Death in the Desert: A Texas Cowboy’s Gruesome Encounter

by Bobby Dee

Editor’s note: Bobby Dee first made his appearance in SKK’s previous story about Bodies and Gunfire in the Texas Wilderness. Now Bobby writes about his encounter with a bad scene at sunrise.

The sun wasn’t even high yet, but the heat was already pressing down on me. It was the kind of dry, relentless heat that drains the sweat from your skin before it even forms. Mornings in Texas are like that. They’ll drain you in a hot minute, especially when you’ve got an outdoor job to do. That morning, we were out fixing the fence again. Someone cut it during the night. It happens often—trespassers, smugglers, people desperate to keep on moving. They don’t care what damage they leave behind. Or who they leave to die in the desert.

READ MORE: Bad Scene at Sunrise: Bodies and Gunfire in the Texas Wilderness

We split up to check different sections, aiming to get it all done as fast as possible. We wanted to get done before we drained our canteens, and before the heat put too much strain on the horses.

I was riding alone, checking a remote stretch of pasture. The land out here is rough. Dry earth, thorny scrub, and open space for miles. If you get lost or stuck without water, the land will take you.

I found a couple spots I needed to fix, and headed down by section of fence line.

That’s when I heard it.

A scream—high-pitched, unnatural. It sent a shiver up my back. What the hell, I thought. Out here, you hear strange things sometimes. Coyotes, bobcats, cattle in trouble. But this was different. It sounded human.

I turned my horse toward the sound, and rode fast.

My horse saw it first, the horror. She’s a good horse, never gets riled up. But this got her spooked. She stopped short. She stared ahead, snorting. Ears pricked sharp forward.

I looked between her ears. Oh, man, this was bad.

A man was crouched in the dirt. He was covered in dust, his clothes torn and filthy. He looked weak, starving. But what stopped me cold was what he was doing.

He was holding a rabbit by the hind legs. The animal was kicking, struggling, screaming. And the man was biting into it.

Not killing it. Not cooking it. Just trying to eat it. Alive.

With his teeth.

“He was eating the rabbit alive,” I told the others later, over and over. I had to keep saying it. “Just biting into it like he was a wild animal.”

I have seen hunger before. I have seen cattle collapse from thirst, and I have seen men go without food for days. But this—this was something else.

He was only 30 feet from a water trough, but I couldn’t tell if he’d made it that far. His skin was dry and cracked, dirt ground into every inch of him. His lips were split and bleeding. The sun and dehydration at a bad combination. If he did drink from the trough, he probably already was sick. That stuff goes right through you.

The rabbit was bleeding from one foot. Maybe it got caught in the same barbed wire the trespassers cut the night before. The rabbit already went through its own fight for survival before the man grabbed it. But it wasn’t giving up.  It fought harder than he did. It kicked, twisted, and scratched until it broke free, leaving the man with deep claw marks on his arms.

The moment it hit the ground, it was gone—vanishing into the scrub as fast as its damaged body would carry it. But that wasn’t fast enough, not enough for a rabbit. Something else out here would get it before the day was over.

And there was the man, bleeding from fresh cuts from getting scratched. Rabbit claws are sharp.

I stayed back. I didn’t know how he got here, what his story was. Did he got lost; did someone abandon him; was he victim or criminal. I didn’t know if the man was sick, violent, or just too far gone to understand what was happening.

I raised a hand, trying to calm him.

I called out in English, and then in Spanish. I told him I was going to get help.

I threw him a water bottle. I turned my horse, and rode off to find another hand. He was down the fence a ways, but I pretty much knew where he was.

By the time we came back, the man was dead.

We couldn’t do anything else for him except report it as an emergency. We let the first responders handle it. We don’t get involved beyond that.

And that was the end of it. He didn’t make it, but at least they found him.

Out here, the land does not care who you are. The land always wins. If you make a wrong step, if you come unprepared, the land will take you.

Bobby Dee rides the range in the wilderness of Southwest Texas.