Run 1 of 4
· José Escobar
To avoid false alarms the programme warned that “en vez de seis, serán cinco los toros que corran hoy en el encierro”: five bulls would run, not six, because the sixth had been taken up to the ring before dawn the day before.2 Three or four heavy showers between four and six laid the dust and broke up the night revellers, but they made the run eventful: the bulls slipped again and again and the herd came apart. One entered the ring with a runner’s sash caught on a horn, in the company of three steers; two more followed with another pair of oxen; and two came in loose, mixed with the runners, and stayed in the arena, where the crowd played with them as if they were padded heifers. Neither Moncayola nor the two ring hands posted to bring in stragglers could do a thing, and in the end the bulls, worn out and half suffocated by the crush, could not even lift the people they caught. There were bruised runners and “un par de heridos”, a couple of wounded, but none of the consequences that had been feared.4 One of the Escobar bulls, a pied one, the paper later wrote, “perdonó la vida a media docena de los veinte insensatos”, spared the lives of half a dozen of the twenty fools who taunted it.8
