Some bucking bulls have horns. Some don't. None are friendly. PHOTOGRAPH BY MICHAEL SMITH / WYOMING TRIBUNE EAGLE / AP

Rodeo is a business full of risky jobs, and Dusty Tuckness has the riskiest one of all. He’s a bullfighter. He doesn’t compete for prize money, like rodeo competitors. Rather, he’s tasked with protecting the bull riders, heroes of the sport’s most popular and perilous event. When a two-thousand-pound bull throws a rider to the dirt, the fighter intervenes. This means distracting the bull, sometimes by hopping directly in front of a charging animal. Bullfighters are constantly getting run over or “hooked” by a horn and tossed high in the air while protecting fallen cowboys. A young bullfighter once told me that he preferred landing on his head to his feet, since a broken ankle would prevent him from working. Some bull riders have started wearing helmets. Their guardians have not.

Public sacrifice is popular in rodeo—the sport makes a pageant of toughness—and Tuckness is particularly beloved. He is twenty-nine, with a top-heavy, muscular build. Since he turned pro, in 2006, he has proved remarkably durable. A separated shoulder sidelined him for two months a few years ago, but he hasn’t missed any other significant time. He didn’t even skip a performance after breaking a few ribs in Texas this February. He has been named the Professional Rodeo Cowboys Association’s bullfighter of the year for the past five seasons running. Sage Kimzey, the twenty-year-old reigning world champion in bull riding, says, “Tuck’s flawless. He’s as close to perfect as I’ve ever seen a human be at anything in the world.” Another rider once said, “I’d get on a mountain lion if Dusty was out there.”

On a recent Thursday morning, Tuckness walked into a small concrete locker room. He wore a baseball cap, green-framed sunglasses with orange lenses, and a fuchsia shirt. Outside, about ten thousand people had gathered for Cheyenne Frontier Days, the country’s largest outdoor rodeo. Most had come through a ticket gate staffed by elderly men in cowboy hats, where a sign read NO GANG CLOTHING OR SYMBOLS PERMITTED. The National Anthem was introduced as “The greatest song that’s ever been written.” Tuckness started to put on his makeup.

Wielding pink face paint and black eyeliner, Tuckness adorned his chin with a cross and his cheekbones with large T’s turned on their sides. He pulled on bright-green cleats with the words JESUS SAVES written on the heels. Then it was showtime: he walked out onto the rodeo-arena dirt, played air guitar to AC/ DC’s “Back in Black” on the sound system, got into an athletic stance—left foot forward, arms bent in front of his torso, almost like a boxer—and awaited the maelstrom of hooves and horns.

In 1897, an executive from the Union Pacific Railroad sponsored a daylong fair at one of the train line’s stops: a plains town called Cheyenne, capital of the seven-year-old state of Wyoming. The fair, titled Frontier Day, advertised bronc riding, a wild-horse race, and steer roping. A few thousand people gathered near the capitol building, wearing woolly chaps, waving handkerchiefs, and shooting off firearms. “The combined noise,” reported the Cheyenne Sun-Leader, “was deafening in the extreme.” The first events took longer than expected, and darkness cancelled the steer roping.

In late July of this year, more than ninety-eight thousand people attended the hundred and nineteenth iteration of Cheyenne Frontier Days. The noise was still deafening in the extreme, but it now came from fireworks by day and electric guitars by night. Aerosmith and Toby Keith performed. The rodeo is not the nation’s oldest—towns like Prescott, Arizona, and Pecos, Texas have been fighting over that title for a while—but Cheyenne’s standing in the theatre of the Old West is undisputed. The rodeo is frequently called by its colloquial name, “The Daddy of ‘Em All.” Toby Keith doesn’t play Prescott.

Bullfighters evolved from rodeo clowns. At the 1912 Frontier Days, clowns began entertaining crowds during breaks between events. The first bullfight at Cheyenne occurred in 1938, when, to the shock of the crowd, a clown jumped out of the stands and danced around a bull that had recently tossed a rider. Soon clowns started serving double duty, both cracking jokes and protecting riders. In the nineteen-sixties, clowns like Wick Peth started identifying solely as bullfighters. Peth wore makeup, but he wasn’t that amusing—an announcer once said he was “about as funny as a funeral in the rain.”

Tuckness’s father, Timber, is a rodeo clown, but Dusty veered away from jokes and toward the bucking chutes. At the age of twelve, he started fighting bulls at junior rodeos near his hometown of Meeteetse, Wyoming. A bull almost destroyed him when he was fifteen, playing “Ping-Pong with me up against a fence,” Tuckness recalled. He flirted briefly with college football, but a coach didn’t want him to fight bulls, so he dropped out of school and joined the rodeo full time, in 2006.

Other fighters are known as good “protection men,” standing over fallen cowboys like tackling dummies. Tuckness enjoys engaging his opponents: running at and away from bulls in order to lure them from a cowboy. “You’re a bullfighter for a reason,” he told me. “A lot of guys go in, make a sheep-dog pass, and run to the fence. That’s not doing your job.” He occasionally participates in freestyle competitions, in which a fighter attempts to evade an angry animal with verve. He once backflipped over a charging bull.

This year, Tuckness’s partner at Frontier Days was the rarest kind of bullfighter—an old one. Darrell Diefenbach is a forty-one-year-old Australian. He was named the Professional Rodeo Cowboys Association’s Bullfighter of the Year once, in 2008, but has since entered professional winter. This was his final Frontier Days, as he planned to retire at the season’s end. In the locker room he put a cast on his left wrist, which he had recently broken, nodded at Tuckness, and said, “His style is fast and smooth. Mine is slow and choppy.”

There were other differences between the partners. Tuckness took great pains with his makeup, the rodeo clown’s traditional war paint; Diefenbach didn’t bother to put any on. Tuckness bears a tattoo of a Christian fish on his left upper arm; Diefenbach has no visible ink. Tuckness is already balding; Diefenbach has a full head of hair. Tuckness makes his living solely by fighting bulls; Diefenbach runs a construction and furniture business on the side.

Social media was another, generational point of division. Tuckness often posts about his travels and religious beliefs. This Easter, he tweeted, “#gamechanger #hesback #kingofkings #lordoflords #hesmyking #hediedsowemightlive #hehasrisen #happyeaster.” Diefenbach does not tweet. Tuckness speaks in the clichés of a sports star; Diefenbach has the filter of a man who’s about to quit. “Dusty has to wear makeup because he’s fucking ugly,” he cracked.

But Tuckness isn’t ugly. His face is smooth and symmetrical, a testament to his elusiveness. Diefenbach’s right eye, on the other hand, looks notably smaller than his left one, the result of three surgeries to rebuild the socket. He has also broken his back and neck fighting bulls.

It can be difficult for bullfighters to acquire health insurance. “You’re always telling them you’re a ‘ranch hand’ or ‘farm worker,’ “ Diefenbach said. The first time he had his eye socket rebuilt, after a bull stepped on it, in Augusta, Georgia, his insurance company found out what really happened and declined to cover the operation. He says a sympathetic surgeon pulled the skin off his forehead and rebuilt the socket for five thousand dollars. He has since switched health-care providers.