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Bull strong, sheep tight
by Betty Sayers

I’m driving east in the Republican River Valley on Highway 6, a road traveled by the First People eons before automobiles. As I near the town of Cambridge, my eyes drift along the white highway stripe and I see a meadowlark, bill open wide and throat throbbing in song and lush green grasses shimmering in the roadside ditch. In passing, I glance at a sign partially obscured by a brushy tree. I see words, large and bold in black and white, and they stick in my mind like a cockle burr on a sock.

BULL STRONG
SHEEP TIGHT

What do these words mean? I’m curious. Signs sell things. What are these words asking me to buy or do? I’m driving through ranch country in western Nebraska. I’ve seen sloping canyons, silvery bluestem hay meadows, bleached out sage brush plants rooted in rust-red soil, slabs of sandstone, occasional knobby cottonwood trees, black angus cow/calf herds, yucca plants, and meadowlarks on fence posts. The scenery offers no clues.

Farmers and ranchers work outside and need things that withstand weather, dirt and rocks and scrapes against heavy machinery. Rural people till, plant and harvest gardens, build and repair homes, fish, swim, play golf, hunt, repair their own lawn mowers, motorboat engines, and cars. We believe in savings accounts and insurance policies.

Could it be creative marketing for beer, chewing tobacco, jeans, cowboy boots? Chaps and leather gloves? Ropes? A bank or insurance company? No, none of these are a good fit. I’m clueless. By now I have driven through the town, and I’m two miles east of Cambridge.

BULL STRONG
SHEEP TIGHT

The phrase oddly comforts me. I like saying it, “Bull Strong and Sheep Tight,” and I wish something in my life fit the description. Not my friendships, people slip away from me. I relocate. They do too. Letters and phone calls and e-mail messages lessen in frequency. Ties loosen and friends drift away like a sheep on a snowy mountain.

Not my convictions, time passes, and experience pokes holes in the beliefs I once defended with fervor. I once trusted these old adages: Better safe than sorry, children can be managed, people change, true love lasts forever, hard work pays off.

HORSE HIGH
BULL STRONG
SHEEP TIGHT

My curiosity wins. I slow and find a wide angle in the road and turn around. I will drive back to read the entire sign so I can find out what it means. I see it now. HORSE HIGH BULL STRONG SHEEP TIGHT, and in small print running along the bottom of the sign, I read Fence Company. Of course, in western Nebraska, a fence needs to be high enough to hold a horse, strong enough to stop a bull and tight enough to corral sheep. Horses jump fences, and bulls with bunches of muscles and strength enough to “bull their way” need especially strong fences to keep them inside. Sheep are well known for slipping under fences and if one goes, so do they all. “Follow like sheep,” another saying, and this one is true.

Fences arrived with the immigrant farmers who wrested the great, unmarked prairies from the First People, the Arapahoe, Pawnee, Omaha, and other tribes from the west, north, south and east who hunted the grassland grazing animals. The settlers surveyed and fenced. They plowed their claim, and defined their corners and borders with fencing of all types. Wooden posts and the strands of smooth wire stretched taut appear to be common today although I see barb wire too. A single strand of wire and a steel post indicate an electric fence. I doubt if one wire strand is considered HORSE HIGH BULL STRONG SHEEP TIGHT.

I’m looking for a HORSE HIGH, BULL STRONG, SHEEP TIGHT kind of place. Even though I’m a “don’t-fence-me-in” kind of person, life’s vagaries and the current unsettling concerns of fraudulent mortgage loans, insolvent banks, global warming, exultant gas prices, and my often hectic every day life, I’m feeling a need for protection. I’m looking for a space that shuts out the “think it, get it, think it, get it” refrain, and where I may do nothing and allow the unnamed universe to remake me.

Betty Sayers is a co-founder of Nebraska Rural Living. She lives in Holdrege, NE. Read more about her on the 'About Us' page.

To learn more about how you can be a writer for Nebraska Rural Living, and have your essays posted on this site, visit our 'Writers Wanted' page.

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