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and underpaid, the pickings were slim, and many of the men they interviewed were, if experienced, broken down or, if inexperienced, not able-bodied. The only exception was a lanky, gum-chewing wise guy in a hot-rod Ford named Dale Brewer. A lazy, scheming, no-account ladies’ man, Dale would be the child Gladys and Wiley never had. They took him into their capacious hearts.
    Once after school and during a late-spring snow, Dale and I were feeding cows from a wagon, tossing the bales out as we cut the binder twine. One bale had hit the ground still bound, and Dale got down to cut the twine. As he bent over to do this, an old swinging-bag cow butted him onto his face. Dale jumped up in a rage and screamed at the cow, “Someday I’ll be rich and you’ll be a thousand pounds of Sloppy Joes!”
    It turned out to be true. Dale ended up with great wealth.
    I was simply summer help, but Dale hoped to keep this job forever. I don’t quite know why Wiley and Gladys took to him as they did; he was an absolute menace around machinery, the only thing that interested him on the ranch, and he broke more than he could fix. We had a low-boy trailer that was in constant use hauling farm equipment in to the John Deere dealership for repair, usually on account of Dale’s neglect. The last summer I worked on White Bird, Dale had taken over the irrigation, resulting in terrible friction with the neighbors. Wiley declined to intervene or bank on his years of goodwill because he wanted Dale to learn for himself how the water was shared and apportioned; but Dale just argued with people, and eventually a ditch rider was assigned to us and everyone had to meet his expenses as he adjudicated every drop that came through the head gate. A ditch rider brings shame to the people of a watershed, a public announcement that the neighbors don’t know how to get along with one another. Once Dale had his share of the water, he did almost nothing with it, and the small amount of alfalfa that ought to have been irrigated dried up on the meadows. Wiley and Gladys just let it happen as part of the education of Dale. Instead of attending to the appropriate chores of damming and spreading water, Dale focused all his attention on a badger living in the middle of the alfalfa field that had made a great, unsightly burrow, in the mouth of which his striped face could be seen. One day Dale handed me an old J.C. Higgins rifle with iron sights and told me to shoot the badger. “I’d do it, but I’m nearsighted.”
    Well, I tried and failed, both because of the wiliness of the badger, who after a few of my inaccurate shots, grew evasive, and because the old gun had probably never been sighted in; it seemed to me that the shots landed nowhere near where I aimed. It didn’t help my accuracy that the several glimpses I’d got of the badger had induced sort of an attachment to it, giving me the sense of trying to kill something which wished only to live.
    Dale was quite furious at my failures and professed to be fed up withthis badger ruining the alfalfa, alfalfa that was going nowhere for lack of water. He put poison at the mouth of the burrow without effect. He tried running water from the ditch toward the hole but ended up eroding part of the meadow. This finally came to Wiley’s attention, and he wordlessly shoveled the appropriate repair to the ditch bank, his silence betraying his dissatisfaction with Dale and maybe even with me. He walked off toward the house without speaking.
    That night in the bunkhouse, Dale said that if we didn’t do something about the badger we were going to get our asses kicked off the ranch. I was so young and credulous at this time that I thought Dale knew something about badgers I didn’t, but now I still believe the problem was the lack of irrigation. Dale pulled a wooden box containing narrow, waxy red cylinders from under his bunk. He held up a stick of dynamite and said it had the badger’s name on it. “Wiley ain’t going to