Border Crossings

An old bull rider from Texas is telling his life story to his comrades around a campfire in the Medicine Bow Mountains of southern Wyoming, explaining why he walks with a limp and how he ended up there. We flash back to the story he is telling: his ill-fated love affair with a young girl from Mexico, his crippling ride on the great bull Red Rock, his descent to an emotional rock bottom, and his struggle to put his life back together as a ranch hand in Wyoming. In the penultimate scene, the old bull rider completes his story by showing his comrades the wedding ring he had bought but never used. In the final scene in Mexico, we see his former love, now a mother and grandmother, looking wistfully at an aging photograph of her and the young bull rider together in Texas.