this one,” Jason replied, “And you can’t go off campus at all during the week.  Even the guys with cars have to have them locked up in an impound all week.”

            “Sounds like a drag, I mean, no dating or anything,” I commented.

            “Oh, you can make out but you learn real quickly to keep it in your pants, though.  Hey! Check out the hooters!”  Paul suddenly said as two college girls pulled up in a Subaru.  They sat in the car studying a map for a few minutes before getting out of the car.  They were dressed in hiking clothes; shorts, heavy shoes, and tee shirts that were plenty tight. You didn’t have to have very good eyesight to see that their nipples were trying to burst through the thin cloth.  They looked our way and smiled, then went on into the store carrying the map.

            “Man, that’s sweet!”  Jason said.  “Hey, Jeff.  You get any yet?”

            I felt myself blushing.  “Almost,” I replied.

            “You either did or you didn’t,” Jason said, “There’s no such thing as almost.”

            “If I could have stayed home another week I would have got it wet.  I know this girl, see.  She let me see and feel her tits, and she gave me a, you know, hand job one time, and she said that we’d hook up as soon as she got back from this trip she was going on.  My mom found a note she’d written to me, and also a receipt from a Safeway store that showed I bought a dozen rubbers, so the next thing you know I’m out here in the middle of nowhere with you guys.”  The worst part was that someone was that with me gone she would glom onto to someone else, Rick Henderson probably, and forget all about me.  She’s like that.

            “Maybe we should have left that band on his balls,” Jason said, eliciting a laugh from his brothers.

          The two girls took off in their Subaru and we finished our sodas and took the cans back inside to collect the deposit on them.  There was flyer on the bulletin board next to the door that offered a ‘twenty-five hundred dollar reward for information leading to the arrest and conviction of person or persons involved in the killing and mutilation of cattle in Southern Harney County.  “What’s that all about?” I asked, pointing to the poster.

            “Some pervert has been killing range bulls and cutting the balls off of them and then gutting them out and taking the hearts.  They think the bull balls and hearts are being sold in china or something,” Paul answered.  “That why those bulls are all in the field up by where we’re irrigating.  They usually let them rum loose with the cows this time of the year.” 

           That seemed kind of creepy to me and I said so.  The other guys agreed, then we got back in the pickup and headed up the road, Vince driving.  Mom would have a cow if she knew that I was in a pickup truck going forty miles an hour on a gravel road with a thirteen year old kid behind the wheel, and I decided that I wouldn’t include that information in my nightly email. 

            The Subaru was parked about ten miles up the road, near a small ramshackle looking wooden structure next to the edge of the desert.  “Plan B?”  Vince queried.

            “B it is,” Paul responded.

            “Roger on B,” Jason echoed.  I didn’t even bother asking what plan B was, because Vince had driven on by the empty Subaru without slowing down.  He stopped around the next corner though and we all climbed out of the truck. 

            “Here,” Paul said, handing me one of the nickels from the pop can deposit.  “Odd man out.”  He then flipped the coin in the air and slapped it onto his wrist. “Tails.”

            “ Tails,” Jason said.

            “ Tails,” I said.  I still didn’t know what was going on but I was willing to play the game, provided it didn’t involve my nuts again.

            “Heads,” Vince said, and then added,  “crap!”

            Paul, Jason, and I flipped again and eliminated Paul.

            “Okay,” Jason said, handing me one of the two pair of binoculars that he’d just removed from the truck’s storage box.  “Keep your head down and follow me.”  I obeyed and followed him around a low ridge towards the ramshackle building we’d just passed.  We stopped a hundred yards away and crept up to the top of the ridge and hunkered down in the brush.  Following his lead I focused the glasses on the building.

            The two girls were up to their shoulders in a pool of steaming water that was enclosed on three sides by the low walls of the building.  Their backs were to us and they were peering out through the cracks in the boards towards the road, insuring that any hormone-fueled lecherous adolescents wanting to look at their naked bodies wouldn’t walk in on them.  “It’s a hot spring,” Jason whispered in my ear,  “Just watch, and don’t move, here they come.”  I shifted my eyes to the road in tile to see Paul and Vince pull up in the truck.  The girls saw them too and wasted no time in standing up and donning their swimsuits, naturally keeping their backs towards the road and the truck and the kids.   I was hard as soon as I saw their tits, and the sight of their blonde pussies would have surely made me blow my load if I hadn’t jacked off the previous night. 

           Once suitably attired they submerged themselves in the pool and stayed that way until the offending pickup truck left.  Knowing they were now safe from prying eyes they again emerged from the pool and stripped down before getting back in.  Jason had to physically drag me back to the parked truck.

            We made it back to the ranch just in time to change the irrigation pipes and I was still so wired that the work seemed effortless.

            Most of the rest of the summer passed in a blur.  Paul and Jason worked driving the equipment that turns the hay into gigantic round bales, and Vince and I continued to change irrigation pipes.  I grew some muscles and the job got a lot easier even though our workload increased as the hay was harvested.  There was still time to do a lot of other neat stuff though, and I learned to shoot a rifle, pistol, and shotgun, and also learned how to chew tobacco without throwing up.

            Aunt Meg” book was published and she and Uncle Floyd flew the Cessna to Portland to sign copies and celebrate.  As soon as they left Paul drove the truck down to somewhere in Nevada and came back with a bunch of beer and wine.   I didn’t out of bed the next day except to puke and pee.

            Two things did happen that summer that I’ll never ever forget.  One was that I got to know the youngest daughter of the owner of Pike Creek Cattle and she taught me how to ride a horse, among other things, and in the course of the her lessons I expended three of the rubbers that I’d brought with me from LA.  Vince was PO’d.  He’d been trying to get close to her for over a year but she’d shut him down.

            The other memorable event occurred one night when we were riding the four-wheelers back from a rabbit hunting expedition.  We heard the deep boom of a large rifle from somewhere up around the bull pen.  Being a recently bred, studly fourteen year old cowboy I wanted to go investigate, but Paul vetoed the idea in favor of riding up to the Pike Creek foreman’s house and informing him of what we’d heard.  He rounded up the owner and they hauled butt up there, followed by us, and we arrived just in time to apprehend the guy who was responsible for the mutilating the bulls.  The foreman told us to go on home but of course we didn’t.  We parked the four-wheelers our of sight and crept back just in time to see the foreman and the ranch hand strip the guy naked, tie him onto the carcass of the bull he’d just killed, and cut his nuts off.  The next morning there were four wads of toilet paper in the bowl.  The sheriff’s deputies questioned everyone in the area about anything they may have heard or seen, and just like everyone else we knew nothing about it.

            School was about to start and I went home right after that.  I was at least fifteen pounds heavier, all muscle, and several hundred dollars richer.  More importantly I had learned the value of a hard days labor and the pleasures that living in the country can bring, and most importantly I learned to never ever mess with the owner of the Pike Creek Cattle Company and I thank God that he never found out about my riding lessons.

Author’s note:  The area on the East side of the Steens Mountains, the community of Fields, the hot spring, plan B, and the Alvord Desert are all accurately described, as is the domicile high school at Crane.  The people, of course, are fictitious but the mutilation of the cattle and the vigilante punishment of the offender were very real events.