quantities of alcohol they’d imbibed earlier in the day). Who said cowboys were an extinct species? What Jurassic Park did for dinosaurs, Bill’s bet was about to do for cowboys.
Unfortunately, Bill’s bet was about as real as velociraptors opening doors and chasing plucky kids through well-stocked kitchens. Poor Buck and Bob. If they hadn’t been drinking so much, they might have realized that Bill had been pulling their legs all along. He’d only wanted to get rid of the camel as fast as he could before the sheriff figured out that it was not, in fact, a deformed equine. What better way to do that — and have some fun in the process — than to make a wager with a pair of drunken idiots that they could outlast the animal in the desert? The camel would obviously leave them in the dust, but Buck and Bob, thirsty for glory of any kind, would march triumphantly back to Dodge City claiming victory over the camel and demanding their promised one hundred and fifty dollars. And Bill knew exactly where that money would end up. He might as well have paid himself.
So our luckless heroes had been duped by a bird-fearing bartender. Alas, as Bill had suspected, the camel outran the two hollering cowboys in a matter of seconds, but, since they were drunk both on booze and themselves, Buck and Bob continued pursuing it until it was a mere speck on the barren horizon. As it turned out, this pursuit quickly landed the two buddies in the middle of nowhere, and neither one of them had a map. Since they lacked built-in compasses, or actual compasses, or even a GPS, knowing that Dodge City lay to the north did not help matters at all.
Once they finally realized that the seemingly juiced-up camel would never be seen again, Buck and Bob collapsed onto the sand, exhausted and ready to puke. It was late afternoon, but the merciless sun still glared down on the two foolish trespassers, who, in their haste to win a hundred and fifty dollars, had neglected to bring water with them.
“Well, there goes our money,” Buck moaned, face down in the sand.
Bob pulled him roughly to his feet and slapped the grains of sand from his face. “Ah, quit whinin’, Buck,” he growled. “We never shoulda taken that dumb bet. We was probably drunk when we did it.”
Buck wiped beads of sweat off his forehead, staring at his friend as if life had no meaning anymore. “What do we do now?”
Bob grabbed the moaning cowboy by his shirt and started pulling him toward the setting sun. “We go back home, stupid,” Bob snapped. However reasonable this statement sounded, Bob neglected to notice one crucial feature of the landscape: their footprints ran in the opposite direction.
The cowboys continued walking for hours and hours, and the more they walked the farther away they got from Dodge City. Soon the unforgiving sun had descended below the horizon, and still human settlement was nowhere to be seen. A family of kangaroo rats out for an evening stroll was the closest that Buck and Bob came to encountering civilized life.
Then suddenly Buck spotted something that caused both their hearts to pulse with joy and relief: an abandoned hitch-hiker’s camp, consisting of a dilapidated makeshift tent constructed from tattered blankets and chewed-up yucca stems. An equally beat-up Buick, its tires shredded and the front hood nowhere to be seen, lay in the middle of this mess. Beside both of these sorry-looking objects was a puddle of purplish liquid.
Tired, parched, and totally devoid of logical thought, Buck ran forward, hollering at the top of his scratchy voice, “Water! Water! Water!”
Bob, though just as exhausted and dehydrated, called out a warning as Buck dropped gratefully to his knees beside the purple puddle.
“Hold on, Buck! You don’t know what that stuff is. I wouldn’t chance it!”
Buck merely made a rude gesture in Bob’s direction and submerged his head in the liquid anyway. Expecting Buck to pay as much attention to him as he would a sleeping tortoise, Bob settled for placing a well-aimed kick in his friend’s posterior. Buck pretended not to notice.
“So what do we do now, Bobby boy?” Buck asked, grinning like a demented jackalope.
“I think we been goin’ the wrong way,” Bob said reluctantly. He’d realized this about a mile ago, but his ego was as fragile as a glass vase, and he hadn’t wanted Buck to laugh at him. However, for the first time in their mutual existence, Buck didn’t care.
“Awright then,” Buck drawled happily, that goofy grin still plastered across his face. “Let’s turn ‘round.”
They began the arduous process of retracing their steps, which was made more difficult by the conspicuous lack of sunlight. Bob threw quizzical glances at his comrade every few seconds, wondering if that irritating grin would ever disappear.
They hadn’t been walking very long when, for no discernible reason whatsoever, Buck started skipping. Bob stared at him with a mixture of alarm and fear; the nearest insane asylum was hundreds of miles away, and he did not want to get stuck in the desert at night with a loony.
“What do you think you are, a jackrabbit?” Bob inquired of his bouncing buddy, trying to stay deceptively calm.
“That’s right! I’m a bunny! A big fat funny bunny rabbit!” Buck replied in a wildly fluctuating tenor voice, a marked departure from his usual monotone baritone. Before his shocked friend could say anything, Buck broke into a run…and began to yodel, more horribly out of tune that any human being ever in the history of everything.
In such a frenzied state, Buck was apt to become violent, and Bob would appear no different to him than a gecko. Bob felt sure by now that the “water” Buck had drunk had really been some kind of liquor, and this was the price that Buck —and Bob — had to pay for the former’s idiocy. An overwhelming desire to scream “I told you so!” overcame Bob’s fear of grisly murder at the hands of a hopelessly drunk cowboy wanna-be, and he charged after the prancing, yodeling Buck like he’d been targeted by a pack of ravenous dingos.
“Hey Buck, ya moron! Come back here!” Bob roared into the night.
The chase was not one to be soon forgotten. Lizards, snakes, rabbits, and even a feral cow fled before the madly gesticulating Buck. Bob had never seen tortoises move faster in his life. But no matter how fast Bob ran, no matter how much raw energy he forced into his leaden muscles, he could not close the gap between himself and his intoxicated friend. In the meantime, the two of them moved farther and farther away from Dodge City.
“Buck!” Bob yelled with the last of his strength. His legs and throat were on fire; he was about ready to forget Buck and strike on back to Dodge City by himself. Buck would find his way home whenever he came to his senses…after suffering through the world’s most epic hangover.
“Buck! Stop, will ya! BUCK!!”
Buck’s unmanly high-pitched yodel was abruptly cut off as if some giant had squashed him. Buck himself was nowhere to be seen. Gasping for breath, Bob pulled his protesting body to the spot where Buck had disappeared —
— and found himself standing on the edge of a five hundred-foot cliff. Of course, Bob had experienced so many surprises on this day that the absence of solid ground in front of him for nearly a fifth of a mile did not concern him one bit. And then the moonlight glinted off the sands way down at the base of the cliff, and Bob could clearly make out a deep, narrow pit in the earth…in the shape of a cowboy.
Miraculously, Bob made it back to Dodge City in one piece (exactly how he did this remains one of nature’s great mysteries). For generations afterward, a legend slowly began to take shape in the barrooms and backyards of Dodge City, a legend that has been retold many different times in many different ways by many different people:
The Legend of Buck’s Basin.
So the moral of this story is…well, it could be don’t try to outlast a camel in the desert. Or it could be don’t forget to bring water and a map and other essential supplies with you when, for whatever reason, you decide to go wandering out in the middle of nowhere. Or it could simply be don’t take bets from bartenders. But it should be obvious: don’t mess with something if you don’t know what it is. Oh, and also: don’t drink from funny-looking puddles. It might take