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Out on the Missouri prairies, an odd collection of lawmen hunt modern-day cattle thieves.

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Mika chews his cigar butt like cud. His heavyset frame is bound in a pair of straining overalls, and his skin is scorched magenta from too many days in the sun. Mika has spent most of the afternoon on his tractor, lifting hay into cattle pens. His friend Mel Nichols, a city handyman who usually works on rental houses, follows behind him with a pitchfork. Nichols does the grunt work because Mika's shoulders and arms are virtually useless, racked by carpal-tunnel syndrome and arthritis. Behind them loom rows of gigantic round hay bales.

At its peak a few years ago, Mika's farm held 106 head of cattle. It was supposed to be his retirement fund. He'd been a social worker at a Veterans Affairs Hospital in Iowa until 1995, when he retired to rebuild the crop farm he'd inherited from his father. Mika commuted there 14 miles a day from his home in Mexico, Missouri.

The trouble started in January 2004 when he rented a single-wide trailer on his property to a farmhand named Louie Bowers Jr. and his wife, Deanna. In exchange for free rent, Bowers was supposed to tend the herd. "I trusted him," Mika says. "Hell, everybody trusted him."

In March 2005, Mika counted his herd for his income taxes and realized he was short 47 cows and 34 calves. Bowers claimed innocence, so Mika told him to be more vigilant and bought replacements. Seven months later, the town veterinarian arrived to pregnancy-check the herd, and Mika realized he was down another 54 cows, 43 calves and one bull. He called the Cattle Theft Task Force. Nash and Crain were dispatched to solve the mystery.

The task force found that 72 of Mika's herd had passed through sales barns. Nash and Crain told Mika that Bowers had used aliases to drop off the stolen cattle at a series of barns in the middle of the night.

Nash and Crain gave Mika a list of those who had purchased his stolen cattle. They came from farmsteads in Kansas, Oklahoma and Wisconsin. But there was a catch. In order to have his animals returned, Mika would need a county prosecutor willing to go out and seize the stolen property. And much of it has been sold and resold on the auction circuit.

Mika had insured his cattle in mid-2004, but he hadn't updated his coverage as his herd grew. Last November, he received a check for $57,000 to cover $125,000 in losses. He expects he'll have to sell the farm to recoup. His wife recently bought him a plaque to hang in their living room. It bears a windmill and the inscription "We've been though a lot together and most of it was your fault."

"I wiped us out," he says, spitting a wad of cigar into the dirt. "I can't recoup it. I ain't got no money to buy any cattle back. At 68, your most valuable asset is time. I don't got enough time."

In the wan light, Mika nods to Nichols.

"We got a baby calf out there," he says, swinging his head toward a black animal the size of a Great Dane at the far end of the pasture. The baby bull, born last night, has wandered down the wrong side of a fence that divides the field, separating itself from its mother. It whines and stomps back and forth frantically. Mika and Nichols split up, walking in a wide arc to come up behind the animals. Ankle-deep mud pulls at their galoshes. Mika heads toward the mother; the handyman moves toward her kid calf. Mika waves his hands and grunts. Nichols mimics his actions. The cows saunter forward, churning and splattering mud as they head back toward the main cattle pen. When they reach the edge of the fence, Nichols pins the newborn against it to slow him down and kicks his legs toward the mother to keep her on the other side of the field, which is closer to the gate they are aiming for. If the mother crosses the fence line, they will have to backtrack to drive her and her calf back into the main field and through the gate.

"Now watch her!" Mika shouts.

"I am! I am!" Nichols says. "You watch her. You are on that side."

Mika blocks off the gap in the fence, then steps aside as Nichols releases the calf. It takes off after its mother. Both men play zone defense around the animals, closing off the available lanes of travel until they drive the calf and his mother toward a main holding pen near Mika's pickup.

Mika bets the calf will be worth about $150 if it survives the day, double that in two months. He'll neuter it to make it a steer, and in a year, it could bring $950. The newborn will be sold, just like his stolen cattle, at a livestock auction.

On a recent Wednesday, Pope surveys the rolling grasslands of Christian County through the window of his white, unmarked Ford F-150 police truck. The sky is shifting from blue to gun-metal. He can tell a storm is coming.

His flattop is perfectly spiked, his mustache in full bloom. Country tunes twang as Pope swings past the Springfield Livestock Center. His windows are down so that he can hear animals bray. An hour ago, he helped Nash and Crain try to flip a former cattle thief to become an informant. Pope dressed casually for the meeting; he wears a preppy blue button-up shirt, slacks and low-cut leather boots. In Missouri, rustling is a class-C felony, punishable by two to seven years and a fine of up to $5,000. But it's rare for a cattle thief to rat out his buddies. It was a short visit, he says.

He passes more round hay bales, then a rusted-out dairy farm that will soon be razed to make way for condos. He passes members of a high school basketball team out jogging. They cheer his nickname: "Hey, Stash! Stash! Stash!" He stops by another dairy farm and waves to Pat Thompson, a gray-haired woman with mud-caked hands who is out with her herd. She admits she's worried.

"They have a new access road with the new addition," she says, pointing to a road that snakes toward rows of tiny houses in the distance. "Used to be, when I was a kid, you knew everybody. Now you got all these subdivisions. You got people you don't know."

About a mile away, Pope spots his destination, a small cattle pen surrounded by grazing fields. Pope backs his pickup to a fence that leads to the metal-barred swing gate for the enclosure. The area is hidden by surrounding trees and a steep hillside. It's secured by a pair of locks.

Pope explains what he'd do if he were a rustler: He'd get dropped off first with a cell phone. He'd fill the trough with feed to draw the cattle. Rather than fight the locks, he'd use a pair of wire cutters to create a new chute from a weak spot in the barbed-wire fence. Then he'd call in his hauler, load the cattle and head 30 minutes south into Oklahoma.

He will add this spot to his list of possible crime scenes to scope. Because, despite all the advanced hunting techniques he has learned, Pope is still a cowboy at heart.

"Desperate? I don't want to use the word desperate," Pope says. "Proactive. We want to catch these guys in the act."

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