With its massive chest and haunches, the cow stands there tense and flighty, looking more like a bull than a heifer. We’ve spent all morning searching for, driving, and blocking this brown cow and finally have her stopped with her yearling and debating an open corral gate. At exactly the wrong moment the corgi sees us returning from the gather and comes bounding down from the trailer to join the fun.

“Amish, you dumb dog,” yells rancher Ed Hanks. “Get back!”

Amish cowers. The cow bolts and jumps a fence, and that’s that. Nothing could have stopped this frustrating scene from unfolding. Hanks, 63, is red with anger.

“I’m going to kill that cow,” he grumbles. This renegade cow has been giving him hell, evading him for two years. On another vain attempt the day prior, I’d seen her jump a four-foot fence like a deer.

“I never carry a gun when I gather cattle,” Hanks had casually remarked to me over his shoulder earlier as we rode across the northern Bradshaw Mountains. “I’d likely shoot a dog.”

There’s no doubt in my mind that Hanks, had he been armed, would have shot (or shot at) his beloved corgi this morning—and possibly the cow, too.

Spend any time on a ranch, and you’ll quickly see that to earn a living, a cowboy needs to draw on a broad skill set, including self-restraint. He (or she) works the livestock market to buy low and sell high, farms, tracks animals, and repairs and maintains all manner of equipment—leather, metal, wood, and mechanical. The cowboy practices most veterinary care, short of outright surgery, and deftly employs psychology to train and move animals. Perhaps not cosmopolitan, he is a savvy observer of the nature of things. A ranch has to fit into—and maximize—an ecosystem, so cowboys pick up chemistry (soil analysis), botany (the nutritive value of different feeds), and hydrodynamics (swales, berms, and ponds).

These were my impressions of Hanks. During the week I spent at the Arizona Cowboy College to, um, beef up my ranch skills, the guy showed himself to be overwhelmingly competent—an army of one. But boy did he have a temper.

His stock phrase was: “What in the hell!?” Faced with the conundrums of ranching life, he’d spit this out before getting down to business.

This morning, he regroups and continues sorting the cattle and newborns we’d gathered then sends us off to survey his lower pens and watering holes. When we return hours later, we come upon Hanks scratching his head before a corral. There stands the renegade cow’s yearling behind a severely bent five-foot panel. Turns out, the wild cow hadn’t bolted far, and Hanks had been able to quietly urge her and the yearling to join their friends.

“She jumped and got caught up,” he says about the pretzel of a panel. “Thought I was going to have to butcher her. Ran for my gun, but she was gone when I got back.”

• • •

In this game of patience and perseverance, Hanks will eventually win. Americans are too fond of hamburgers to allow maverick cattle free passage. But no one ever claimed that cowboying was easy, and that’s why I came. I’m a desk jockey by trade. And though my wife and I own some acres and a fledgling equine-assisted therapy business, my sensibilities are more computer than cow.

The Arizona Cowboy College, a cowboy boot camp of sorts, is designed for people who want to go beyond the dude ranch. The trail rides here actually have a purpose, like gathering up cattle or counting cow-calf pairs. A game enough ranch hand, I can work a shovel and a post-hole digger and toss hay bales with the best of ’em, but this program expanded my field of view. It taught me to look beyond my nose and respond better to the animals and land in a rancher’s care.

Rocco Wachman, 53, and Lori Bridwell, 52, run the Arizona Cowboy College from Bridwell Ranch near Scottsdale, Arizona, with a weekend visit to Hanks’ Triangle M ranch serving as the final exam. Wachman could be called a cowboy evangelist and hosted the program Cowboy U for six seasons on Country Music Television (for which he once rode a horse under the spinning blades of a helicopter). He has also appeared on the Biggest Loser with Dr. Oz, where he lost 51 pounds, and was recently the master of ceremonies at the Flying W Ranch in Sayer, Oklahoma, for the 100-year anniversary of the Oklahoma Land Rush.

“Train a horse, and you’ll quickly learn to never ignore bad behavior. You might as well be rewarding it,” he tells me in one of our first encounters. A former grocer from New York, Wachman had a come-to-Jesus moment 20 years ago when a friend got him into riding after his grocery chain moved him to the Phoenix area. By training a horse, he was himself trained to listen and learn in an entirely new way.

Wachman signs his emails: “The cowboy knew his life had a purpose. It was a gift from God to be steward of the land, livestock, and the people he loved.” It’s a sentiment fully expressed at the college and in his 2009 book, Cowboy: The Ultimate Guide to Living Like a Great American Icon.

“Cowboying is not a job, it’s a state of mind,” Wachman likes to say, and from day one he had us doing barn chores and practicing ranch safety. “I need to teach you, so I don’t get hurt.”

For three days, we rode slalom around saguaros and learned to shoe and care for horses. “Any chance I can get to practice my craft,” is another of his sayings. Then six of us (four clients and two instructors) set off for the hills in a Ford 350 Powerstroke Diesel V-8 crewcab, hauling a six-horse trailer stuffed to the gills with four leggeds, tack, camping gear, and food. We rumble out of the Phoenix basin, air conditioning on full blast, and climb from 2,500 to 4,500 feet near Prescott.

As we cross the Agua Fria River, Wachman recites one of his favorite poems, Sancho, by R.W. Hampton: “In the Arizona desert where the tall saguaros grow; Where the Purple Bradshaw Mountains rise an the Agua Fria flows; Down in a lonesome sand wash where no man should ever go; A buzzard picks the sun-bleached bones of a horse that I called Sancho…”

• • •

As we pull into the Triangle M, my first sight of Hanks is a wiry man bent to his work, shoeing a rank mare.
“What ya doin’?” Wachman asks playfully.

Usually quick with a glib response, Hanks smiles and shakes his head but recovers quickly, “Well, I could have shaved with the old ones,” he says. Ask him how he slept, and he’ll say, “lying down.” Or how he feels? “With my hand.” Or where he wants that salt block? “On the ground.”

Not long after we clamber out of the truck, unload the animals, and set up camp, Hanks comes over to visit. Wachman gives him a new rope as a thank you for having us, and Hanks deftly spins it through his hands, feeling its weight.

“Does it catch?” he asks.

Hanks can go weeks without seeing anyone but his wife and a neighbor or two, so he’s delighted to have company. We get to talking about the wisdom of breeding older mares for the first time, and he speaks in the measured, thoughtful way of someone who has all the time in the world. (In short, it’s not wise, unless you’re planning to breed her several times, as a mare’s first and last foals are typically her worst.)

We spend the next three days horseback six to eight hours a day, gathering with Hanks. His 30-acre spread and 36,000-acre lease is steep and rocky, and he had to spend the first year on the property hauling water and installing watering troughs and repairing many, many miles of fence.

John, one of the college clients, displays the “when” not “if” part of the axiom about riders eventually falling off their horses, thanks to a wandering mind and an unfriendly tree branch.

“Are you hurt?” Hanks calls back.

Even if he’d broken his leg, John would never have answered “yes” to this cowboy. We ride on and “mash rocks” and “bash brush” past Indian ruins and blooming cacti, surveying the cattle. Whenever he sees one, he pulls a tiny notepad from his breast pocket and makes notes.

“If I see a bull a few times without cows, he’s gone,” says Hanks. He points out bald-headed crows (Bald eagles) and smokes a steady stream of Marlboros (of course). Hanks grew up in Boulder County, Colorado, and has been ranching all his life. His father ran cattle, too, and it’s in his blood. He was even an extra in a Western, the Father Keno Story.

“You’ve got to farm what you see,” he comments, perhaps harkening to his Indian ancestry. He has Hopi blood from his mom’s side and Cherokee from his dad’s.

Rocco and his string boss, Elaine Pawlowski, meanwhile, carry cell phones, which they answer regularly. When your office is a saddle, you make due.

“The fastest way to move a cow is slow,” says Hanks. “Otherwise, all you do is chase.” And work the weight off them.

He’s also adamant that ranching benefits the desert. “Cattle improve watering holes,” he insists. “Their hoofs aerate the soil and promote plant growth.” Who else is going to care for all this acreage? The BLM could never pay staff to do what ranchers oversee themselves on public land.

In the evenings we practice roping (Elaine dismisses my technique: “You throw like a girl.”) and sit around a fire corralled in an oil drum. We nestle the Dutch oven (a.k.a. cowboy microwave) into the coals and tell stories and ogle the constellations in the darkness.

• • •

Back in Scottsdale, Wachman takes me to the Scottsdale Gun Club, a non-descript box in an ocean of identical malls. Inside, the clothes and home décor one might expect have been replaced with a deadly arsenal. As a first timer, I’m asked to watch a five-minute safety video before we’re allowed into the shooting range.

Standing next to a young woman in a tank top and flip flops firing an array of weapons with her boyfriend and a child firing a rifle with his instructor, I raise a 45-mm Magnum revolver and fire booming reports at the human-shaped target.

“You’re a natural,” Wachman encourages and gives me tips. He holsters a loaded Ruger Vaquero 45 Colt in public at all times and brought a canon-like Smith & Wesson AR15 to the Triangle M.

“It’s a matter of principle,” he says.

The funny thing about Wachman is that he’s a cowboy by choice, not birth. This former New York grocer is particularly keen for Cowboy Way, because it’s given him so much. He believes whole-heartedly that nothing could be more natural—more American—than to reimagine yourself and make a better life. And that’s the promise of the West: new beginnings.

Describing Ed Hank’s lot in life, Wachman concludes, “Failure is not an option.” No one pays a rancher for effort. He must deliver sound cows. Period. Successful cowboys show results. The rest quit.

For my part, I can now rope my dog with ease, and I can fork a horse long after it has stopped being comfortable. Though I’ll likely never be faced with producing livestock to survive, the time I spent in Arizona taught me not to be a nuisance on a ranch—and to perhaps lend a hand, at least better than Amish.