Still Cowboys

Having missed three heifers, one with a fresh calf, across the creek when I fed, Robbin & I jumped in the Kubota to see if we could find them yesterday afternoon, eyes peeled for coyotes. We found the pair, but also our neighbor’s heifer across the fence, down with legs up, looking dead at a distance, but trying to have her calf.

We went for him and the calf pullers, parts that have outlasted their canvas bag, big jug of water, lubricant, disinfectant and penicillin. As an afterthought, I grabbed a stiff lariat rope someone had left at the shop. Clarence beat us to his first-calf heifer, on his knees with some hay string in the shade and surrounded by the heifer’s mates, his Kawasaki Mule running when we arrived. We assembled the pullers after slipping the OB chains around the calf’s front feet, connecting the OB chains to the big chain from the jack with a quarter-inch bolt and nut, the original S hooks long-straightened and lost.

She was a big heifer with small pelvis in obvious pain as we applied pressure and lubricant. The calf’s feet were big and he was alive. Just as we were making progress, she jumped up, Clarence with a hold on the OB chains, me with the breeching, pole and jack, scattering the channel locks we used for a jack handle, cross-country. It was a fairly even pull to begin with, and I thought she was wearing down when the pole I was holding disassembled, leaving Clarence with a grip on the chains. Approaching 73, his legs couldn’t keep up with his grip, and out across the pasture she trotted, dragging breeching and jack, swinging from the chains connected to the calf’s front feet.

We had the rope—a 7/16th x 30-foot cable I tied to the axel of his Mule. We drove towards her. I needed a big loop, already loosing 5 feet of length from the bowline on the axel to the passenger’s seat, leaving me only a coil and a half in the hand I held-on with as I swung with the other, not sure whether to jump clear when I caught or duck under my slack as it got tight. What ran through my head without resolution became academic after several misses, and having to unwind their slack from around the axel. From the shade of our original oak tree, Robbin said it was pretty good watching. A one point, the heifer was turning in a tight circles left, the centrifugal force of which, as Clarence kept up, made standing and staying aboard my full-time job.

The chase brought us closer to the corrals and an ancient, Linton squeeze. I got the gate afoot, Robbin fell in behind her on the Kubota, and Clarence turned her through the gate on the Mule. Long story short, we saved the heifer, but lost a huge calf.

Over drinks as shadows crept across the canyon, we replayed the afternoon. My first cowboy hero, Clarence ran this ranch for my Dad and Granddad when he was 16, and I had to ask him, “How old do you think those pullers are? They were still in their canvas bag when I got here out of college in 1970.”

“Sometime in the Fifities, I guess.” He replied.

“Do you think Dad would throw too big a fit if I wasted money on some new ones?”