Cow Mad

This cow is driving me crazy.

A single cow, in contrast to my normal cow-induced insanity, inflicted by whole herds. I prefer to exist in a world governed by common sense and cow behavior defies most attempts at logic. For example, if you’re standing in a pasture full of knee high grass and clear, cool running creeks, why would you jog a mile to rush through a hole in the fence to get to the neighbor’s already combined barley field, which is dry as a bone?

(And thank you, Anonymous Hunter, for that full afternoon’s extra work courtesy of the wires you cut. Your hunter friends can all thank you too, the next time a rancher blocks a road or nails up No Trespassing signs and says “No way” when they call to ask if they can hunt there. Oh, and here’s those beer cans you dropped, too.)

It is even more difficult to grasp why a dozen cows would stroll across an oat field ripe with heads too short to be picked up by the combine, ford a lovely little brook, scour the fenceline until they find that one wire flattened by the snow, hidden in three foot high timothy grass and second growth alfalfa, and hoist their big fat butts over it to get to the neighbor’s already combined wheat field. Cows don’t even like wheat.

But Lord knows, they’ll eat plenty of other things. Three hundred acres of grass, but the yearlings find it absolutely mandatory to chew up any chunk of rope or twine you leave hanging on a gate. And bones. They go after them like a dog on a…well, bone. Which is sort of creepy since the majority scattered around our pastures are cow skeletons and I prefer not to contemplate cannibalism and cows in the same sentence. Plus they usually manage to get the stupid bone stuck in their throat and then they die, but only after working up a good vet bill.

Still, the bones at least make some sense. They are made of calcium, and so is milk, so it’s sort of like a supplement. Which means they eat chunks of rusty barbed wire for the iron, right? And the electrical wiring off the hay swather for the…okay, I’m stumped on that one. I can’t think of a single dietary benefit to plastic, copper and battery acid.

So yeah, Cow Madness is not an unusual state for any rancher (as opposed to Mad Cow, which at our place is usually that high-headed brockle-face with the bad attitude). This particular cow is a special case in that she is not my cow. Or my problem. Which apparently doesn’t matter to the compulsive part of my brain that insists all cows must be kept—as much as humanly possible—in their proper place, which is not the barrow ditch.

This cow has been standing alongside the highway for two weeks straight. All by herself. Hasn’t moved more than fifty yards in either direction the whole time. Every morning and every night I drive past, sure by now either the owner has seen her or someone else has given them a call. But no. She’s still there. Every single morning. Every single night. Right across the fence from a herd of cows that appears to include her calf, since it was having breakfast through the barbed wire when I drove by on Tuesday morning.

There’s a gate right there. Wouldn’t take more than five minutes to chase her through it, even on foot. So if you know who runs cows out on the Chalk Butte highway and has blue ear and brisket tags and they don’t find their black white face cow on the side of the road, they can thank me.

I couldn’t take it any longer.

So It's Been a Crappy Day...

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You're telling me?

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The Week in a Snapshot (or seven)

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The end of October signifies a lot more than Halloween around here (although if you've ever wondered what it's like to Trick or Treat in ranch country, you can read about it in Thar She Blows). Mid-October to mid-November is shipping time for ranchers. Most of the calves around here are sold on contract to buyers in Nebraska or Iowa for a specified delivery date.

We were scheduled for today, November 6, but shipping is really a three to five day process at minimum, because we can't do it by ourselves. We need a crew, and our crew consists of my cousins who have ranches east and west of us. Which means, in return, we go and help on their scheduled shipping day (and this is me using the royal We, since I am generally required to be at the evil day job for all except our own).

So today we gathered and weaned. Sold all but the lightest of the steer calves. Brought all of the heifers home to feed for the winter. It was sunny, chilly, but no wind, no snow, no mud and no dust. You can't get much better.

I took some videos that I'll hopefully get edited and posted before the cows in question die of old age. In the meantime, here's how the rest of the week looked:

Keep your eyes wide open. Fall turnout time on the fields along my highway. 

A sunset swim.

Fire in the sky behind Many Glacier mountains.

Southbound from Calgary.

A lot of wide open space between here and the Sweetgrass Hills.

A few of the neighbors are hanging out in our summer pasture.

What? Is this bothering you?

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Traveling Light

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Once upon a time I lived in a magical kingdom called South Dakota, where the corn grew ten feet tall and the sunflowers were bigger than a dinner plate and the pavement ran clear to my front door. Well, within twenty yards, which is close enough. It was a mind-boggling experience for a dirt road girl. I washed my pickup and it stayed like that, all clean and shiny, and I didn’t walk around with streaks of mud on the inside of my left pantleg all spring and fall from rubbing up against the door frame. Amazing.

My husband had never lived more than half a mile off the highway, so he didn’t really grasp the sheer wonder of it all. This difference in our upbringings became apparent the first time we went to a rodeo together. I told him I was entering Bismarck and he asked if he could go along. I said sure, although there might have been a condition or two. Something about a haircut and a new pair of jeans. I bought him a new shirt myself, quite sure he would come home with one just like every other shirt he owned at the time. A bachelor should be more careful about telling his mother and four aunts that red plaid is his lucky color.

It was two hundred miles to Bismarck. The rodeo started at seven. I proposed that we leave at one-thirty, which meant I’d actually get myself into the pickup and ready to go by two.

“That’ll get us there awfully early,” he said. “It only takes three hours to drive that far.”

“Plus an hour for changing tires and fixing the trailer lights,” I said.

He gave me a blank stare. “Why would I have to fix the trailer lights? They work fine.”

“Well, sure, they do now. But by the time you get to the end of the gravel—“

And then I remembered the gravel was only twenty yards long. I may have done something like the touchdown shuffle that one guy used to do before the NFL got all cranky about showing off. Only with a lot less rhythm.

Gravel roads are brutal on trailer lights. Wires get beaten in two by rocks and yanked loose by mud clods. Plugs get packed with dust. Right up until I was in college, if asked how a weekend on the rodeo trail went I might smile and chirp, “Didn’t win a dime, but the trailer lights worked the whole way.” Any trip that didn’t include sprawling flat on your back on the side of the road with a flashlight in your teeth and dirt falling in your eyes while you wiggled wires was considered a success.

I am reminded of this because in August I hauled my sister and her broke down car home to Bozeman, then circled back through Big Timber to pick up a couple of horses. A round  trip of around eight hundred miles…seven hundred and fifty of them without trailer lights.

Three helpful hints to anyone heading that direction in a similar situation:

1. A Mini Cooper will fit in a stock trailer.

2. Thanks to the road construction around Townsend, it is actually faster to travel from Cut Bank to Bozeman via Big Timber.

3. If all else fails, spit on the light plug. It probably won’t fix the problem, but you’ll feel better.

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Strollin'

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A couple of bonus pictures from my afternoon walk. Max and I went down the coulee and up across the flat picking rose hips to make jelly (more on that later). On the way back, we started up the road to the corral and encountered a road block:

Ninety five percent of my brain was thinking, "No big deal, just old roping steers. They're harmless." But the other five percent was screaming, "OH MY GOD THEY WEIGH A THOUSAND POUNDS AND THEY'RE ARMED AND THEY'RE BETWEEN YOU AND THE FENCE."

I am happy to report that the majority was correct, in this case.

This is Timber and Doc as the sun sets.

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Gathering the North Forty

Gathering day, bringing the registered cows and Longhorns in from the far north pasture in preparation for weaning and shipping next Sunday. How far north? That barbed wire fence IS the Canadian border. 

Steep climb up the side of big coulee. 

 All the cowhands I need to get my part of the job done. 

Time to wean when you can hardly tell the calves from the cows anymore. 

Max says, "I'll get you, you wascelly wabbit."

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Giving it Up

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There comes a time, assuming you’re lucky enough to live that long, when you are forced to admit you may not be one of the young guns anymore. For me, that moment smacked me upside the head like a Louisville Slugger when I was still an athletic trainer. Upon being introduced to the incoming class of baseball players at Blue Mountain Community College, it occurred to me this was the first time in my career no one made the stupid joke about having a groin injury and needing a massage.

Wow. Right there on the third base line, I realized I was too old to warrant sexual harassment. Not that I missed the tired jokes, but still…it ranks right up there with when the construction workers stop whistling.

After a suitable period of grieving for my lost girlhood—which may have included an aborted and very painful attempt at taking up jogging—I came to terms with my new status as a non-chick. With acceptance came freedom. After all, if no one was checking me out, did it really matter how I looked?

Ah, glory days, those. At the rodeos, I no longer had to wonder if anyone but me would notice that this year’s jeans were a smidge wider between the back pockets. They were too busy eyeing the twenty-somethings. Makeup? Totally optional 

Sweet, sweet freedom.

Then this year, I went and joined the Senior Pro Rodeo Association. The masters division for cowboys in the over forty crowd, with the majority of contestants in the fifty plus range. Suddenly, I’m the incoming freshman all over again, stumbling into Senior Study Hall by mistake while all the other girls know exactly how to get through gym and on to English looking like they’ve never broken a sweat.

And the peer pressure. Sheesh. The quest to be the coolest girl in school was nothing compared to the effort some of these women put into being the hottest thing on the old circuit. Emphasis on the ‘old’.

Lucky for me, the senior rodeo season is fairly brief. I only have to diet and dye a few weeks out of the year to avoid being labeled a total loser and relegated to the table at the back corner of the concession area. Although it is nice and quiet there, an excellent place to observe my classmates and consider at what age I will once again be too old to worry about such stuff. Also to memorize the instructions on the box mounted on the wall that holds the emergency defibrillator because, well, at our age one should pay attention to those things, too.

I’ve decided seventy is my next give up the fight mark. And if someone tells me there’s a Homecoming Dance and a prom queen at the nursing home, I may just throw in the towel now.

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