Traditionally, the cowboy's unwritten job description extended only to work that could be done horseback. The increasing mechanization of agriculture changed the reality of ranch work years ago, but not the cowboy's attitude toward machinery. Cowboys have little patience with machinery in general — and even less with equipment that doesn't work. A cowboy's favorite repair tool is a leather punch. Another name for a hammer is a "cowboy screwdriver." A cowboy doesn't like to get grease and oil on his hands, though he thinks nothing of getting his whole body covered with three or four colors of bovine body fluids.

Farmers seem to get along better with machinery. E.B. White, in a delightful 1940 essay entitled "The Practical Farmer," wrote that "farming is about twenty percent agriculture and eighty percent mending something that has got busted. Farming is a sort of glorified repair job. This is a truth which takes some people years to discover, and many farmers go their whole lives without ever really grasping the idea. A good farmer is nothing more nor less than a handyman with a sense of humus."

Cowboys do preventive maintenance too, but only on the livestock. A farmer friend once related how he had finally caught his wild cow: "We chased her around the pasture with the pickup all afternoon. Darned if she didn't drop dead as soon as we got her in the trailer." A cowboy would have dealt with this situation years before when the heifer turned back at a gate the first time. He would have laid a trip, knocked the wind out of her and taught her forevermore that gates were for going through, not running away from.

Pardner tells of a cowboy he once saw driving a tractor with a hay spear on the front for moving round bales. He was running at a good speed when the hydraulics on the tractor failed, the spear dropped and jammed into the ground, and the cowboy was bucked off the tractor as it came to an abrupt halt. He flew through the air in a fine parabolic arc, spur rowels glinting in the sunshine. The other hands all agreed that if he hadn't been a good bronc rider he might have gotten hurt.

A good farmer probably wouldn't have gotten in that jam in the first place, because he wouldn't have ignored the little stream of hydraulic fluid dripping from the tractor. He would have grabbed some tools, fixed the problem and gone about his business. I'm pretty sure that the cowboy's only available hand tool was a pair of rusty vise grips — and they were serving as the window crank on his pickup.