Cattle ranch

Leaving the pickup behind was necessary, because there was no way I was going to be able to make it up the road to the house, even with all four chains on. I had to leave my truck behind no matter what. However, what wasn’t necessary was traveling on foot with the cow calf pair in this weather to the big barn. I had my truck filled with hay and I was ready for feeding tomorrow. I could have just walked back home and used the tires tracks and stroked easy and followed the fence posts and climbed into my warm bed after a nice mean by the fire and woke up and “discovered” the dead calf. There was no question that calf would have died if I did that. Can you sleep while others die?

I had a real bad ass mom out in the field, and her calf was tucked away nice and neat like in a turned over water trough. I put a bales worth of straw in it, she was solid and the calf was fine, so I wasn’t worried about them at all. Sure they looked a bit funny out there all alone in the white wasteland, but I was confident they were safe. In theory that strange move with the water trough would have left me with plenty of room for two cow calf pairs to weather the night in this little loafing shed, but one of the moms in there was a psychopath. She wanted the whole place to herself, and the other mom was scared of her, and wouldn’t go in. The scared mom’s baby was weak from lack of feed and cold and dying. This is where it is good to work for a brand, and to not be a lord, because if I would have had the power I would have simply executed that mean mom and left the two calves in there with the nice one. The scared mom would have walked right back in there after I showed her that the threat from before was now merely a dead lump, and then she would have nursed her calf back to health, and probably would have even taken charge of the new orphan as well. Like I said though, it’s a good thing I didn’t do that, because something on a basic fundamental level would have been wrong with that. Partly this is simply because it is the easy way, and when you are out there on a mountain alone, and death is circling over head, and new life is springing up all around, and it is so so so cold, and the wind blazes back and forth till the froth makes seeing impossible...when thing are like that, and the world becomes such a place, then things are SUPPOSED to be hard. It would go against nature to take the easy way.

Anyway, doing the right thing this time meant me carrying the little calf of the scared mom back to the big barn. I enjoyed the last warmth of my truck, and I filled my pockets with a little food and water, and then I set out. I walked past the scared mom on the way into the loafing shed, and I had to make it past the psycho cow next, but that was no problem because she could feel that I wanted to murder her, and I kind of jutted out my jaw like I might do it, so she got out of my way. I looked down at her baby on the way to the object of my mission. She had a nice bull calf, and I knew if I could just get my troubled pair into a nice warm stall in the big barn all would be well. Everyone could make it out of this night alive, but it was on me to ensure this.

It was fucked up though, the risk seem overly big and I knew I might die, which I definitely didn’t want to. I mean you want to do it because you are a boy or whatever, and it’s the same way you want to go to war or stab some bank robber in the neck or run into a flaming house, but on the level of things happening at that moment, no, I just didn’t want to do it. I picked up the calf though, and right away I knew I make he right decision. It wouldn’t have last another two hours out there without me intervening. It was small by birth, and not much of a fighter. A little heifer primadona that should have be born a month later when all she would have had to do is strut around in the spring flowers and look pretty. I locked her into my chest and kissed the top of her head. On the way out I spoke to her mom about what we had to do. I wasn’t worried about her refusing to follow or anything like that, she was a good mom after all, she just didn’t want to get beat up by that psycho we were leaving behind, which is understandable. I did want to make sure she understood that I had her baby though, and that we were traveling. The big barn took me away from those sweet tire tracks, and out into virgin snow. I had to cross a creek and bash through drifts that reached my waist. I was sweating pretty bad about half way there, so I flopped down on my ass and took a break. The mom sniffed at her calf, but I decided not to risk a feeding out in the blizzard. Plenty of time for that once we made it. Once? If? For a little bit while I was sitting there, ‘once’, was not dominant, and ‘if’ ruled my thoughts. Maybe even a ‘fuck it we are doomed’ swirled about. My toes were in the early stages of frost bite from crossing the creek, my lungs hurt from the cold, and the whole plan seemed so exhausting. Two more hours of shittiness, or simply lay down and die. People choose death in circumstances like these all the time, and it’s not like they are being irrational. But that mom kept making noices and cheering me on, so I got up and trudged back into the whiteout.

As I got closer I stopped caring about sweating, and that calculated risk turned out alright. I burst into the barn, dropped the baby, and started stripping off clothes. Everyone looked at me like I was mad, but of course I didn’t care. I lay in a heap, naked from the waste up, sucking down water, waiting for a sign. The sign that all was right, the sign that it was time to stop striving and go to bed. It didn’t take long. The mom nosed her baby from the ground and the little one, the warmth and light lifting her spirits, started nursing.

I regrouped in the vet room and then pushed on towards home. Looking back I guess that mean whore of a mom was not bad. You can’t be bad out there. I guess the coyotes that would have eaten that heifer had I made one wrong decision were not bad, and I guess that thinking cowboy with his gun wasn’t bad neither. On the mountain we all simply ARE. Existing under the eye of God, pumping the flow of His blood, being one with His creation, is a miracle worth suffering severe hardship for, sure, but the real point is that those hardships are the exact same thing as good times.