All that remained of the campfire was a glowing bed of coals, while our favorite cowboys roasted their s’mores. The Stetsons were thrown back as heads turned toward the black sky, their eyes following pinpricks of light moving slowly among the stars.
“Is that it?” “Is this Biden’s cow-tracking satellite?” Rimrock asked.
“I don’t know,” “Maybe,” and “I have a bad feeling about this” were the answers from the cowboy’s neural circuit.
The crew spent the entire day installing artificial intelligence-powered electronic ear chips, ordered by USDA bureaucrats, to every head in the herd.
Signals from the devices were sent to an orbiting satellite so that the movement of each cow could be tracked by isolated spies deep within the NSA and CIA.
“They do it so they know which cows are farting upwind,” Rawhide Rickey of Rawlins said.
“No, they want to prevent these cows from wandering all the way to Colorado and being exposed to wolves,” Panhandle replied. “It’s in their best interest.”
“The earmuffs are so heavy,” said Sourdough, “that after we put them on, the cows’ heads were all tilted to one side. They’re probably walking in circles now.”
The debate went back and forth about the poor cows caught in the clutches of Big Gubmint’s greed and high-tech attacks on the rural way of life.
A pair of brush tools reached into their pockets and pulled out the spare ear tags that couldn’t find a place in the cow’s ear. They threw the tools into the ashes of the campfire and dusted their hands on their breaks. They looked comfortable.
The Trail Boss jumped in and said, “This isn’t the worst of it, boys. I heard there are secret labs in China where they make fake beef. It looks like beef and is supposed to taste like beef, but it’s made from chemicals and recycled diapers.” Or something like that.
Looks of shock greeted this unwelcome news.
“Fake cows!” shouted baby Casey. “Science has gone further!”
Lingle’s angry Latigo Lou jumped to his feet. “What’s next? ‘Fake horses?’
“If scientists could make them so they wouldn’t fail, I wouldn’t have much of a problem.” Joe Wrangler said.
“I’m going to have nightmares,” the child said, “about Chinese communist thieves stealing our herd and replacing them with fake cows.”
“What you should be worried about is the fake lab cowboys,” Trail Boss said. “They’re made to look, smell and act like the real thing, so you can’t tell the difference, but they’re made from leftovers that the fake cow labs have swept onto the ground.”
At this time, the cowboys around the campfire gave each other suspicious glances, and the unspoken question on every lips was: “Hey, Bard, are you for real???”
It’s been a long time since tired hands have engaged in a good, free-for-all existential explanation of the role of government in their lives and what it means to be a real cowboy, so the conversation has become lively. Campfire.
As Biden’s spy satellite looked over the sleeping herd, the cowboys heatedly debated the virtues of real horses versus fake ones, and how a lab-raised cowboy would likely wither like a delicate prairie flower the next time the crew visited the meat bowls on Front Street. In Rollins.
A campfire speech about the relative merits of fatty grass T-bones versus fake Chinese beef was interrupted when Cookie rapped on his frying pan with his six-gun and snarled, “Dinner’s ready. Get your asses on over the chuckwagon. I’ve prepared a surprise for you tonight.”
