Another Day On The Mountain

Yesterday my first patient, who is unfailingly on time, was late. He arrived a little out of breath and said excitedly: "Did you hear about the dead body??!!" And then he rambled on about who found it and who it might be and where it was and how long it had been there. It turned out he was wrong about some of it. It seems some local women out on a little walk stumbled upon the body of someone not local that appeared to have been dumped some time ago wherever it was they found it. A mystery nonetheless, and one I am interested in.
It was a beautiful day. Sunny. 47 degrees. Cooper and I took a run up the pass, where we found a skull! It is some sort of animal skull, but we were excited to find it anyway. We were disappointed to also find a good amount of what appeared to be the household trash of human beings dumped on the pass. Note: I am increasingly disappointed in the behavior of human beings.
Later on, I was hanging out in the Spoon working on some paperwork and chatting with the Lunch Lady and the Lonely Divorced Produce Guy when we got word that our Cowboy friend would be arriving shortly for lunch. The Spoon was closed by this time, but Lunch Lady was having a glass of wine and seemed amenable to the idea. A couple of other people arrived. The Cowboy, never one to waste an opportunity to call attention to hisself, came riding up on one of his horses. He was wearing calfskin chaps and he had a gun on his hip. He sauntered on into the Spoon and manfully agreed to eat a taco salad. Produce Guy was interested in the gun. We all ducked a few times as he examined it and the Cowboy took it away from him and dumped the ordinance onto the counter. There was Man Talk. I went back to work.
As I was getting the lowdown on how my patient's vacation to Hawaii had culminated in a 48 hour battle with food poisoning, there came a knock at my door. I opened it to see a large man whom I had never laid eyes on. He said this:
"You know whose horse that is tied up out there?"
I said:
"Yeah."
He said:
"Well, he ain't tied up no more and he's runnin' down the road!!"
I sighed. "Thank you," I told him. I quickly got myself back over to the Spoon and told the Cowboy his horse was off and running. Everyone in the Spoon ran out the door. A few minutes later, a guy down the road called the Spoon to say he'd caught the Cowboy's horse. I looked around at the empty lunch counter--the door wide open and guns and wallets left on the counter without a thought.
I reckoned I'd found myself in the right place in the world, but I wasn't sure why.
Everyone laughed about the whole debacle when they returned for their lunch and their firearms, the runaway horse safely apprehended.