All Things Ranching and Farming: "Party All Night 'Til the Cows Come Home"

Whew! What a busy last couple days. After a lackadaisical Sunday (probably one of the last ones I’ll have for a while), I started out Monday morning in the barn helping get the horses ready for the day. This entitles putting half a coffee can of oats in every stall and letting the horses in. Then, it’s time to direct traffic. Horse traffic that is. And the same rules (of normal traffic) apply here…get out of their way! Each horse has its own specific stall that they are supposed to go to with their name and description above it. Did I mention that there are only two colors of horses here? There is about 8 sorrels and 3 brown ones. So there I was, trying to direct horse traffic at 5:30 in the morning. “Oh look, it’s a sorrel. And there’s another one that looks exactly like the last one, and another one.” Here are 11 hungry horses fastly walking their way into the stable barn and here I am trying to figure out who is who and where they belong. They do have slightly different markings, but everything happened so fast that first morning, it was just mass chaos. Finally, after day 3 of doing this, I think I can tell which one is which. I even have their names down!

Moving on. Monday morning we were getting ready for our all day ride. I got to ride a brown, TALL, long legged horse named Sissy. We (Sam (crew leader from Nebraska), Todd (boss), Matt (full time worker from Michigan), and I) left right after breakfast and headed out to the “NL” division. About 18 miles up the road, we picked up two more riders: Jolly Holly from Florida, and Levi from South Dakota. They are working at the Eagle Creek Division right now. 17 miles down, everyone and their trusty steeds were kicked out of the trailer at the gate of the pasture. Then we started into the pasture to gather the cows. As we headed them out the gate and down the road, another rider joined us. Shane is the manager of the NL division and rode with us half way. Shane also thinks that my name is Julie and I didn’t have the heart to correct him. We have these little radios that we communicate on and I finally figured out he was talking to me after I heard Julie a couple times. Todd left us at this point.

I was positioned up towards the front for this ride and my job was to keep them strung out and moving. On our way down the road, we passed the mailboxes of the Williams Brothers. For those of you that don’t know who they are, let me give you a little history lesson, the same lesson that my brother had given me the day before. The Williams Brothers are the owners of the world’s largest farm tractor: the Big Bud V16-747 tractor. See, you learn something new everyday!

Back to the cattle drive. Like I said earlier, Shane left at the halfway point and that left us with 5 riders. We made it to the stopping point where the ladies would bed down for the night called “Stage Cabin”. We should have savored the nice weather that we had on Monday and prayed a little harder to keep it coming because Tuesday was a brutal, viciously cold day.

Tuesday’s ride started out with 4 riders: Sam, Jolly Holly, Anna (the cook!) and I. The mommas were a little slower moving today but wouldn’t you be moving slow if you’d gone 17 miles the day before almost 9 months pregnant!? Instantly, frostbite set in and I’m pretty sure I lost a couple toes. Just kidding, it felt like it though. I actually felt more like a frozen popsicle that was just sitting on top of the horse. About a mile into the ride, I put on my rain slick to cut the wind. I was out in front for this ride and spent the majority of the first half babysitting the first 30 cows. They kept on stopping which halted everything behind them so eventually Sam sent me to the front to get those cows moving! I also spent the majority of this ride walking into the wind, trying to keep my toes, fingers, and face from freezing. No such luck. I even became desperate and walked for about a mile to regain feeling.

Eventually my group of cows got so far in front of the others, that I couldn’t see them anymore. Around noon time I was told to stop my cows and let the rest catch up. Then the pickup and trailer picked us up and we blasted the heaters in the pickup while we ate lunch. Pretty soon, the cows had caught up and passed us. And they didn’t stop! After lunch (it might have gotten 1 degree warmer), I was sent up to the front again, Sam and Holly went back to get the cows that had stopped and laid down, and Anna decided to babysit the heaters in the pickup. Sam and Holly’s cows were about 2 miles back and verrryyy slow moving. I thought about waiting for them but my cows wanted to go, so…they went! And they didn’t stop! I felt like the pied piper leading the cows down the road for the last 6 or 7 miles but they kept following so I kept leading. Believe it or not, those cows followed me the rest of the way home and boy was I ever glad to see that final gate. I started counting them in and got to 297 cows before they stopped coming. Seems my group of 30 grew a little. About 20 minutes later, Sam came over the hill with the rest of his cows. Somewhere along the way, we lost Jolly Holly. I think someone took her back to Eagle Creek. She was telling us in the pickup that this was by far the coldest she has ever been! 394 cows and approx 33 miles later, we made it home!