The Ranch had been passed on for generations and was now in the hands of the grandson Fred McGregor.

Fred had worked very hard most of his life and was still an independent rancher when many of those who had been his competitors were selling out to others.

Fred had been looking for ways to improve his breeding operations. It had become tiresome and sheer drudgery to bring bulls into specialized stalls and go through the games of trying to get a bull with a “headache” to mate with an equally unreceptive female. When that did not work, he then began using various types of “gadgetry” which had been sold to him with the idea of making his duties easier. One of these, was an electric ejaculator unit, prior to that there had been a vacuum ejaculator-collector unit, and then there was specialized sperm collection equipment and more. He invested again and again and did so at great cost. This worked to a degree, but it was time consuming and necessitated the time of multiple farm hands that would have been better off dealing with the animals on the range lands.

Fred had been married to Libby when he was in his late twenties, and for a Texan and a cattleman, he was well educated and a progressive thinker. Fred and Libby had two sons of their own and had adopted the son of his wife’s brother and sister when they were killed in an automobile accident. It worked out rather well. The three boys Alan who was thirteen, Barry who was fourteen and the adopted Charles or “Charlie” who was also thirteen got along well and life was good.

Fred was reading diligently in one of the farm journals about a German Scientist who had come up with some specialized hormonal compounds which showed great promise at increasing the breeding rate. Contact information was in the text of the story and immediately Fred contacted the man to get the details.

The compounds when given to male breeding cattle re-programmed the hormonal patterns and slightly modified the DNA in the animals to radically increase sperm production. The test cattle who had been treated with the drug became more sexually aggressive and were capable of multiple ejaculations and in theory mating multiple times in a single day.

Fred made arrangements with the Company to be the test bed in the United States for the new product. The only animals which were effected by the changes were those which had been treated by the drug, the sperm samples were normal and there was no evidence that the drug did anything to successive generations who were not treated.

It was about two weeks later that a driver from Federal Express drove up with several large cases and these cases contained about 100 bottles each of these very specialized drugs.

Fred himself took all of these bottles and stacked them on shelving out in a storage area in the barn and then walked back into the house to read the paperwork. He read the parts that interested him which mainly were the ones relating to the chances of success he was going to have by using the preparations.

At 7:45 P.M. he left the papers sitting on the kitchen table when Alan, Barry and Charlie walked in to complete their homework.

Unlike the part that caught Fred’s eye, the part that caught Alan’s eye was a bit different. He started reading the area under the heading of “side effects”. The things he read there were about the boost in testosterone, phallic growth, testicular growth, and something called “libido”.

Initially, Allen thought nothing of this and laid it down to complete his homework along with Barry and Charlie. For the moment it passed out of his mind.

Libby gave each of the boys a piece of pie after their homework was completed and she personally sat down and checked all the answers herself. Thank goodness it was History because the Math even she had trouble completing.

When the boys went up to bed that night, Alan had given the matter more thought and couldn’t contain his own excitement.

He explained to Barry what he had seen.

All three of the boys were starting into puberty and marveled as the changes had started. But, they were really not happy campers. There were boys in their school gym classes who were far ahead of them. That Donny something or other even had some hair on his belly, and his dick looked huge compared to theirs.

The boys discussed this off and on all through the night wondering if this cattle stuff would give them more hair and bigger dicks. Alan in particular wanted to have the biggest dick in the gym showers! No one would pick on him then, and none of the boys would ever hear the words “micro-dick” again.

In the middle of the night, when everybody in the house was asleep, Alan sneaked out of the house and down to the storage area in the barn. He knew his dad so well, he had little trouble in finding the stash of bottles for the experimental drug.

The drug was in pill form, and these were surprisingly not all that large. There was a certain familiar appearance to them. He removed one bottle and shifted all of the others around to cover the disappearance of the missing bottle. He then sneaked this single bottle back into the house and placed the contents into a huge vitamin container that his mother already knew about in the bathroom the boys shared. What was amazing was that there was a weird coincidence here. The vitamin pills and the experimental drug looked virtually the same. This was why things looked familiar; he rarely remembered the vitamins. Even the odor was somewhat similar. He had originally intended to hide and destroy the empty bottle, but with this new development, he decided to do some clever substitutions on his next opportunity.

That opportunity happened the next night when both Fred and Libby went into town to a dance at the Elks Lodge. He knew that Maria the wife of one of the farm hands that they liked best, was supposed to kind of keep an eye on them, but Maria was one who went to bed very early, because morning on the ranch came early as well.

Alan substituted the vitamins and mixed them into the contents of six of the bottles spreading the valid and the bogus to multiple containers.

He had also sneaked down into his dad’s office and copied the parts of the drug literature he wanted to read carefully placing the stuff back where he had found it.

Through all of this, Barry and Charlie knew what was going on, but they were the followers and not the leaders.

The boys learned that the drug was to be given daily to the bulls and that it was to be dissolved in a small amount of water, which was given to the bull from a pail. The pill had a slight flavoring, which treated the water in such a manner as to make it attractive to the bull in question.

The product information said that the effects would start in about five days and would continue to escalate and reach a peak in about two weeks. It took only four pills per day for a rather large bull, Alan figured out that if they were going to do it, they had better cut down the dosage somewhat. He went to a drawer in the desk of his bedroom and pulled out a very sharp Swiss Army knife. With this, he started cutting the pills into quarters. He could not get them any smaller and still make the pieces relatively uniform. He cut up a ton of the pills and got it down to a rhythm, which went quite quickly. It was not long before he had on nervous energy cut 100 drug pills into 400 pieces. As he was finishing the last pill, he heard the rumble of his dad’s Powerstroke Ford Diesel pickup off in the canyon heading towards the house.

The drug was ready, at least he thought so. Alan hid the paperwork, cleaned up the mess, and got in bed. He had the light off and had gotten himself in bed by the time his parent’s bedroom door was heard to open.

It was Saturday morning and Fred wanted to get two of the bulls started on the new regimen to see if he could improve his breeding program. He read the directions and dissolved a pill in one cup of water as the instructions dictated. He then added the cup to a pail with about a half-gallon and stirred it up. When he placed the pail near the nose of the bull the animal immediately drank the water and then went back to feeding on his dry food. The boys had been watching from a location where they were not visible to their dad.

All of a sudden Alan turned ashen white. He had not thought! Would the vitamins dissolve in water like the drug would? Boy, that could give something away in a hurry!

He rushed back to the house and up the stairs. He found one of the wayward vitamin tablets, which he had saved just in case, and placed it in a glass of water. Fortunately, in a matter of a minute or two, these cheap tablets also started to dissolve and even more fortunately the water turned a similar but not exactly the same shade of yellow-orange as when he used one of the drug tablets. The only other thing was the scent or flavoring. There is no way that this would be the same. Would the bulls be creatures of habit enough not to know the difference?

That night all three boys waited for their parents to get to sleep. Alan then quietly awakened Barry, and they both went into Charlie’s room to quietly discuss what the plans were.

Alan took three of the pill quarters and filled their three bathroom glasses with water, he then placed one quarter of one pill in each glass and watched the mixture dissolve. He reached in his finger and stirred.

All three boys grabbed their glasses and chugged the mixture down before anyone could “chicken out”. Surprisingly it was not as bad as they would have imagined. It tasted somewhere between a vitamin B tablet and oatmeal. It was guessed that this was the flavoring that the bulls would like.

The boys then shook hands and divided to go to back to their beds, agreeing to do the same thing the next night.

They were on their way. •