Rodeo bulls, like the boys who dream of riding them, are unpredictable creatures. They can start out shy and skittish, then suddenly turn ornery. They’ll lie down in the chute one day and try to gore you the next. The most dangerous bull ever ridden, by some accounts, began as a scrawny yellow calf in 1988. Half Charolais and half Brahman, he was still long and bony at age three, but liable to turn fat and ungainly if his breeding held true. His owner, Phil Sumner, named him J31—he wasn’t sure the bull would live long enough to earn a real name. Sumner took him to a few scrubgrass rodeos in northern Oklahoma, but didn’t see much fight in him. “I was thinking, Dude, you’re going to have to step up your game plan or you’re going to be going to McDonald’s,” Sumner told me.

Then one Sunday afternoon at a small arena outside of Okeene, Oklahoma, something in the bull snapped. The kid who was riding him got his hand caught in his rope. He was flopping around on J31’s back, trying to dismount, when the bull suddenly went crazy beneath him. He leaped up and spun around, bucked forward and kicked back, his legs so high behind him that he almost flipped end over end. By the time the boy pulled free, the bull had nearly gone over the fence. “It just freaked him out,” Sumner said.

Animals, as a rule, don’t like to have other animals on their backs. They find it strange and distressing—an attack or a violation, an act of dominance. This hasn’t kept us from trying to ride them, of course. Horse, mule, donkey, camel, llama, yak, and elephant—the bigger the animal, the more likely we are to climb on top of it. People have sat on ostriches, orcas, alligators, and water buffalo, straddled giant tortoises, and set toddlers on St. Bernards. Their mounts may try to shake them off at first, but the contest is an unequal one, and they tend to knuckle under eventually. Some even learn to like it.

Not rodeo bulls. Their brains aren’t wired for submission. They not only refuse to be ridden; they find ever more inventive ways to cast people off. Watching old videos of J31, you can see him learn as he goes. At first, he just charges around the ring and jumps up and down. But the older he gets the crueller and less predictable he becomes. He spins one way, then the other, charges forward, and jerks to the side. His front and back ends start to uncouple, jackhammering the ground independently. His spine twists and rolls, leaving the rider with no balancing point, no center of gravity. By the age of five, he weighs nearly two thousand pounds and is built like a clenched fist: all hoof and horn and fast-twitch muscle. Sumner eventually sold him to another rancher, Sammy Andrews, figuring that he was too much bull for the local rodeo circuit. It was Andrews who gave him a name to match his reputation: Bodacious.

“He was like a monster once he matured,” Tuff Hedeman, a four-time world champion, told me. “Even the good guys were super scared of him. You’d see world champions ride him for a jump or two and then get off.” In 1993, at a rodeo in Long Beach, California, Hedeman drew Bodacious for what some consider the greatest ride in history—a near-perfect exhibition of balance and anticipation. Two years later, the bull got his revenge. At the world championships in Las Vegas that August, Hedeman was leading the standings by what proved to be an insurmountable three hundred points when he drew Bodacious again. This time, a split second after leaving the chute, the bull bucked forward with all his might. Hedeman did what riders are supposed to do: he leaned high over the bull’s shoulders and flung his arm back as a counterbalance. But just as he came forward, Bodacious threw his head back—smashing it square into Hedeman’s face. Hedeman stayed on somehow, his hand twisted in the rope, only to get head-butted again, thrown into the air, and bounced off the bull’s back like a rag doll.

The ride broke every bone in Hedeman’s face below the eyes. It took thirteen and a half hours of reconstructive surgery and five titanium plates to repair the damage, and Hedeman’s sense of smell and taste never returned. “I told my buddy afterward, I must have broke my jaw, because when I bite down my teeth don’t come together,” he recalled. “People were looking at me and then turning their eyes away or putting their hands over their faces. I thought, I must look like Frankenstein or something.”

Seven weeks later, when a rider named Scott Breding drew Bodacious at the National Finals Rodeo, he elected to wear a hockey mask for protection. It didn’t help. In less than four seconds, the bull had knocked Breding off with the same move, fracturing his left eye socket. The next day, Sammy Andrews retired Bodacious from competition. “I didn’t want to be the guy who let him kill someone,” he told me.

The boys at the Camp of Champions couldn’t wait to get on a bull like that. How else would they be world champions one day? Bull riding is a collaborative sport—a pairs competition in which one partner tries to kill the other, like an ice dance with an axe murderer. If a rider manages to hang on for eight seconds, he’ll earn up to fifty points for his own form and fifty for the bull’s. The meaner the animal the better the score. “Ooh, I really want to ride 44!” Wacey Schalla told his friends Trigger Hargrove and Jet Erickson one morning. He jumped up and down on the catwalk along the arena, and pointed at a bony brown calf in the chute below. “I hear that sucker’s rank!”

Wacey, Trigger, and Jet were eight years old. The tops of their heads barely cleared my waist, yet they already had the rangy look of seasoned riders. They wore saddleman jeans and paisley Western shirts, tooled leather boots and straw cowboy hats, oversized to fend off the broiling June sun. Wacey was the smallest of the three and the most intensely focussed. His eyes would turn to slits above his freckled cheeks as he visualized his next ride. Trigger was taller and leaner, with a natural swagger—he was an excellent roper as well as rider. Jet was the shyest and the most delicately built. While Trigger kept up a running monologue—“That 36 nearly yanked my arm off! But then the next one didn’t hardly buck at all”—Jet slumped against the rails, adrift in his own thoughts. “He’s kind of a floater,” his father, Everett, told me. “But when he scoots up on that calf and it takes off, his body takes over and he just rides.” He laughed. “It kind of reminds you of the legends of the past, watching them kids.”

In the past two decades, selective breeding has made rodeo bulls more dangerous and valuable than ever before.The best ones cost half a million dollars and their semen can fetch thousands.

Almost every weekend, the three boys would ride against one another at some small-town rodeo in Oklahoma. The previous Saturday, it had been Elk City, with Wacey coming in first, Trigger second, and Jet third. But the order could easily have been shuffled. “It’s just back and forth with those three,” Trigger’s grandfather, Eddie, told me. “They’re the fiercest competitors and the best of friends.” All three were the sons of professional rodeo riders. They’d gone from bouncing around on sheep at the age of three or four—“mutton busting,” it was called—to riding calves at six and now the occasional steer. In two or three years, they’d get on their first bulls. Their winnings came mostly in the form of engraved belt buckles and prize saddles—“I’ve got a bunch more in my closet somewhere,” Wacey told me, when he showed me a few buckles at his house—as well as small cash purses. But they’d grow more substantial soon enough. Caden Bunch, one of the eleven-year-olds at the camp, had made more than a hundred thousand dollars.