I went down to Beaumont about a year ago to do some visiting with relatives and ended up getting involved with a mule named Moe.  When I back home to the D&E Ranch, Moe came with me.  As of this posting, that ornery mule is now the Chief of Security here at the ranch, and for good reason.  It turns out that Moe is nosey almost beyond a point of comprehension, and if he gets really curious about something, things start to happen.  Moe is not a mule easily denied, and that's what this story is all about.

Bubba and I have been on this ranch for about forty years, and lots of animals have come and gone from here during that time.  Since we're both big time animal enthusiasts, even some strange critters have been around here from time to time.  We've had ducks, hogs, and frogs for one thing, and I don't mean just wild ones.  Our first big adventure here was involved with raising ducks, and we also had a hog'n frog operation at one time.  Yeah, hogs and frogs - an experiment in double cropping.  Bubba saw an old hog eat a frog one day, and that's what started it.  That hog actually chased down the frog and gobbled it right up, and after doing some research, Bubba decided that we ought to start a hog'n frog operation.  We'd fill all our tanks (ponds) with seed frogs (tadpoles), and when they got big, we'd feed them to the hogs he planned on buying.  Actually, he planned on us harvesting the legs off the frogs, then feeding the bodies to the hogs.  We'd have frog legs to sell, plus some high protein fed hogs . . . and that just never happened.  It turns out that hogs don't eat frogs at all, at least the ones with no legs, and that put the quietus on that operation.

It took a year to finally get rid of all the hogs, and we've still got about a zillion frogs out in those tanks - just happy as they can be and croaking their little froggy asses off every night.  If you don't like frog opera, you'd never be able to sleep around here at night.  And pardner, until you've seen one of our frogs, you haven't see a real bullfrog.  I've seen some frogs on the big tank fartherest away from the house that could wear sneakers that'd fit a six year old kid.  But except for the remaining frogs, that's all done with now.  Besides, even if we hadn't brought in all the seed frogs, we would've had them anyway.  Frogs, you may have noticed, just sort of invite themselves to your pond whether or not you like it.  

We've raised fishing worms too.  Yup, raised something called wigglers - big suckers that get up to six or eight inches long.  We did OK in that business until baby snakes started showing up in our worm beds.  We worked hard at trying to keep the beds snake free, but mama snakes found them anyway and laid eggs.  We're talking here about garden snakes and the l like, nothing dangerous.  But the worm business ended when we got sued in court by a fisherman who got bit on the thumb by a baby rattler.  He swore up and down that he reached into the worm box to fish out a wiggler and came up with a baby rattler hanging off his thumb.  He said in court that jaws couldn't clear out a fishing boat any faster than a rattler can, that they'd lost a boat and all kinds of equipment, and it was all our fault.  We ended up winning the case, however, by showing the judge that rattlers couldn't possibly have gotten into our worm beds . . . but that's neither here nor there to the point I want to make here, which is:  My partner, Bubba Espinoza, can sure come up with some goofy ideas from time to time.  That's bad in lots of ways, but our adventures due to his wild schemes has given me lots of story lines.

Moe Le Mule belonged to my first cousin Poochie Duhon, a full blood Cajun from my daddy's side of the famlly.  Me, I'm just a half coonass, but Poochie is a thoroughbred.  He's also a thouroughbred pain in the ass most of the time because he's about as ornery as they come.  Getting him and Bubba together is dangerous for a number of reasons, paramount among them being that they're both a couple of goofballs.  Together, they hatch plans like a dominique hen hatches a pile of eggs.  Moe Le Mule ended up back at the D&E mostly because Bubba wanted him there, and he wanted him because he saw first hand what the mule was capable of doing - jumping.  Poochie had gone into the jumping mule business, and that just set Bubba on fire wanting a jumping mule of his own.

Now, I'm not against mules, especially jumping mules, but I'm against old men having them.  Bubba's too damn old to be riding a jumping mule, but he doesn't know that.  Well, I should say that he knows now, but he didn't know that when Moe Le Mule came home with us from Beaumont.  The name, by the way, comes from my Cajun cousin naming him that - Moe Le Mule.  He also trained him, which accounts for the mule being ornery.  Mules are famous for being stubborn, but most of the ones I've been around aren't as downright ornery as Moe.  That damn mule will eat the hat right off your head, and that's no joke.  He won't mess with a felt hat, but it you show up around him wearing a straw, he's sooner or later going to take a bite out of it.  And he has been known to take a bite out of you too . . . if you mess with him the wrong way.

All ranches have rules, and even our little rag-tag ranch is no different.  We expect animals to come here to get used to the rules and do things according to them . . . like staying inside the fences we put up.  We pride ourselves in keeping good fences because we usually have them in fine shape.  Our small herd of cattle stays secure inside the fences, as do the eight horses we have here.  Moe has absolutely no respect for a fence, and we found that out the first day he was here.  The good thing about him is that he doesn't run off.  Once he made himself home here, decided he liked it, he stays put.  He still jumps the fence all the time, but he doesn't go far and always jumps back over in due time.  All of our neighbors know Moe, and he's not usually a destructive mule, so we don't have any problems there.  Moe becomes a problem, though, when something or somebody comes here that he's not familiar with.

We retired Moe as an official jumping mule right after he threw Bubba into a briar thicket his second week at the ranch.  Until then, Bubba'd been having a blast riding him and jumping him over things.  Then he got too brave for his own good and tried to jump him over this little briar thicket, and the mule scotched.  Bubba's been horseback most of his life, knows how to handle situations like that, but horses don't stop like mules do . . . and Bubba went flying over his head into the thicket.  After spending two hours at the clinic in town with a doctor and nurse picking thorns out of his ass, he decided to retire from jumping Moe over thickets.  In fact, he just quit riding him althogether . . . and that suited me fine.  Since then, Moe's been pretty much a pet around here.  He got to be Chief of Security when he broke up a hunting camp.

Hunting deer is big business here in the hill country of Texas.  Three ranches border the D&E, and only one allows hunting . . . and it's that property that gives us the most grief during hunting season.  Most hunters are respectful of properlty lines, but some are not, and we sometimes get hunters on our place during deer season.  We don't allow hunting of any kind, and we sure don't like it when some hunter shoots a deer on our property.  This usually happens when the deer jumps a fence while the hunter has a bead on him, and he ends up shooting him anyway.  We've even had a few hunters cut our fences so they could drive their jeeps or trucks to where the deer finally fell . . . and that really pisses me off.  We come down hard of folks like that, if we can catch them.  

Moe must like deer, or maybe he hates hunters, but he can sure clear out a deer camp in a hurry.  We know that for sure because that's what he did last year.  Some guy shot the dear, it fell on our side of the fence, and he crawled over the fence to retrieve it.  He'd gone about a hundred yards inside our fence, was gutting the deer, when Moe came up and bit him on the arm.  The guy said he never heard the mule coming, didn't see him either, until it was too late.  He ran back to the fence and jumped over, but the mule just glided over the fence and chased him all the way back to camp.  Then he created all sorts of havoc there when he destroyed lots of their equipment . . . all on the neighbor's property.  We finally worked it out with our neighbor, who knew the hunters were in the wrong for going over the fence.  I don't stop them from doing that usually, for the simple reason I don't want the deer to go to waste.  If they don't cut fences or destroy things, I see retrieving a deer as part of the game and don't fuss about it.   Moe, on the other hand, doesn't see it that way.  After that happened, Bubba put a sign up over his stall at the barn that reads:  Moe Le Mule, Chief of Security.

But . . . it's getting close to hunting season again.  Our neighbor says he'll try to keep his hunters away from our fences this year, and he's making them camp all the way on the other side of his ranch now.  Maybe that'll take care of the problem.  By next year he'll have a game fence all around his property, he says, and even Moe can't jump a fence that tall.  We're thinking about doing that here at the D&E, but not on account of deer and not for Moe's safe keeping.  It's just a good idea all the way around for all of our animal's sakes.

I just wish there was some way I could put a fence around Bubba.

C. Duhon, 9/21/07