USO

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The day we moved our cattle out to the lease, my son and I spent our requisite half hour skipping rocks in the reservoir. In case you haven't experienced it, 'skipping rocks' with a six year old means finding one the approximate size and shape of your head, standing close enough to the water to get your toes wet, and heaving. Then giggling hysterically at the splash. Even more so if it douses your mother.

In the midst of our rock skipping, we found this Unidentified Slimy Object floating in the shallows, dead. It was about six inches long, looks like super-sized salamander with a crest around its neck. My dad thinks its called an axolotyl, but I can't find information on any of those except in Mexico. Any of you seen one before?

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Gone Roping

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Despite the fact that daylight arrives around four thirty in the morning and doesn't give up the ghost until almost eleven, I am finding once again that there aren't quite enough hours in my days. July is my rodeo month, and between work and trying to squeeze in a few practice sessions here and there, you've probably noticed that I've been pretty scarce around here. Such will most likely remain the case until at least mid-August, but I will try to pop in once in a while with some pictures and re-runs of my newspaper columns, which I do every other week.

For now, I'll leave you with some footage from last night's rodeo at Hook's Hideaway, up near Babb, Montana. Gotta love horses that buck, as long as I'm not on 'em.



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Aliens in Antelope Clothes

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Every morning and every night I drive a ten mile stretch of gravel road on the way to and from work. A couple months back, during the first big snow melt, water ran over stretches of the road, washing gullies through it. The county crew came along and filled them in and packed it the best they could.

Then it rained. And rained. And rained some more. I’m pretty sure all of you in the northern plains noticed. The spots on the road that had been backfilled turned to mush, especially a fifty yard stretch along a slough we fondly refer to as Olsen Lake. The ruts there are so deep my Jeep drags bottom if I don’t straddle them right. Plus a nice set of washboards on either side from unwary drivers slamming on the brakes when they see the pit of doom opening before them

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In other words, my road is like every other dirt road in the county, with one possible exception: In the ditch across from Olsen Lake, beside the pit through which no one could drive more than fifteen miles an hour without coming out the other side upside down and missing an axle, there is a dead antelope.

I have yet to determine the cause of death. No one has stepped forward to confess to running it down. And honestly, who would? If you hit an antelope while moving at a speed slower than my six year old can run, would you tell anyone? Unless you were texting your BFF the latest awesome Weiner joke at the time, the thing would have had to lie in wait and fling itself under the tires at the last possible second to pull it off.

 I can absolutely imagine an antelope doing just that. They are the sheep of the wild kingdom, a dangerous combination of stupidity and suicidal tendencies.

Have you ever really looked at an antelope? They’re sort of freakish, awkward, like an artist’s first attempt at clay sculpture gone horribly wrong. A round, lumpy body stuck on toothpick legs. A neck that doesn’t quite meet meld with the shoulders. And those weird, bulgy eyes.

They have a disturbing habit of staring into space. Standing. Alone. Motionless. For hours. Like they’re in some sort of trance. Or communing with beings from another realm. I can see antelope as inhabitants of an alien planet. Make that former inhabits. I can also imagine they were exiled here for being too stupid to live on Selenium Six.

Alien Lieutenant: “Sir, we have to do something about those funny looking deer-like creatures. This is the fifth shuttle they’ve wiped out this week, throwing themselves under the hydroboosters.”

Alien Supreme Ruler: “Round them up and find some primitive planet to dump them on. And tell my son no more fooling around with genetic modification until he’s in grade school.”

Which at least explains why antelope stare into space. They’re looking for a ride home. 

Dog Tired

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I realize now why we waited so long to get a puppy. Actually, I realized it a month ago, when I walked barefoot from the bathroom to my bed and stepped on a turd that squished up between my toes and got stuck. I spent the next twenty minutes scrubbing my foot with a wire brush and lye soap and still when I went back to bed my husband said, “Don’t even think about touching me with those feet.”

We got the puppy in large part for my son, but also because she's out of my cousin's excellent cow dogs. About a year ago my son decided he was afraid of the dark and started getting up two or three times a night to beg me to come and lay with him, which I would, until he fell asleep again. Then I'd lie awake for another hour in my bed. So we figured if we got a puppy to sleep with him, he wouldn't need his mother. 

Worked like a charm. The kid has only gotten me up in the night once since the dog arrived. The dog is another matter. Three times last night she came wandering through my bedroom looking for new shoes to chew. At two-thirty I was hanging around the living room door, waiting for her to finish a tour of the front yard.

Somehow, this hasn't worked out quite like I planned. 

I don’t recall having this much trouble training the last dog that was allowed in my house. But then, Weezy was special. In so very many ways. First off, she was a red tic coonhound, which is what every single girl with a full time job should get for a dog. I realized we might have a problem the day I came home from work and found the entire Aberdeen, South Dakota phone book reduced to one inch fragments. Aberdeen is not a small town. The phone book is a couple of inches thick. It looked like the New Year’s baby had taken a confetti dump on my living room floor.

Then I met my future husband. He also had a dog. A ‘real’ dog named Squeak who worked out in the feedlot and slept in the barn. A dog that, five years after we got married, still operated on the assumption that she knew more about cattle than I did. She may have had a point, but she didn’t have to be quite so rude about it.

Weezy did not work. Her sole purpose in life seemed to be to irritate everyone in earshot. Squeak hated her on sight. Despite reservations about the appropriateness of dogs in houses and coon hounds in general, my husband started out cautiously optimistic. After all, pheasant hunting is big in that part of the country, and he’d always wanted a good bird dog. And it went reasonably well at first. His pointed her at a cornfield. Weezy plunged in and flushed up a bunch of pheasants. Greg shot one.

Given their prior relationship, I felt she was justified in assuming he was aiming at her. Even more so after he had to pack up his gun and spend the next two hours trying to find where she ran off to. Then he belly crawled under the deck, dragged her out of the back corner, and took her back to the cornfield for another try.

He found her under the wooden granary the second time.

The day was pretty much history by then, and so was Weezy’s career as a bird dog. She went back to rambling around the yard baying at rat holes (but only when my husband was outside working where he could hear her because, Hello, what good does it do to tree a rat if no one is there to see?) and lounging on her couch. And I do mean her couch. An old loveseat left behind by my husband’s former roommate and shoved over in a corner of the dining room with vague plans of hauling it to the dump someday. The first time Weezy jumped onto the real couch, my husband swatted her with a magazine. She never slept on anything but her own couch again.

Somewhere along the line, she learned to drink from the faucet in the bathtub, and afterward refused to drink icky stale water from a bowl, although slimy green feedlot puddles were perfectly acceptable. This was problematic, in that she would get up at two in the morning dying of thirst and there was no answer for it except to come into our bedroom and get someone to turn on the faucet. My husband slept on the left side of the bed. The one closest to the door. The first time she stuck her nose in his face while he was sound asleep, he smacked her upside the head.

She never went to the left side of a bed again. And after I booted her outside instead of giving her a drink, she stopped asking in the middle of the night.

Now if I could just figure out how to get that point across with the new puppy. And my son. 

Fix or Repair Daily?

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At least, that's how it seems around here most days. Things get broke faster than my husband and my dad can patch them back up again.
Between Blogger's periodic breakdowns and few other minor chores like branding the main herd and the artificial insemination of the registered cows, I'm afraid there hasn't been much going on here at the ol' blog. Plus we're going to hitch up the tractor to the pickup and trailer and drag it through the mud and out of here for a little Memorial Day getaway.

And of course, there's what you get when you take one half ton round bale, add a tractor with a grapple fork and an "Oops!"

Have a great weekend. Hope it's warmer and slightly less soggy than it appears ours will be.

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Rockin' and Rollin' on the Ranch

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Yep, it's that time of year again. The snow is mostly gone, the tractors and plows and seeders have been fired up. Commence farming.

I am not a farmer. I have mentioned this before, in much detail. (see Tractor Crazy). If you could just go out, climb on the tractor and go, it wouldn't be so bad. But no. The getting ready to go farming takes longer than the actual farming itself. Hook up this and fill that and oops, the hydraulic hose is leaking on the air seeder and darn that tire on the plow is low again and the battery is dead on the truck with the fertilizer in it so we have to dig out the jumper cables and by the time it's all finally geared up and headed out to the field I'm already fried.

Despite my best efforts, I do occasionally get tagged to help with things that involve farm equipment. Today, it was moving the rollers over to the far north hayfield. I am pleased to announce that for the third year running, my marriage has survived the process of hooking these things up. If you're not sure why this is a major accomplishment, pop over to The Hazards of Getting Hitched.

So, yeah, hooking up any towing vehicle involves hand gestures. Pointing and waving, palms up and down and out. Most are easy to interpret. Forward. Back. Left. Right. Stop. Go. And, as my niece calls it, the tall finger wave. In case you weren't sure, when your wife gives you that one you probably shouldn't expect dinner on the table at the usual time. Or ever.

So today we went through the usual routine. Husband on ground, me in tractor. Hand gestures slightly more complex due to using the tractor bucket to lift the hitch into place. Finally, he gave me the thumbs up to indicate the hitch was in proper position. Then he pointed back. I backed up. Then he pointed straight down, then waved a hand toward him. And I went, "Huh?" He did it again. I went, "HUH?" He walked over to the tractor and yelled up through the window.

"That means put it in Park and come down here!"

Next, we lined up the second roller. He backed it into place. I gestured for him to stop. He did, but when he put the tractor in park it rolled forward a couple of inches. I waved that he needed to back up again. He did. Then he took both hands and made a circle and bounced them up and down like he was trying to smash a coconut on a boulder. And I said, "Huh?" And he did it again. And I said, "HUH?" And I walked up to the tractor and he yelled out the window, "That means grab one of those big rocks and stick it front of the roller so it doesn't move!"

Of course. How dense of me, not to figure that one out.

So the rollers are hooked up and he's happily squishing rocks and I'm happily pecking away at my keyboard. All is well on the northern front.

What's that you say? You don't understand why anyone feels the need to drive around squishing rocks with massive steel rollers? Well, it's like this:

Need I say more?

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Stupid Isn't Fatal

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At least not this time.

Those of you who've been following along here for a while might remember Roo, of the tiny little brain and barbed wire fence. New folks can head back to last June to catch up, but before you click the link: Hurk Alert. These pictures are not pretty.

Several have asked how he's been doing. I've sort of put off posting anything until I could say, without reservations, that this particular story had a happy ending. The worst of the cut had closed up by Labor Day, but there was a part on the front of his hock that he kept rubbing open, and even as late as February I wasn't sure it would ever heal. Plus I was worried that the circulation was compromised and the foot and leg might freeze when our temperatures dropped down to twenty and thirty below. But when I went out today to catch Scotchman and Julie, he was back to his old obnoxious self.

I'd show you pictures of the scar, but I could never get that close. Which is a good thing, in this case.



In case you couldn't tell, the left hind is the one he injured. It's still stiff and his gait is a little odd, but overall he's doing great. Could probably even be ridden, as long as you kept it slow. We're not much for pleasure riding around here, though, and he was never that much of a pleasure to ride anyway. Plus, he's twenty two years old.

We're just glad to see him trotting off into the sunset.

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