Tyler+Kijac

 Tolerance can be determined in many different ways. There is the kind of tolerance where you have to put up with an annoying sibling. There is the exact opposite of tolerance also which Im sure all of us are guilty of. The story that your about to hear goes much deeper than what you’d expect. __The kind of tolerance Im talking about is pain tolerance.__  It all started out in mid July. Now for some people, July is a cute name for a baby boy, or a time of pride and fireworks. __But for me, they are long hot summer days sweating on a wooden hay wagon cruising down a seemingly endless field filled with hay.__ July is also the month of the world finals junior rodeo held in Colorado. It had always been my dream to go out to Colorado. All year long, I had been dreaming of riding bulls at the world finals rodeo. I was number one in the world now. We were leaving for Colorado in a week and we were gonna be gone for two weeks. I was so excited for it would be the greatest two weeks of my entire life. The only problem was I hadn’t had any practice in a few weeks. We were so busy with bailing hay we didn’t have any time to go to local rodeo’s and practice on anything. So on a hot July day we were bailing when smash, clunk, clunk, clunk...The hay bailer came screeching to a stop. It was broke. So we hopped in the truck and drove home. We were gonna go inside for a minute while my dad made some phone calls on how to fix the bailer. Then we would have to wait for the part to be ready to get picked up so then by then the dew would set in and then you can’t bail hay so the evening plan was to just unload the hay we had already bailed into the barn. __Well me and my dare devil self decided in the down time I was gonna go and practice on the beef cattle that we had in the barn yard.__ So I picked out just the biggest bull out there. He was all red with a white face and had big horns that came to a dull stub. I worked for an hour and a half to get the bull next to a fence with out becoming a cowboy shish kabob. So when I eventually got him all ready I leaped on to the side of him as I had many times before. When I did he moved just the slightest bit and I ended up with two legs on both side of his body.   The bull swiftly and gracefully threw his head back and wacked me just as hard as he could in the leg. Barely missing the shin bone and piercing all the way to the back of my calf, I fell to the rocky ground as I got to my feet I headed for the house with my equipment not even knowing how bad it really was. Half way to the house I felt something cold run down the side of my leg. __I looked down to see my pant leg was absolutely covered in red blood. I lifted my pant leg to see a hole two inches wide and three inches long on my leg.__ There was curly pieces of fat and meat coming out of my leg and I could see clear to the back of my leg. I fainted at the sight of my limp leg. I tried to hide it from my dad because it was the week that we were heading out to Colorado. I think you can see how hard it would be to hide a gigantic blood stain though.   Now to not even feel a hole in your leg that big...thats pain tolerance right there. I remember when I went tot the hospital, the whole staff came in because they saw on the status chart that someone was gored by a bull in room 28. So I had quite the crowd when the doctor sewed it all up. I stayed conscious during the whole thing and I got to watch. I ended up getting to come home and bail hay then we went to the finals the next week and It didn’t affect my riding at all. 

Blood ran down my leg like rain down a cold windshield... The horn just barely missed the bone...