Old Man

 

          It is 2021 and my “Kentucky Colt” is 21 years old – getting on in age for a horse.  (Of course I am 71 myself, and some folks think that is elderly for a human.)

 

          I have written much about “The Colt”, as he is such a remarkable animal and we have had such remarkable adventures together.  As my past writings have recounted, he was bred in Kentucky by my daughter Wendy out of a running Quarter Horse mare by her Thoroughbred stallion.  He was born and raised here on the West Boulder, and has long been the incarnation of a Harley Davidson: pure, raw, power.

          Our ranch is steep and rough.  ATVs are not an option over much of this country,  so the “Colt” has been my main ride for the past 18 years - over, under, around, and through the rocks, coulees, brush, creeks, trees, and ridges.  Our default gait for years was a long trot, only slowing occasionally to a walk, or extending to a full out run.  It was only a few years ago, at age 17, that “The Colt” would walk voluntarily.  I could sense that my time on “The Colt” was coming to an end, and I bought another horse to succeed him.

          It took a couple of years to develop that new blaze-faced horse into a cowpony, but there was a lot lacking.  I was never comfortable just giving that Blaze his head racing after a cow; he required repeated urgings to maintain a trot; and he just never had the eager, long swinging gait of “The Colt”.  I traded him off to my granddaughter to use at her dad’s feedlot.  “The Colt” remained my first pick for a tough job.

          I have a couple more excellent horses in my string, but mostly I let Eric or Ted ride them.  Occasionally a few select people have taken “The Colt” for a tough job if I was not available to ride.  But I can only describe my relationship with “The Colt” as “simpatico”.

          Most of our rides here turn out to be long and hard.  Every field on the ranch has some steep, rocky, and brushy terrain.  I always lay a bead of hard-surface weld on their shoes before nailing them on.  Going “over north” requires a quick climb of 1000 feet in elevation in addition to the steep, rocky, and brushy terrain.  There was a time when “The Colt” took it all in his long trotting stride.  For the last couple of years, however, he has settled to a walk until more effort is required.  I could feel him slowing down.  In fact, it was 4 years ago that I wrote a post entitled Slowing Down.

          This week we made a circle downriver, in anticipation of working the calves on Sunday.  There were some 5 pairs down on the river that we took up Sick’Em Creek and put in the gate near “Ted’s Camp”.  There were another handful on up the mountain side that required us to climb a thousand feet in elevation to put in the gate on the “pine ridge”.  Then we had to drop over into Alkire’s to dump another handful down into Mendenhall Creek.  And last were two pair that we brought back up to put in the Sick’Em Creek field with everyone else. 

          It was a pretty good ride.  We’d been moving for a couple of hours on some steep terrain.  We’d zigged and zagged through the trees and brush, climbed through a gulch, across some rocky side-hills, and busted out a couple of times to turn the cattle toward the gates.  I was tired.

          But now the job was finished and we turned toward home.  “The Colt” knows this country as well as I do, and I was curious which path he’d choose. 

Most often we’d head past the Pothole Lake and down Mike’s Coulee.  But that would require us to circumnavigate the Sick’Em Creek meadow and climb another couple of hundred feet.  Down the east fork of Sick’Em seemed easier.  But it’s hard on a horse to go downhill as well, and it was a long way to the bottom.  I gave “The Colt” his head.

“The Colt” and I had often come up the east fork gathering cattle in the Sick’Em Creek field.  It had been a few years since we had taken cows down the creek – and that had been a battle.  But that’s the route he chose.

Again, that trail is steep and rough.  But “The Colt” took it at a trot. We crossed the east fork a couple of times, and quickly doubled back.  We crossed the main fork, and I grabbed the horn as “The Colt” lunged up the steep bank on the other side, past Ted’s Camp.  Then I grabbed the horn again as the colt lunged up the couple of hundred yards on up to the main trail.

“The Colt” dropped back to a trot up the trail to the gate into “The Desert” field, and stopped for me to open and shut it behind us.  A long trot again as we crossed the flats of the desert claim, and down into the brushy draw.

It seemed to me that the easiest way home from there was down the road and into the hayfield – but “The Colt” had another idea.  Rather than continuing downward, he elected to cross the draw and up the ridge on the other side.  Over the ridge, he picked up the cow-trail that side-hilled straight westward toward the barn.

Through the next draw we were still following that contour trail when he seemed to realize that this was the one that the cows followed through that next finger of thornbrush where the opening was too low for a horse and rider.  “The Colt” abruptly turned right, and I grabbed the horn again has he lunged straight up the mountainside until he reached the upper trail, which led around the top of the brush. 

Over the saddle he trotted, across another rocky side-hill, over the home gulch, and down to the orchard and the gate toward the barn.

 

I’d felt a little guilty taking this old man for a ride that I had known could have turned rough.  That “Sassy” mare was fresh shod, and would have been just as eager.  I would need “The Colt” again for gathering and working calves in just a few days. 

But while “The Colt” hadn’t started this ride exhibiting all the power he had in his younger days, he had still jumped out anytime the situation required.  And it was obvious on the ride home that he still had plenty in reserve.

Why would I need to go to all the work of training a new horse?

True Detective

Caution – This post contains graphic descriptions that may be offensive to some people.

          About 22 years ago I sent a message to my brother that I had been dating a gal who thought she could make me politically correct.  He messaged back that she should settle for socially acceptable.

          I can’t make any sense out of why most people do what they do.  In fact, I don’t much care what people do.  But I do study the behavior of cattle and horses.

Our calving operation is designed to take advantage of the natural behavior of cattle.  The entire calving field is visible from my kitchen window.  We feed and bed at one end of the field, knowing that two hours after feeding the cattle will break for water.  Most of the cattle will then drift back to the feed and bedding – but those few that are beginning labor will drift to the end of the field away from the rest of the herd, and toward the calving shed.

This evening I noted one cow traveling away from the herd in the suspicious manner of one that is beginning labor.  It was plenty cold, and it would be beneficial to put her in the shed before dark, where her new calf would have a much warmer and drier environment for those first challenging hours of his life.  I fell in behind her.

As I followed her toward the shed, I began my detective work.

Pregnancy in a cow is not obvious as it is in a human.  A cow eats a large amount of course roughage every day, and the volume of that feeding is about as much as the fetus growing inside her.  There is only a subtle difference in the position of her distended rumen higher and to the left versus her distended uterus lower and to the right.

Immediately after calving one can see the reduction on the lower right side; and a cow also goes off feed for the first day, reducing the volume on the upper left side.  So her figure does change quickly – for a day or two.

As I followed this cow, however, her profile was ambiguous.  Her lower right side was not so pronounced, but neither could she be described as gaunt.

As a cow comes within a week or two of calving, her labia become relaxed and swollen.  Her udder begins to fill up

The labia of this cow, however, was not typical of a cow near to term.  Nor was her udder tight and swollen.

There was no accumulation of amniotic fluid on the tail to indicate that she had recently calved. 

As I drew along side of her I could see that in fact two of her teats had been sucked, and the fullness of her udder had been drawn down by a calf.  Why was she leaving the herd in such a determined fashion?

As we rounded the corner of the shed, the answer became apparent.  Her calf was stashed in the brush behind the shed – as far as it could get from the rest of the herd.

All those signs immediately added up.  She had calved a couple of days before, and hence her labia were healing and returning to normal.  She had just filled up with hay.  She was leaving the feed-grounds to return to her calf.

Mystery solved.  Another case closed in the life of a cowboy.

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Ah, Straw...

          If you stop to think about it, the survival of a newborn calf is a miracle.

          After living for 9 months in a zero-gravity, fluid-filled, temperature-controlled environment with his nutrients automatically provided through an umbilical cord, a calf is suddenly and forcefully expelled onto cold, hard ground.  Within minutes he is up on his legs and searching for the new source of his nutrients – his mother’s udder.

          A human baby has a similar experience of expulsion – but he is born into another temperature-controlled environment, where he is lovingly caught in a warm blanket, and delivered directly to a breast. 

This human baby can go nowhere on his own for months!  He is carried from one place to another; picked up often and held to the breast (or a damned rubber nipple thrust in his mouth) multiple times a day; he lives indoors, and is covered by a blanket.

It is 30^o today in Montana, with 6” of fresh, wet snow.  And yet that calf hits the ground, struggles to his feet, and finds a teat.  Once he is dried off and has a belly full of milk, he is good to go.  In two days he can outrun a man afoot.

If the calf has a good mama, she immediately goes to licking off that months-old slime that permeates his haircoat, and she stands patiently while he searches up and back along her underline until he finally connects.  The job of the cowboy is to assure that every calf is successfully expelled, licked off by his mother, and finds that life-giving fluid.

But the title of this piece is straw.

Most of you know that hay is forage that has been cut, dried, baled, and stored.  It is harvested in the summer when there is an excess, and is spread out in the winter when there is a dearth.

Straw is slightly different.  It is the stalk of the plant which is harvested for grain -usually wheat, barley, and oats.  This is cut in the fall after the plant is mature and has turned yellow.  The valued part of the plant is separated in the ‘combine’.  The grain is hauled one way, and the remainder is baled up as straw.

While good hay may be as high as 15% protein, straw has had its primary nutrient package removed.  Straw is likely to be around 5% protein.  It’s not particularly good feed.

In the winter, we put out straw when the temperature drops below zero.  The cows eat it, and the inefficiency of digestion helps keep them warm.  Whatever is left on the ground helps to insulate their underside.

In the spring, we put it out for the purpose of keeping the cattle up off the cold, wet snow and mud.  The cows find it quickly.

What is amazing is that a 24-hour old calf can seek out that nice warm bed, and propel himself to it!

Ah, Spring!

          I have mentioned before that “Spring” is pretty fickle in Montana.  It can be 65 above or 10 below on any day between the first of March and the first of June.

          On the ‘official’ beginning of spring this year, it got to 55^o.  A few days later it is 30^o with a fresh 6” of wet snow.

          Last week we began calving in earnest, and cut in some 40 head of heavies to the calving field.  Today we began turning out those new pairs into a bigger field where they can maintain a more adequate “social distance” to avoid an accumulation of mud and manure, and to minimize transmission of disease.

          There were 19 pairs in this first sweep of the field we call “the rocks” into which we turn newer pairs soon after they calve.  We pushed these into the “bridge trap” to sort.  One calf needed to be caught for the application of a band to his testicles.

          I was riding the Blaze colt, from whom I have done very little roping.  He had been quite a challenge to break, and I still wasn’t certain about his reaction to throwing a lariat.  But he has settled in nicely, and handled well to catch that calf.

          One must be careful when turning out new pairs to be sure that every calf follows his mother across the bridge and into the new field.  We paired them out slowly and deliberately.  But most of the calves were a couple of weeks old, and were solidly following their mamas.

          Then we swung around and cut 14 new pairs out of the calving field, and into the now-empty “rocks” field. 

          Light snow was blowing in our face the whole time, but the temperature was hovering around freezing – not particularly unpleasant weather.  Two cows were obviously going into labor, so we pushed them on down into the calving shed.  There’s no reason for a new calf to be born into a snowbank when we have an empty shed with a nice straw-covered floor.  It’s bad enough to be rudely thrust from a weightless, 103^o environment out onto a cold hard ground, when we can temper it with warm, dry straw.

          And we elected to spread more of that warm, dry straw out into the field for the rest of the heavies.

          There had been one calf born earlier in the day up on the hillside in the calving field.  Once a calf has dried off and had a good suckle, he can stand a lot of cold.  But there was a second cow nearby.  I called Eric.

          “It’s snowing too hard to see if that second cow has a calf,” I said. 

          Eric was just heading out to throw off the late feed for those heavies.  He soon radioed back that she had a new calf.

          I rummaged around in the glove-boxes for a pair of rubber-palmed gloves, jumped on the quad, and headed down to the shed to tie onto the sled.  The calf lay quietly in the sled, is mother followed along easily, and now we had our fourth calf for the day, safe and warm in the shed.

          Ah, spring.

Too Cold for CoronaVirus

            In fact, it’s too cold for my old bones.  But the work goes on. 

            Calving is just taking off on our ranch, with three calves born yesterday. It’s 20^o today, with a cold wind blowing snow out of the northeast.  Too cold for a horseback ride – yet we did it anyway.

            Our two-year-old heifers are out in a field across the river, and these girls are the high-risk group for calving.  We needed to sort through them to bring in the ones approaching calving – a job we try to accomplish every five days or so.

            My first stop ahorseback was back to the house - where I traded my felt hat for a wool ear-lap cap, and my insulated gloves for mitts with knitted wool liners.  Then it is a mile ride out across the bridge and upriver into that wind.  (A long trot is 11 MPH; the wind at 11 MPH; total “wind chill” at 22 MPH. 

            The heifers followed the main trail down across the gulch, but pulled up short at a deep snow drift on the brow of the gulch on the other side.  The flow was disrupted as we followed them up the gulch to the road crossing. 

            We held them up in the “bridge trap”, where we cut out the ones showing “heavy” – that are likely to calve in the next week.  There were 8 in today’s cut.

            As we sorted, I noted that although most of my toes were numb, I could still feel my big toes.  I remember rides where everything below my knees was numb.  And today the ride was all within sight of the house!

            My little dog Niña abhors the cold.  She has the short-haired blue coat of her Blue Heeler father.  But she remained right behind my horse until each time I sent her out after a laggard.

           

            On the return trip to their pasture, the heifers piled on down through that snowdrift on the brow.  And the horses picked up a lope after we dropped the heifers home and turned back toward the barn.  They chose to climb back up through that snowdrift - rather than take the longer, easier way home – and we let them.

            I read in my newsfeed that most of the US is shut down.  The governor of Montana has closed the schools, restaurants, and bars.  My wife reports the shelves of the local grocery stores to be scant.

            Looking out my window, however, I see none of this.  There is food in my refrigerator, freezer, and pantry.  There are still two rolls of TP in the closet, with a roll and a spare in each bathroom.  My discard pile has enough newsprint for months more.

            The price of live cattle is down $20 per hundred-weight – but the price of “boxed” retail-ready beef is UP $20!  People are suddenly buying less from the restaurant trade and more from the grocery stores – just as they did in my childhood.

Trips to Town

            I make the trip to town as seldom as possible.  The ranch is on a rough gravel road that literally beats a pickup to pieces.  Every trip to town takes up an hour and a half of my time, and consumes expensive tires and fuel.  But yesterday I went to town not just once – but twice.

            In the early days of this ranch, Grandpa went to town only a few times a year.  Once in June to haul in the wool sheared from his sheep, and once in September to trail in his lambs to sell.

            In my early years as a cowboy, we went to town every month to cash my paycheck to buy clothing and groceries.

            Yesterday I was finishing up the last of the hay-stacking when a chain on my stackwagon came apart.  I had no repair parts on hand.

A call to the parts store in Big Timber assured me they had the master link and half-link that I needed. 

Big Timber is a smaller town than Livingston, but the road is much better: only six miles of gravel and sixteen miles of paved highway – a half hour driving time.  They had the parts laid out for me, but I still had to stop for fuel.

But when I started to repair the chain, I found that they had sent a #60 half-link rather than the #2060 I had requested.  The links were in plastic packages with printing on both sides, and I hadn’t examined them carefully.

I made another call to be sure they had the 2060 half-link, and it was 5:30 when I arrived back at the parts store.  Someone had put the #60 link in the wrong bin, they told me apologetically.

I was able to make the repair and finish stacking all the hay before dark.

What with meetings, town business, and parts runs, I end up in town a couple of times every week these days – even though I hate to make the trip.  But I had reason to do some work with the road department in Gallatin County a few years back.

Bozeman is the epitome of urban sprawl.  People move there to enjoy the “rural” lifestyle.  But these people apparently don’t enjoy the rural environment enough to stay in the country.  With mom and dad driving to work, and the kids in sports and dance class - the road engineers in Gallatin County figure the average “rural” family makes four trips per day to town.

I would be happier if I never had to leave the ranch.  Why do people bother to live in the country if they are going to spend all their time in town?

Plan 'A'

            I’m not a big planner.  I’m a strategist.

            Strategy may be defined as a “course of action”.  It’s a framework within which plans are made.  My strategy is to harvest the grass on our ranch, using cattle, in an effective manner which has recently been given the title “sustainable”.

            Part of our ranch strategy is to harvest the over-abundance of grass which grows in June and early July – to preserve its nutrients, and to feed in the winter when forage quality is poor, and often covered by snow.

            We could plan to begin cutting on June 20.  But what if its raining?  What if its been a cold spring and the hay is not yet ripening?  What if there’s a funeral that day? What if the granddaughter has only that day free to help move cows?

            As part of that “sustainable” strategy, we move cattle often in the early summer to protect those growing grasses from the damage caused by frequent repeated grazing.  We aim for a 7-day rotation.  But maybe an irrigation ditch blew out.  Maybe we could only get an excavator on Tuesday.  Maybe the swather broke down.  Maybe we got the horses in and found one with a thrown shoe.  Maybe there is lightening.

            My strategy is simple when we do go into a field to gather cows: get them all from here and put them there.  But I’ve had a number of people ask for a plan.

           

            For me, a plan is too much work.  We don’t know where the cows are in the field – how many are here and how many are over there.  We don’t know what the weather is going to be like, and we don’t know toward which gate they are going to line out.  We don’t know if the fence got down and some of our cows out or the neighbor’s in; we don’t know if one is sick or lame.

            Sure, we could crowd them in whatever direction we chose – but it would be hard on the cows and hard on the horses.  It’s better to start them moving and bend them toward whichever gate accomplishes our objective with the least amount of effort.

            I once had my son-in-law lined up to help with some cow-work on Thursday.  He called the evening before to check on the plan.

            “So far as I know it’s still Plan ‘A’”, I told him.

           

            “Hey Amy”, he shouted over top of the phone!  “Listen to this: Your dad’s still on plan ‘A’”!

            It was years later that I finally received some positive affirmation for my “flexible” style.  “Improvise; Adapt; Overcome”, I was told, is a slogan of the U.S. Marines.

            Yes!  That’s me!  After 20 years as a cowboy I was able to improvise, adapt, and overcome a broken back by going back to school and entering the health care profession.  I was able to improvise, adapt, and overcome when called to manage a hospital, three ranches, a dozen nursing homes, and hundreds of emergency ambulance calls.

            And I was able to improvise, adapt, and overcome my wife’s broken printer as I tell in this blogpost: mellinniumcowboy.blogspot.com/2019/06/we-fix-things.html

           

Smooth Move

            We’ve had plenty of moisture, and June in Montana brings long days - the grass is growing quickly.  We try to get the cows out of a field before the grass has grown tall enough for them to take a “second bite” from any plant, so that there is time for it to grow new leaves and replenish its root reserves.  That’s only a week or ten days in June.

It was time to move the cows to the next pasture further up the mountain, and also time to put in the bulls.  We had a lot of country to cover, and I’d invited several people to help, but it ended up to be just Eric and me.  We saddled two of our best horses and we each went a different direction

            We’d just received a new yearling bull who was still in the corral. The yearling heifers were west of the barn.  I set the gates to run him through, and headed to the corrals for the new bull.  Eric headed a mile up west to gather the older bulls.

            I ran my one yearling bull out into the pasture where the yearling heifers were awaiting his services, and changed the gates so that Eric could bring his bulls past the east side of the barn, out through the orchard, and take them up the hill and into the “desert” where the main cowherd was camped.

            Circling back around, I came up on the outside of the fence along which Eric and his dog were bringing his bunch of bulls.  He’d already ridden out a mile and a half to gather those bulls, and was now halfway back.  I told him that the gates were set for him to pass through the yard and out into the south-west corner of the desert.  I had seen cows out in the hayfield, and would pick them up and head up through the south-east corner.

            So while Eric pushed his bulls up the hill on the far left of this picture, I gathered some fence-crawlers in the hayfield and pushed them up through a gate at the far right of the picture.

            I was just breaking out of the coulee on the far right, when Eric's bulls joined us from the hillside on the far left.  So eager were they to resume their duties in breeding all those beautiful brown-eyed girls, that they had quickly climbed up the hill on the far left, and followed the contour trail around to meet us on the bench at the far right.

            The bulk of the cows were on that bench.  I and my dogs gathered them, and started them up the fence which follows the ridgeline at the top of this picture.

            In the meantime, Eric was gathering the basin to the left of center in this picture.  I was about halfway up the fence with some 125 pairs, when Eric’s gather from the basin joined them from the left.

            Just over the top of the ridge is a gate into “the pothole”.  We dropped the cows through, then set off at a long trot on to the west and south, following the trail back down the mountain. 

            Returning through the Elges Creek field, we picked up the yearling heifers and started them back to the east.  With Eric behind the first bunch we gathered, I circled the east side of the field, checking all the timber and blind pockets on the way down, opening the east gate as I passed by.  Then I headed west up Elges Creek on the north side.

            From my eastward circle, I could see that Eric had about half the yearlings in a bunch, and that he had them headed toward another bunch further down.  He would throw them all together and push them on down the road on the south side of the creek, and on toward the gate on the east.

            But as I neared the northwest corner of the field, from my position on the north side of the creek, I could hear bawling - and watched helplessly as Eric’s bunch split up and headed back to the south.

            Then four yearling heifers came toward me on a steep, rock-strewn hillside high on my right.  I waited them out. 

            When they had passed, I got behind them and shoved them on east toward the gate.  More bawling to the south of me – but all of us emerged from the brush and timber simultaneously. We counted the entire bunch of 30 yearlings strung out toward the gate.

            I had to make one run to head off the few that hadn’t found the opening, but we had them quickly shoved out the gate and into a new pasture.

           

            It hadn’t been that big a ride.  We’d been only a mile and a half, at most, from the barn.  The route covered maybe 8 miles.

            But we’d been up and down and back and forth over steep, rocky, and brushy terrain.  We’d done some trotting, a lot of walking, with a few short bursts to turn various bunch-quitters.  We’d handled the cattle gently, we’d passed our gathers back and forth seamlessly, and we’d covered some 1000 acres without missing a single head. 

            It was a smooth move.

Winter Storm Warning

Here’s the forecast for Memorial Day 2019:

Rain and snow showers, becoming all snow after noon. Patchy fog. Temperature rising to near 39 by 8am, then falling to around 32 during the remainder of the day. East northeast wind 8 to 10 mph. Chance of precipitation is 100%. Total daytime snow accumulation of around 2 inches.

         My last blog-post from one month ago declared it to be spring.  A lot of water has gone under the bridge since then – literally.  It’s been a cold wet spring.

          We don’t have much farming to do – only about 40 acres of hay renovation.  But it isn’t done yet.  There has only been a day or two in the last month when it was dry enough to get in the field with a plow.  Another job is weed-spraying.  But that, too, requires some dry weather.

          I had set Sunday the 19^th as our date for branding, but the rains came.  One can’t brand wet calves.  The moisture in the hair cools the irons too quickly, and it causes steam, which scalds the skin a blotches the brand.

          Yesterday, however, we tried again.

          There had actually been a bit of dust on the very surface of the county road. There were breaks in the overcast sky.  I sent a group text to the help I had lined up, and we began gathering early.

          We had the cows in the trap when stock trailers began to roll in.  Several people went to work sorting cows out one gate while holding back the calves.  Another group was at work on the other end of the trap sorting calves into the corral.  We were soon running cows through the chute for their annual vaccinations for some respiratory and reproductive diseases.

          Two of us were ahorseback pushing cows up the alley.  Two more were feeding cows into the chute.  One was running the headcatch, one was mixing vaccine, two were vaccinating, two were keeping the cows moving up the chute.

          The last of the cows were still in the chute when I lit the propane burner and ropers tightened their cinches.  As soon as the irons were hot, I gave the signal and the calves began to be heeled to the fire.

          I was kept busy slapping on brands and hurrying back to the pot for a fresh hot iron; Eric was vaccinating; dark clouds were closing in.

   
       We were about half way through the bunch when Darin rode up and told me to go to roping – he’d take over the branding.

          Thunder began rumbling in the distance as we worked steadily through the calves.  The last calf was drug in just as the first raindrops fell.

          We quickly closed up the tool boxes that held our vaccinating guns.  I’d forgotten on which post I’d hung my vest. I swung onto my horse and grabbed the reins of Eric’s horse as the rain increased.  We loped the half mile to the barn, where I found my coat.  Raindrops stung my face as I sped to the house on my four-wheeler.

          Rain pounded on the roof as the crew lined up in the kitchen to load their plates with sloppy joes, potato salad, and baked beans.

          I produced a jug of Wild Turkey to help lubricate the bantering and story-telling that followed.  We were all in a magnanimous mood. A disparate crew of friends and neighbors, town folk and cattlemen, old hands and uninitiated, had come together like a well-oiled machine to accomplish an essential task; we had done it in record time; and we had beat the rain!

Read here about another day of Branding on the West Boulder.

It's Spring!

            Spring in Montana is hard to define or to describe.  We have a lot of nice spring days, but the worst blizzard I have experienced began on April 15 of 1973; I struggled to keep new-born calves alive in below zero weather in April of 1987; There are years when we are still feeding hay to the cows right up until the end of May. 

            But for this year, I declare spring to have arrived on April 19.

            The first indication of spring was that the interior of my car was hot when I returned from my side-gig at Crow agency.  I had to turn on the air conditioner.  There was a boat being gassed up when I stopped to fill my tank.  I saw several tractors out working in the fields as I drove home.  Bugs began to accumulate on my windshield.  And finally, I had to pick up beer cans along the county road passing across a corner of the ranch.

            The snowstorms are indeed fewer in April, and the white stuff melts off quicker.  The landscape is taking on a green cast. Days are longer.  Most of the cows have calved, and they are eating less and less hay every day.  Some ranches are branding.  We’ve gotten a little fencing done.

            But it’s still a long time until June.  While there are little spears of grass poking out, there still is not nearly enough growth to sustain the plants, nor to sustain the cows.  We’ll be feeding every day for a few more weeks.  The fields are too wet to get any farming done.

            

          And it's still too early to sit out on the deck drinking beer.

A Toy or a Tool?

            All manner of mechanical toys are commonly seen in America these days: skis, surfboards, trail bikes, dirt bikes, boats, snowmobiles,  ATVs…  Town folks work all week to have the time and money to escape the city and enjoy the great outdoors from the vantage-point of these expensive devices.

            What are toys to the city-folk, however, have become tools for the rancher.  Far more cattle are now handled by four-wheelers than by horses. And the side-by-side ATV is just the tool to check on cattle, ride out to change irrigation sets, haul salt to the cattle, and fix fence.  A side-by-side is far more convenient than a pickup, uses far less gas, and is far easier on the land.  In addition to trucks, tractors, pickups, farm implements, and haying equipment, we now consider both a four-wheeler and a side-by-side to be essential to ranch operations.

            And now we have a tracked side-by-side.

            This morning we have 18 below zero and some 2 feet of snow.  It’s just too much for a pickup – even with chains on all four tires – so we’re feeding with a big four-wheel-drive tractor and a hay wagon.

            But we are just beginning to have new calves, and we needed to get out to check on the calves.

            The horses were all out to pasture, and we usually use the four-wheeler to run them in when we need them.  The snow is far too deep for the quad. This new Ranger was just the tool to bring in horses.

            To get ahorseback, however, I would have to follow the tracks through knee-deep snow to the horsebarn, saddle a horse, and ride a half mile out to the cows.

            Eric has his new tool sitting just off his front porch.  He fired it up, swung by to pick me up, and we were through the cattle and back in the kitchen drinking coffee in less time than it would have taken just to saddle up.

            I’m a bit ashamed.  In the old days we’d have harnessed the team and hitched them to a bob-sled, maybe leading a saddle-horse behind.  It would have taken several loads.  We’d have spent most of the day breaking trail with the horses.

            Now we can spend a couple of hours inside the cab of the tractor – stepping out only to flake the hay off the wagon.  Then we can drop off the loader and mount the snowblower, to clear away the snow from the trails and the gates rather than just trampling it down.

            No longer the clop of the hooves and the jingle of trace-chains in the dead-quiet of a snow-filled world.  Now the growl of a tractor and the whine of an ATV engine break the silence. 

            And this is progress?!?