Ken came in the door and announced, “I hired a cat skinner.”
I had no idea what he meant. I was certain he was not going to skin cats and sell the pelts.
“You did what?”
“I hired a cat skinner, a dozer operator.”
We had moved to Abilene. Ken and his dad had bought a Caterpillar D8 bulldozer and a root plow. They were in the process of starting a soil conservation business. A root plow had deep teeth that removed mesquite and brush roots. Native grass seed was then sown, and the land was reclaimed for grazing land.
I met the cat skinner a few days later. He was a small, thin man with a wide, toothy grin. The dirt and grime on his body didn’t seem to bother him. He had a large bandana that he pulled over his nose and lower part of his face when he was working.
As the business grew and acquired more bulldozers, the contracts took them farther and farther away from Abilene. F. G. was the operator on a large contract near Fort Stockton. He had grown up in the brush country. He would often park the dozer by a windmill and camp under the stars.
Ken went out to check on the job one morning. As stepped onto the track of the dozer, he noticed a burlap bag close to the driver’s seat. It was moving. F.G. had plowed over a rattlesnake den. There was a rattler in the sack. F.G. asked to get off early to go into Fort Stockton. He thought the snake might set a size record. Sure enough, his picture was in the newspaper a few days later. He was holding the snake arm’s length above his head. (The snake was dead by this time.) We do not remember the length or weight, but it was a big one.
F.G. had a young son who would occasionally ride with his dad or play around the area. The plowed ground was difficult to walk over. The boy could run and jump across the furrows. One day he caught a jackrabbit. We could not imagine a boy catching a jackrabbit on level ground, much less in that rough plowed area.
One job was on a large ranch near San Angelo. Ken rode with the rancher to the area to be cleared. They went through thirteen gates. Ken told the rancher that he couldn’t do the job because he didn’t have an operator who would open and close thirteen gates to get to the work site. The rancher furnished a ranch hand to follow the operator morning and evening to open and close the gates.
One contract was in the Big Bend National Park. The operator saw something unusual turn up between the prongs of the plow. He immediately stopped and went to the headquarters for a park ranger. The plow had unearthed dinosaur bones.
All of the bulldozer operators, or “cat skinners,” were hard-working men.
