Read The Cowboy and the Cossack (Nancy Pearl's Book Lust Rediscoveries) for Free Online Page A

time to argue. Bawling wildly, she went after her baby like a shot. And, terrified by our yells and waving torches, the others started to follow. One mean-looking dun bull lowered his head five feet away to charge right at me, so without thinking about it I burned him a quick, good one on the nose with the torch and, luckily, he changed his mind and charged the other direction instead.
    I guess that ocean water must have cooled his nose off pretty fast.
    I know damn well that about two minutes later it cooled me off fast. The rest of the remuda and the pack mules followed the longhorns, and when the last big, balky mule got to the sea door, Slim whacked him on the tail with his torch and yelled, “Abandon ship, goddamnit!” And an instant later they were all gone.
    “We’re bringin’ up the rear, so carry your torches!” Slim said, swinging up onto Charlie, his calico stud. He went over and when he came up, still holding his torch, he yelled in a strange, choked voice, “Come on in! The water’s fine!”
    I got aboard Buck, who was, naturally, a buckskin, and who was as nervous as I was. But when I pushed him toward the edge, he went right on over, out and down without even looking back.
    And great, holy God was it cold! It was already kind of cold because we’d all sent our warm jackets on the small boats. But now ten thousand wet, tiny icicles plunged paralyzingly into every pore of every part of my skin, through shirt and pants and even boots. It was colder right then than any time I can remember, even including the time Ma and Pa froze to death around me. Just the shock of it alone was so much I couldn’t even try to get my breathing going for a while.
    Slim was a few yards to my right, waving his torch and yelling, steering the cattle in front of us toward the shore. Looking at me he called, “Yell out, Levi! Holler! It’ll start your breath goin’!”
    “Yowwwwwww!” I put all my lungs into it.
    “Shad was right about it bein’ refreshin’!” Slim called.
    I could yell back by now. “Sure takes your mind off drownin’!”
    Crab was on my left, holding his torch high. All he could manage through clenched teeth was a loud, chattering “ Jesus !”
    “Steer ’em!” Slim bellowed. “Keep pushin’ ’em in!”
    And then, in those freezing, heaving black seas, we lost one of the herd. A mud-colored cow with only one horn was about twenty feet ahead of me. For no understandable reason, shesuddenly turned around toward me and started swimming back in the other direction. It sounds silly, but for a minute I had the awful feeling that she thought she’d left something behind on the ship. “ Hey! ” I yelled, waving the torch toward her. “Back!”
    Her eyes were glazed over, and I don’t think she was even aware of the torch or my shouts. She started to go under, but then swimming frantically she raised her nose up among the rough waves for one last pathetic half of a wheezing breath. And then she sank like a rock.
    I dropped my torch and grabbed for her, which was pretty ridiculous, but didn’t seem like it at the time. As the torch sputtered out in the water beside me, I caught one of her soft, water-soaked ears for a brief moment, and then it slipped out of my hand as the cow went down below into the dark, icy sea.
    “Let go!” Slim was already bellowing. “You’re pullin’ your horse off balance!”
    Somehow, cold and frozen and scared as I was, I was damnere ready to cry. And maybe even did, a little.
    That poor damn cow!
    I couldn’t quite get all of my broken feelings for her in place. But it was just so sad for her to die alone and helpless out here in this black, terrifying water. So damn sad for her to die like that, way off at the end of the world where she’d sure as hell never asked to come. To die stunned and frozen, and not understanding it at all, in this unknown place, while she was trying blindly and so desperately to somehow struggle back home.
    We were probably not in the