December 4, 2003

Only my hands smell stronger than the ranch kitchen. The whole room reeks with the sour pungency of a nursery after a bad siege of colic.

Where Mother placed a sweet little porcelain figurine of a blue and white shepherd boy rests a big jar of powdered milk. Where she kept a vase of flowers on the window sill stands a corral-stained milk bottle with a big red nipple. Down at the barn where her gentle yellow Jersey cow nursed dogie calves, a high-strung black Angus momma kicks her adopted calf with blows more akin to a bucking chute than a milk pen.

We are 28 days into heifer calving at this writing. At the rate we are delivering calves and bottling mismatched and unclaimed calves, by press time, I'll be so stooped I'll have to lift my head to see eye to eye with the keyboard of this word processor.

But don't be swayed by my ill fate. I had better opportunities than ranching. The old barber where I shined shoes offered to teach me to cut hair after high school. In those days, too, the railroad line running through the ranch hired young men to work on section crews, help in freight depots, and live and ride on work trains to such exciting places as Minerals Wells and Brownwood.

Oh no, Eugene Manlove Rhodes and later Elmer Kelton combined with J. Frank Dobie sang my love song. Hadn't been for those word purveyors of the Western myth, I might have done something useful with my life. Instead of dreaming of owning a big ranch west of the Pecos River, I would have been a lot better off trying to buy Pete's gas station at the crossing on the Pecos and devote my days to serving man by filling the gas tanks of short-sighted travelers crossing the broad alkali desert.

The heifers were bred last January to four low-birthweight bulls with high weaning weight scores. Bought the bulls in November 2002 at a sale patronized by the wealthiest heifer bull buyers in Texas. Only time I ever spent that much money on cattle before was the compound interest on a herd I bought in 1950; I didn't retire the paper until eleven-odd years after the old cows were sold.

The bulls' offspring do have an early weaning date. We never have had so many calves born to mothers not ready to give milk. By the time we have pulled her calf, the cow is so upset she acts abnormal. Her calf has been through such a traumatic delivery he just wants to collapse on the delivery slab. And we, the unlicensed doctors and nurses, are so exhausted, we aren't any consolation, tearing around taking the halter off the new mother and moving the calf to safety. In so much excitement, the black and white cow on a Borden's milk carton couldn't come to her milk, much less a range cow only knowing man from six feet away on the feed ground.

One problem for an old hand selecting bulls nowadays is understanding the scoring and ultra-sounding. The secretary of the Angus association spoke before the last sale, imploring us to ignore a bull's looks in favor of his EPD. Said the buyers looked for cattle rated for gain. Off-color or white-bellied calves from black cows must tip the buyers that a bad EPD is hidden under the hide or in the white hair of the flanks, as my pintos and brindles always sell at a discount. Being "too full" or "too short" must also signal a poor EPD, as my sales sheet comes back marked down worse than a horse player's race card.

The rating goes farther to label bulls suitable for buyers who sell their calves through the auction, or the ones who choose to feed their own cattle. I sure like the idea. I look on it as insurance: if I only buy bulls for raising auction ring cattle, it might keep me from trying the feedlots one more time. (One herder at the last bull sale claimed to have made $253 a head feeding his last calf crop. Be his good fortune to find a memory drug strong enough to erase that deal.)

Don't guess all our problems are the bulls. Might be the good year causing the calves to grow bigger. Having sheep for so many years, I can't judge cow grass because the woolies kept the ground slick as a new Oldsmobile's hood. But I am going to run DNAs on the calves we've pulled and the four heifer bulls to see whether we can find the culprit. If it works, it will be our first scientific success.

I don't know whether Noah took along first-calf heifers on his Ark, but if he'd made a second voyage, it's a cinch he'd have left them to drown.

December 4, 2003