November 12, 1998

Heifer calving started a week ahead of schedule this October. The gestation period is always earlier on the range than on the charts.

We gathered the heaviest cows into the horse trap 10 days ahead of time to watch closer. The lighter bred stock was left in an adjoining pasture. The ones cut to calve right away stood around in the water lot in sight of my front door, chewing their cud and fighting horn flies. They showed about as much interest in motherhood as those gals do hanging out at Baskin Robbins eating double dip cones and admiring their reflections in the showcases. (Ice cream parlors use trick glass to give trimmer profiles of their clientele.)

Every evening I rounded up the trap bunch; every morning I counted the two-section pasture. By counted, I mean that by mid-morning I might still be out 15 or 16 head of cattle. Along about then, I'd tire from driving in the pickup and go back to the house for a horse. By one o'clock, if my luck continued bad, I'd tie my horse in a thicket close to the windmill, shade up on the dark side of the tank and let the missing ones hunt for us.

Seemed like the more heavy cows I worked into the trap, the more births occurred over the fence in the bigger pasture. The last handbook the ranch owned on heifer calving burned in the bunkhouse fire in '86 or '87. Unsupported by a reference book, I decided the reason the heifers showing the least symptoms of pregnancy were calving ahead of the ones showing the most signs was from the disturbance caused by riding and driving through the herd so much. Lots of premature babies are born after events like Halloween carnivals and junior high football playoffs. So I started stirring the ones in the trap more and leaving the ones in the pasture alone.

In a week, 10 percent of the heifers had babies on the ground. All were natural births until the eighth morning of the eighth day. I drove for hours hunting and looking for one cow. I climbed up in the back of the pickup bed a half dozen times to peer over the tree lines. (Looking a long time for one cow brute in the brush causes Advanced Imagination Disorder, to the point where the hunter starts thinking his quarry can fly. So I've been told, the worst case of A.I.D. ever recorded was when a cowboy named "Ridge Bone" Harris dove to the ground from the shadow of a Border Patrol plane flying across a pasture where he had spent a week hunting a black bull.)

I sat up on a high ridge and looked through binoculars at every header having a dark shadow, or a deceiving-shaped cedar bush. I went in all the corners and made sure a cow wasn't hiding behind a spreader dam, or lying out of sight in a caliche pit. I made one last check at the three waterings and headed for the house to get my horse.

Before saddling up, I radioed my son and another cowboy to come help. By the time they reached the pasture, I found the heifer down in heavy labor. While she was distracted by her misery, I slipped my rope around her neck and looped a half-hitch over her nose. (A catch is a catch in my book.) As I struggled to dally her to a stump, she flounced and fell over in between two large cactuses and a dead mesquite tree.

In 30 minutes, we put her through a head lock/hip lock delivery that'd make the rankest battlefield operation ever performed in the trenches of France look like an advertisement for Band Aid. The calf was dead and the mother too wobbly from nerve damage to stand. Doctors and patient were panting in long whistling breaths the way the north wind whistles through the cracks in on old ranch house.

I rallied enough to brush off the dirt clods and remove the larger cactus thorns. Somewhere in the tussle, a dead mesquite limb shattered under my chaps and fell in one boot top. But before taking off my boot, I needed a place free of cactus to lie on my back to shake out the big pieces of bark and thorns. When I found a clean spot, my hands were still too wet to pull off my boot. So I fished around the best I could in the boot top to dislodge what felt like a cord of wood. I sure didn't want to ride back to the house with the stirrup leathers pressed against the mesquite bark.

The heifer stayed down for a week. Water and feed had to be hauled to her twice a day. As I remember, the heifer calving manual said to sterilize the calving pens and wear gynecological gloves. Nothing was mentioned, however, about how to restore the doctors and nurses after a range delivery on a hillside in a prickly pear cactus and mesquite thicket. I suspect that chapter is one learned from the great old school of looking over saddlehorns and dashboards ...