Traffic

Day 1.  Moving right along.

 If you're hankering to go and check out bucks in their velvet or collect empty beer cans, you could do worse than driving Eastside Road.  It starts in Ft Jones, changes its name to East Callahan somewhere in the middle, and ends up in the city of Callahan.  It's usually the road less travelled.  With exceptions.  Funeral processions, slow tractors, and cattle drives all force the normally slow Eastside drivers to an even slower crawl.

Day 2.  All balled up.

We've driven one of our cattle herds down this road twice in the last week.  The first day was on a Sunday and it was cold and raining and we had a crew of 10 horseback cowboys and cowboygirls.  The cows probably thought they were heading for greener pastures and made it the 5 miles in record time.  The only slowpokes in the bunch were the bulls who were on the last days of their breeding season.  You can guess why they moved slowly.  The next day the herd was vaccinated and dewormed and then on Tuesday we saddled back up with 6 riders and took them another 6 miles to pasture.  By now the cows were skeptical and sore and moved at a turtle's pace.  Even my out-of-shape horse was sulky.  The cows tried to eat every blade of ditch grass along the way and became a mass of several hundred balled up bovines.  There was no driving through them without serious risk of a new cow poo paint job on your rig.  When we finally made it to the pasture the line of cars piled up behind the drive rivaled rush hour on the 405 in LA.

Most people around here accept cattle drives as a minor inconvenience.  I saw a lot of folks driving through with their smart phones out, videoing the progress.  And (at least on this drive) everyone waved, smiled, and gave us an encouraging word.  Life in Scott Valley generally moves at a slow pace, but, especially in the spring, things start to speed up.  We just add a few cows now and then to remind everyone to take a breath, slow down, and smell the manure.

Hot Heifers

Bad Beezys

 We preg checked our heifers this week.  If you've never seen cattle get pregnancy checked, you're in for a real surprise.  It's not pretty.  Usually Greg, sometimes me, and in this case, a veterinarian, puts on a long glove and sticks one hand, then forearm, then elbow, then bicep, in rectally.  From there, you can feel the cervix and uterus and lots of mushy parts and sometimes even a live calf, all through the wall of the rectum.  It's messy (lots of projectile pooping), but it's the quickest, easiest, and most effective way to tell if a cow is bred.

Friday Feed Line

Heifers are a special bunch.  As young females, they're not always great at navigating a chute or our corrals.  We had a new vet here and we wanted to impress him with our bitching corral set up.  What impressed him most was the leaping ability of our young cows.  Pregnant and open cows go in separate pens and we quickly ran out of places to put our open heifers because they had crashed thorough so many fences and broke so many boards.  When they did finally get their turn in the chute, they'd lie down, back up, and were just plain uncooperative to the guy who was only trying to stick his arm up their ass.

After the 3rd jailbreak we started apologizing to the vet and swore up and down they'd never acted like this before.  It felt like taking a toddler to a nice restaurant and watching in horror as she throws her mashed potatoes at the neighboring table.  After the 5th fence crash we starting thinking about career changes.  Luckily, it ended there.  We liked the new vet as he was both helpful and didn't seem to mind a little chaos.  We had a pretty good outcome with the pregging, and found out that Dylan's fair heifer is very pregnant.  We survived to stay in ranching another day.  It couldn't have gone any better.

MTV Spring Break: Hanna Brothers

Wheel lines.  Ug.

 The closest I ever came to having an MTV-style spring break was a few years ago we took our kids to Disney World and then stayed a few days in Daytona Beach.  Daytona Beach?  I grew up in the 80s and I watched a lot of MTV.  I knew what coastal Florida looked like in mid-spring, and it definitely was not a place to take kids.  Hoards of drunken college students blowing off steam?  This was the best (or worst) idea ever.  I couldn't wait.  Then we got there.  Apparently, Daytona Beach hasn't been a cool spring break hangout since about the time I quit watching MTV.  The closest thing we saw to mayhem were the cheerleaders there for a national competition as they practiced their routines on the beach.

My helper.

In college I never went anywhere for spring break.  My friends all headed south to Lake Havasu but I was always broke by Easter so I came home to the work on the ranch for a week and make enough money to get me to summer.  Things haven't changed much since then and we usually don't go too far during break.  This year was no exception.  I fed a lot of cows and started up wheel lines because of this unusually dry spring.  The kids tagged along in the feed truck with me.  The excitement was that we started working to fix up a set of corrals, and that's really depressing that that was the highlight.  Almost.  

The real highlight is our version of Friday Night Lights.  Every Friday the Drill Team meets up at the Pleasure Park to practice.  The parents drink buckskins and grill and it's become a spring tradition.  I'll probably expand on this later (mostly on the choice to name a rodeo arena "Pleasure Park"), but it was a perfect way to wrap up spring break.  MTV would never air a Spring Break: Hanna Bros. edition, but I don't think I'd want it any other way. 

Real Ranch Roping

This calf pooped out his butt

 Ranch roping, for most cowboys, means either 1) a competition that involves big, graceful loops, lots of patience, and well trained horses, or 2) literally, any roping done, off a horse, on a ranch.  But not us.  Here at Hanna Bros, ranch roping has an entirely different meaning.  Here it's the ugly child from a stock car race and pro-rodeo union.  

When we have a sick cow, or calf, the best thing to do is get it separated from the herd by walking it slowly to a set of corrals or a trailer.  Most of the time that just won't work and we have to doctor the animal out in the pasture.  It's a 2-person job: the driver and the roper.  The roper digs out the least-worst rope he or she can find from behind the seat of the truck and has to pin himself up against the headboard while the driver goes like hell to catch up to the calf.  When the calf is caught, you have to dally to the steel post welded to the headboard.  In the last Mad Max movie, remember the guy in the mask who was strapped to the front of the truck as they chased the good guys down?  That's how it feels roping off a flatbed.  It requires the balance of a surfer and the precision of a PRCA tie-down roper. 

When all else fails, just put them in a chute

Our calves start hitting the ground in mid-October.  Our thought is that by the time the weather gets really nasty, the calves are old enough to tough out poor conditions.  Generally, it works pretty well.  We'll still get a handful of calves that will get one of two things: scours or pneumonia.  Both can kill a calf if they aren't treated, so we keep a close eye on anything that looks poorly.  With scours, calves get the shits so bad that they dehydrate quickly.  They are generally pretty weak and it's not uncommon to just walk up to one and treat it.  Pneumonia calves are a different story.  They'll stretch their neck out and wheeze and gasp for air, but you take one step out of the truck and they run off.  If you don't treat it early, pneumonia can turn chronic.

Grant and I have been trying to catch a wheezy heifer all week.  She's crafty.  The big problem with pneumonia is that you don't want them to exert too much energy or their condition can get worse.  It's a catch-22 -- usually you have to run them down to give them antibiotics to make them better.  We've tried twice lately and we can't even get within 30 feet of her.  She bobs and weaves and runs in circles that the truck can't follow.  I've thrown the lariat out as far as I could and had the loop land squarely on top of her shoulders, but wasn't long enough to loop over her nose.  A few ranchers have resorted to using an air gun that injects medicine.  It's like the tranquilizer gun you see big game vets use.  I may have to borrow it, or get a longer rope.