The cowboy's day off

It's not often you get to take a day off when you're the only cowboy on the ranch, but the other day, G-man found himself at the end of long list of cowboy jobs; chop wood for the stove, fix the fence on the yards where a calf took a wrong turn, slash the top paddock, take the gate that a mental cow jumped over but didn't quite clear to the engineers to straighten, finish the yards, etc etc. 

When he gets a day off, he generally fires up his computer to dash off a few cowboy songs, and this particular day off was no exception. There he sat, in clean clothes, with clean hair and wooly socked feet, his head encased in a  lovely ear-cushioning set of headphones, totally absorbed in his music when he got that weird, I'm-being-stared-at feeling.

Still in the zone, he turned around to see a pair of big brown inquisitive eyes watching from the kitchen window, wondering what had happened to the cowboy's head. It was Afraido, one of the young steers, who had taken himself on a bit of a Sunday stroll. The cowboy's day off was over; Afraido had to be sent back to the herd, and G'man had to find the fence he'd 'oops', tripped through while trying to reach the 'mmm, those suckers look delicious' banana patch, and then the gate that Afraido had 'oh, no I'm trapped, help' pushed through to find himself in the next field, to find, 'goodness, the gate to the road is wide open' and then went looking for 'better let the cowboy know' G'man to impress upon him that things were out of order, and so arrived at the house window.

Lucky he didn't make it to town - he's bound to have found the naughty-boys hide and picked up taste for skateboarding and winfield blues by now. I don't think I could bear the steers suddenly going all adolescent on me, with turned around caps and those hideous lairy 'corey' jackets.