John Monroe lived on\nLost Creek by the covered bridge. John ran cattle for decades and always wore a\nbig cowboy hat. John rode round-up in the fall with Leonard Bradshaw. John\nwould hunt mountain lions with Tom Tibbetts as they both kept hounds, and Tom\nsaid John was the best lion hunter in the county. Tom said they\u2019d start off\ntogether and split apart in opposite directions so their hounds would not get\nmixed up during the chase. Improving the family income with bounties on the big\ncats every winter as each lion brought $50 from the state, and $10 from Jackson\nCounty.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
John would not have\nelectricity in his home until a short time after a man walked on the moon. He\nthen gave in to his wife and got electricity and a modern phone. They\u2019d had a\ncrank phone for a time, when Lloyd and his brother were kids. In 94 years,\nJohn, had only been to Medford six times which was 24 miles away.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Once, John\u2019s sister\ndecided to take him to the ocean in a car and they were gone for 3 days. John\nsaw the Redwoods and went to the beach.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Everyone had a\ndistinct cattle call; each owner\u2019s beasts knew his masters call. Many of the\nneighbors knew each other\u2019s call. According to Emil Pech, John\u2019s call was a\ngood one, with a \u201cWhoopee! \u201con the end of it.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
John gave up on\nhorses when he got old and drove an International Diesel tractor. John was up\nthe South Fork looking for cows and didn\u2019t make it back one evening. Lloyd,\nJohn\u2019s son went looking for John with his brother-in-law. After finding the\ntractor at the bottom of a steep grade, that went up to Conde Creek, they began\ncalling out for John in the dark, pretty far up the South Fork of Little Butte\nCreek and up on Hepsie Mountain, past Grizzly Canyon.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Eventually they heard\nhis \u201cWhoopee! \u201cand followed his call in the dark about a half mile from the\ntractor. He was cold, wet and muddy and had the big hat pulled over his ears\nwith a plastic sack tied round his head to hold it down. Each of the men got a\nshoulder under the old cowboy and got him off the mountain.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
\u201cI think I had a\nstroke,\u201d John said to Lloyd on the way home in the car, long after midnight.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
A few weeks later, John fell while feeding calves, the\ncalves tromped the old man until he crawled under a flat bedded wagon, he\nhauled the baled hay on.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
For a brief time, they put him in a nursing home in\nMedford. John became so sorrowful because he was embarrassed when they took his\nclothes away. One day, he found his overalls and his flannel shirt and made a\nbreak for it out of the nursing home. After that escape his sons took him home\nand cared for him there. At the age of 94 John passed, three months after his\nwife Ida Marie had died. Lloyd said, John would say, of his one trip to the\nocean:<\/p>\n\n\n\n
\u201cOh, that\u2019s a mad thing to look at! That\u2019s a mad thing\u2014those waves coming in!\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n
James Ross Kelly lives in Northern California. Mr. Kelly is a U.S. Army Veteran (1967-1971), Mr. Kelly was in the Army Security Agency and served in Eritrea, East Africa, where he was a teletype intercept operator. He has been a journalist for Gannet, a travel book editor, and had a score of labor jobs \u2014 the in-between, jobs you get from being an English major. He retired as a writer-editor for the Forest Service, where he spent the a decade in Oregon and Alaska respectively. He started writing poetry in college on the GI Bill, and after college continued and gave occasional readings in the Pacific Northwest during the 1980s. His poems and stories have appeared in Westwind Review, (Ashland, Oregon), Open Sky (Seattle), Siskiyou Journal (Ashland, Oregon), The Sun (Chapel Hill, NC); Don\u2019t Read This (Ashland, Oregon), Table Rock Sentinel, (Medford, Oregon), Poetry Motel (Duluth, Minnesota), Poems for a Scorpio Moon & Others (Ashland, Oregon), The Red Gate & Other Poems, a handset letterpress chapbook published by Cowan & Tetley (1984, Vancouver, B.C.). In the past three years Silver Birch Press (Los Angeles) so glad is my heart (Duluth, Minnesota), Cargo Literary, (Prince Edward Island, Canada), Fiction Attic, Rock and Sling (Spokane, WA) Flash Fiction and Rue Scribe have all featured one or more of his stories. John Monroe lived on Lost Creek by the covered bridge. John ran cattle for decades and always wore a big cowboy hat. John rode round-up in the fall with Leonard Bradshaw. John would hunt mountain lions with Tom Tibbetts as they both kept hounds, and Tom said John was the best lion hunter in the … Read More<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"nf_dc_page":"","om_disable_all_campaigns":false,"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":true,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[3],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1808","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-fiction"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/pa867U-ta","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/underwoodpress.com\/ruescribe\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1808","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/underwoodpress.com\/ruescribe\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/underwoodpress.com\/ruescribe\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/underwoodpress.com\/ruescribe\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/underwoodpress.com\/ruescribe\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1808"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/underwoodpress.com\/ruescribe\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1808\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1809,"href":"https:\/\/underwoodpress.com\/ruescribe\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1808\/revisions\/1809"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/underwoodpress.com\/ruescribe\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1808"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/underwoodpress.com\/ruescribe\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1808"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/underwoodpress.com\/ruescribe\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1808"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}
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