Finish Line

I didn't bale up my hat, just my 
measuring tape.

September and October are busy months on the ranch.  We're simultaneously finishing up hay season, weaning and vaccinating yearlings, shipping calves, feeding, preg checking and vaccinating our cows, and hopefully finding a second or two to buck hunt.  So, when we can check one or more of those off the to-do list, there's reason to celebrate.  My nephew, Gabe, has brought back my favorite end-of-hay-season tradition.  You toss your ball cap into the baler as it's making the last bale of the year.  You really have to remember to wear your least-favorite hat that day.  When the calves get shipped out, we usually celebrate with a lunch in town and when we're finished working cows I usually pat myself on the back and pour a stiff bourbon, but that's just to ward off achy muscles.

Grizz is such a good helper

This season, I finished cutting hay in early October.  I usually like to finish in late September, but a little rain postponed the season, so I was eager to be done.  On the last pass, in the last field, for the last day of 2022 cutting I noticed the header (the cutting part) of the swather was at a slight angle.  It should be level with the ground and I thought that I might have a leaky header cylinder.  Who cares? I thought, I'll just finish the field and drive to the shop and fix this mother later.  Like, springtime later.  I was done cutting for the year, so I gave a little whoop and started driving back to the shop.  I noticed the right side of the header was sagging more and more, so I stopped to check it out.  It wasn't a bad cylinder, it was a very large tire losing air quickly.  I limped into the barn lot and did the walk of shame back to the shop.  I even called my brother.  You won't believe what happened to me on the very last pass of the season.  We chuckled and I was still on the phone with Greg as I got in my truck to head home.  I was a little distracted, to say the least, and completely forgot I was pulling a stock trailer.  As I drove out of my uncle's lot, I cut a corner a little (ok, a lot) too sharply, and completely wiped out a frost-free faucet and a gate post, from which the lag bolts shredded my trailer tire. I swore.  Greg laughed.  And in 15 minutes I capped off a season's worth of hay cutting with two flat tires and a geyser in my aunt's flower bed.  I think that's a celebration tradition I'll try to skip next year.

Girls of Summer

 When a couple of our high school summer employee prospects fell through last spring, I started to worry a little.  Summer was quickly approaching and the ranch was going to be short-handed.  Finding part-time ranch work isn't always easy.  The work is hard, the pay is average, and the hours can be unpredictable.  I had already recruited Dylan, our 15 year old daughter, and we had Gabriel, my brother's nephew, coming up for his second summer, but we needed one more.  One more came in the form of another 15 year old girl.  Sadi started a little before Dylan was done with her freshman year, and by the time hay season rolled in, the two were thick as thieves.

The first thing they did was commandeer one of the nicer ranch trucks and drove it around the ranch like they were Thelma and Louise.  The blue Ford was their rig, and no one was to mess with it.  Was is technically legal for 2 underage teens to be driving?  I can't, and won't, answer that.  There's got to be an underage ranch-kid provision somewhere in the DMV's bylaws.  At least there should be.  I can tell you that by the end of summer they were both pretty good, and safe, drivers.

The best part, and it was what I hoped for Dylan when we hired Sadi, was that I could turn them loose on a project and they'd figure it out.  From fabricating steel latches for our scale house doors, to building fence through a muddy slew, they got the job done.  If one was baling hay, the other was buzzing around on a 4-wheeler, weighing and measuring all the bales.  They learned to drive hay squeezes, bale wagons, and tractors.  They set brace posts for fences in 100 degree heat.  They health checked the cattle in our pastures and helped doctor any that were sick.  They spent the summer horseback or on 4-wheelers, in beat up trucks and on ancient tractors.  They got sunburned, sweaty, and dirty and never complained.  And, in emergencies, I even let them drive my "going to town" truck.  In short, I trusted them.

I like to think that together they made good decisions.  I remember being 15 and working on the ranch with a couple of my buddies.  We had a lot of fun.  Too much, really.  I'm certain that "good decision makers" wasn't always the phrase used to describe us.  So, here's to the girls of summer.  I've always called Dylan a Jr. Badass, but after this summer, she and her new coworker might be up for a promotion.  The pay might not be any better, but plain old "Badass" has a nice ring to it, right?

Grey Devil

 I used to think that a cow was a cow was a cow.  When I was younger our commercial herd had a lot of variety -- Hereford, Charolais, Shorthorn, Gelbvieh, Angus -- and I didn't think much about each breeds' unique qualities.  Sure, the Angus were fierce mothers and our Hereford bulls were big ol' puppy dogs, but nothing stood out as too unique.  That is, until I went to the sale yard with my parents.  A pen of purebred Brahma pairs, from God knows where, came through and all it took for my Dad to start (and end) the bidding was for my Mom to say, "Those are pretty."

I learned how different one breed could be the first time I went to pet a new Brahma baby and heard its mother emit a growl that would have scared off a wolf pack.  The Brahmas didn't mingle much with the rest of the herd.  They never seemed to go near our bulls but they, like the Longhorns we purchased later, seemed to conceive through osmosis.  The Longhorns are amazing for finding feed and we keep a dry one around just because she is the best lead cow we've ever had.  If there's a blade of grass to be found, she'll sniff it out and take the whole herd to it.  The Jersey nurse cow we got last year is like your Southern Grandma -- sweet and kind and will feed any straggler who needs to be fed.  And then there's the Belties.

I haven't quite figured them out, to be honest.  We were warned about how protective they are of their babies, but tagging calves in our purebred Angus herd has made me pretty fearless and so far I haven't been steamrolled by a Beltie mother (I can't say the same for the Angus mothers).  Moving them can be like herding sheep: they'll bunch up together and run until, on some secret signal, they'll all scatter in different directions.  We've yet to own one that's truly mean, but we've had a couple that would prefer to be as far away from people as possible.  One in particular has been especially shy, which is a nice way of saying she's a real ass.  She has a name, but I just call her the Grey Devil.

Honestly, I've never been a fan of her.  We've talked about getting rid of her, but when you're in the process of building your herd, letting go of even one is a tough decision.  Or it used to be a tough decision until last week.  Like I mentioned, we've yet to have a mean Beltie, but the Grey Devil is close.  She's single-minded.  If she wants to go in a particular direction, she will, despite what's in her way.  And when she decided she did not want to go into the stock trailer, her only other option was through a gate I was trying to quickly close and then straight over Regina, who was standing in her way.  If you haven't seen her Instagram post (@crown.h.cattleco) showing her cuts and bruises she received from being body slammed by 1400 pounds of bitchy-bovine, it's worth a look.

Just as every breed might have a few "quirky" qualities, within each breed there are always bad apples.  Some cows are just jerks.  I'm getting used to the uniqueness of Belties and the more I learn the more I like them.  Except for the Grey Devil.  She's for sale.

Hope

I knew I was getting old the first time the barber, electric clippers humming in his hand, saw the need to trim off the hair growing from my ears.  I watched my youth fall to the floor along with those ear hairs.  It was a domino effect after that.  Soon after I could no longer text and drive because the font on my phone became inexplicably blurry.  Weird moles emerged on my back overnight.  And my taste in movies shifted; artsy-fartsy now put me to sleep and anything I watched had to be A) funny, or B) have Hope.  Most people watched The Road and found it dark and soul-sucking, but I wouldn't shut up about it because, you got it, it ended with Hope.

The idea of Hope carries over to my ranching life as well.  As a cattleman, I realize more and more that Hope is essential.  Some call it Faith, but I prefer Hope.  Hope speaks to the future; Hope takes work; Hope might even require a little luck.  And it's why, I think, I like the Belted Galloway breed so much.

Belties are tough boogers.  They act differently than the Angus cattle we raise on our ranch and there's been a transition getting used to their "flock and run" behavior.  But one had a calf last week that reminded me why I like them and why they feel like Hope.

Our strawberry Beltie calved, a little sooner than we expected, but the heifer calf was spry, healthy, and cute as all get out.  Regina went down to check on it the day after it was born and called me to say we had another new calf.  Emma, one of our favorite mothers, had a tiny, dirt-crusted, bull calf curled up by her hooves and we could tell immediately it was a premie.  Regina checked her books and it looked like he was almost 5 weeks premature.  I was skeptical we could do anything to save it but we had to try.  Regina and the kids quickly got her and baby in the corrals and I got what little milk I could from Emma.  The baby was a fighter (not as common in bull calves), and even though getting him to stand was like holding a block of Jello, he nursed his mother's milk from a bottle. 

 

Hiding baby

So we kept trying.  By the next day my Hope rose and I proclaimed he had a 50/50 chance of making it.  He still couldn't stand on his own, so we kept milking Emma and feeding the baby.  We even brought in our strawberry Beltie with the new baby and milked her, just to supplement Emma's milk.  By the evening of the second day I upped his odds of making it to 60/40.  And then, like a lot of premies, he crashed.  The 3rd morning he wouldn't drink.  I tried again mid-morning, and again in the afternoon, and again in the evening.  I finally poured less than 1/4 of a bottle down his throat and left him for the night.  It sucked.  I knew he'd be in worse shape by morning.  I'd seen it a million times.

And here's why I love Belties, and why I can't forget to lose Hope.  When I came down the next morning, I was full of dread about what I'd find in that little pen at our corrals.  Instead, I saw little Jello legs standing on his own and Emma had been nursed.  It was all I could do to not give a loud Whoop!  I backed away quietly and let them settle in.  By that evening the baby was walking and by the next day he was running and bucking (awkwardly) and getting his fill of milk on his own.

And that's Hope.  Belties are tough.  They're excellent mothers.  And tiny little premie bull calves sometimes turn out ok.  

Stars of the Silver Screen

Remember the show Fear Factor?  I do.  And I was a pretty big fan of it, so when my dad took a handyman jack handle to the side of his head and needed surgery in LA, I visited.  Somewhere between the hospital and the hotel, I saw a flyer for Fear Factor auditions.  I went, and failed, and never got the chance to be on TV and have a pile of tarantulas crawl on my face.  But then Regina got a call from a local video production company.  They had seen her website for Crown H Cattle Company and, because it's awesome, liked the content and wanted to come over to film a commercial for a local hospital.

Of course, I mostly forgot about the hubbub until I came in from work last fall and found three guys with cameras hanging out in front of the house.  I changed into my cleanest dirty shirt, added a vest I got for ordering a lot of cattle dewormer, and started catching horses.  While Regina and Grady have, probably, the coolest horses, Dylan and I have the prettiest.  That led to a lot of filming Dylan and Dad synchronized horse mounting, Drill-Team style turns, and tandem giddy ups.  The four of us pushed our Beltie cattle into an alfalfa field and back out, and then did it again.  They'd often direct me to, "Look at Dylan like I'm proud of her."  I didn't know how to take that.  I've heard of actors often saying that they don't know what to do with their hands when they are acting.  I didn't have that problem because I was holding reins, I just didn't know what to do with my face.  Like I'm proud?  Do I cry?  Smile with teeth?  Stoic cowboy gaze?  I settled on tight-lipped grimace and thus made hours and hours of footage completely unusable.

I finally gave them some good footage when my horse decided, for no apparent reason, to buck.  I rode it out like I was Billy Etbauer at the NFR Finals.  "Did you get that?" I panted, once Kid stopped bucking.  "Nope, sorry," the camera guy said.

I'd forgotten about the commercial until five months later, at one of Dylan's basketball games, some friends told us they'd seen us on TV.  Shortly after, we started getting the phone calls.  "You're on TV!" friends would yell.  Actually, the conversations usually began with, "I saw your horse on TV!" or, "I didn't recognize you, but I recognized your horse!"  That's when you know you really live in the country, when people can pick out your horse from a 30 second commercial.  We only have internet TV, so we haven't really seen the ad except for on our phones.  We've never been surprised with our own faces on TV while we ate our dinner on the couch.  We could have been watching some schmuck get buried in pythons on Fear Factor and suddenly our ad would come on, my face in a weird proud smile, Dylan's horse stealing the show.

Meat Crisis

 Crown H Cattle Company was recently in the middle of a meat crisis.  We've read about the loaded cargo ships, circling around ports, unable to offload their containers full of Nutella and Nissans, but in reality, aside from a few gaskets I needed for my truck, the choked out supply chain hadn't affected us too much.  That is, until we butchered our first Beltie steers and realized we were in desperate need of more freezer space.

We'd intended to have Crown H Beltie beef for sale in October.  Our steers were grain-finished for 90 days and were looking fat and delicious.  Regina was grinding away at the Crown H website (crownhcattlecompany.com), and we were ready to start delivering delicious cuts of amazing beef (see: beltie.org for some cool facts about its nutritional value).  We called the butcher September to schedule a time for Frank, our local processor, to come over and were told we'd have to wait until December.  December?  Was the butcher stuck on one of those loaded cargo ships?  The Belties would be hippos by then.  Luckily, there were 2 cut and wrap places in Siskiyou county (and now, there are 3, thanks 5 Marys!) and we we called, and begged, and got our beef squeezed into the books for an October butcher date.  The next step was to pick up another freezer to hold all the beef we would be expecting.

We tried to buy a freezer locally, but the size we needed required an online purchase.  Suddenly, we were in a race to get a freezer delivered before 1000 lbs. of meat arrived at our door.  The freezer lost that race.  We'd also butchered one Hanna Bros. steer, had 5 butchered turkeys, I'd just cut and wrapped my mule deer from buck season, and had decided, on a whim, to buy a lamb; our freezer space was limited to say the least.  When I picked up the Beltie beef there were so many boxes that it took 2 trips with my truck.  We started to panic.  

Regina got on the horn and luckily our friends at Denny Bar had both a giant chest freezer used for their restaurant overflow and an extra upright that only held ice packets and some margarita mix.  We spent a late night shuffling frozen beef around the valley, stuffing it into any and all available freezers.

Luckily, Regina sold three 1/4 shares of beef (our first sales!) which gave us a little room, and
the new freezer finally arrived.  We are ready for the next round of delicious Beltie beef to come our way (check the website, it'll be soon!).  And if we aren't ready?  It's good to have friends with giant freezers.

Just Another Day

I'm going to tell you a story about what it's like being a rancher.  It's a true story and all the events I'm about to describe happened in a single day.

It started like most fall days: feeding cattle.  I started with the bulls but I immediately got the big bale feeder jammed up with hay.  Some rice straw had wrapped around one of the rows of blades and plugged it up worse than a Woodstock Porta Potty.  Normally I would take care of the problem, but I also had a vet coming to check on Dylan's fair heifer, so my brother got to work on the feed truck.  It's a tricky job, removing hay from the blades, and takes a lot of slow movements and caution.  My brother isn't known for either, but he executed the job perfectly, until he didn't.  For the second time in my life he came up to me and asked, "Will you tell me if this needs stitches?"  The first time was a run in with a chainsaw and the answer then was a resounding yes.  This time, same answer.  Luckily, the vet was still there and so he cleaned up the wound, pulled out his handy-dandy stapler and several clicks later, my brother was wrapped up in hot pink vet wrap and good to go.

You'd think that with that kind of start to the day, the rest should go a lot more smoothly.  And it did; until it didn't.  We moved a herd of cattle across the road and a few calves got away from their mothers.  Stray calves are notorious idiots, cute as they are, and will always run in the opposite direction of the cows.  One ran into the neighbors, where it got chased out by their dogs, and then ran, and ran, and ran.  The last time we saw it was in the other neighbor's barn lot.  Perfect.  We drove in on 4-wheelers to scoop it up and, poof, it was gone.  After hiking hills, scanning fence lines, and driving ditches, we gave up.  That evening, after dark, I decided to go back and look and ta-da, there it was.  Brother came down and we made a plan, which immediately blew up in our faces.  The calf ran, brother pursued, and I chased on foot.  Luckily, my brother got a rope on the calf and I wrestled

Sometimes we do stupid stuff, 
sometimes the cattle do.

it in the back of my truck.  On my way to return the runaway, brother called, which I knew couldn't be with good news.  "I rolled the 4-wheeler," he said.  By the time I got back to him he had righted the bike and was heading home but by the next morning he couldn't cough or laugh without crying.  There's really no point in seeing a doctor for broken ribs, and the vet had long since gone home, so he had to tough it out for a few days.  

1 day, 2 wrecks.  I'd say that isn't, thankfully, a typical day-in-the-life, but it wasn't surprising either.  It's not a job for everyone, but, man, it sure is fun.

Molly Moo

Sometimes, especially on a ranch, you do things a certain way because, well, you've always done them that way.  But then the neighbors try a new approach and well, you can't exactly change and copy them, because that's plagiarism, right?  But, man, it really seems like a better idea and then another neighbor starts doing it, and heck, if everyone's doing it there just might be something to it.  And that's why we bought a nurse cow.

And nurse cow is just a dairy cow that is used to raise bummer, or orphan, calves.  They're often pretty cheap, usually gentle, can raise 3-4 calves, and, best of all, those 2 or 3 a day bottle feedings I've been doing all winter long for the past 14 years?  No more.  All it took was a 3 hour drive with a trailer to meet Dale.

Dale didn't sell me a nurse cow.  Through no fault of his own, he somehow became a nurse cow middle man.  He doesn't do it for money, and he certainly doesn't do it for fame.  Dale is just a good guy.  He's a friend of a friend of a friend and is the kind of guy who always has a toothpick in his mouth and calls guys, "boss."  I drove to Dale's place and he hopped in my truck and guided me to the dairy.  In 15 minutes I had 2 cows in the trailer and was heading home.

Grafting calves onto new mothers can be a chore.  Mama cows often don't want calves that aren't their own so we do all sorts of tricks to convince them that the orphan is really theirs.  We've skinned out dead calves and had the orphan wear the hide so the nurse cow still catches a whiff of her original calf.  It's a lot like the scene in Silence of the Lambs when Anthony Hopkins wears the cop'
s face as a disguise.  Sometimes I'll pour molasses or maple syrup on the calf's back so the mother licks it and since she's licking this new calf and it tastes like candy, she might as well keep it.  Whatever we do, it's usually difficult.  Mothers will kick strange calves that are trying to nurse and it usually takes a lot of attempts in a squeeze chute to get them together.  But a dairy cow?  I put our new Jersey in a pen with 2 calves, said, "Congratulations! You just had twins!" and walked away.  In 10 minutes the 2 calves were nursing their new mommy and she was licking their backs like she'd just birthed them.  I only wish the neighbors had bought a nurse cow years ago; it would have saved me a lot of time.

Fire Starter

This summer was hot.  Miserably hot.  We were in the middle of raging wildfires, insanely high temperatures, low water reserves, and a shortage of above-ground pools at Walmart.  It was a perfect storm for a field fire.  And yet, I still thought that cutting drier than normal grain hay on a drier than normal Hartstrand field would be a good idea.  Spoiler alert: it wasn't.

To be fair (use your Letterkenny voice when you read that), A) this was the earliest I could even get to that field, B) it had a decent rain hit it 2 days prior, and C) I started cutting in the morning so it wouldn't be too hot or dry.  And mostly, things went well.

Until they didn't.  I'd cut all morning and had just one more pass to make before I was finished, but as I turned the swather around to make my final pass, I saw smoke.  Oh shit.  From that moment on, I went full Keystone Cops.  I was near Grant's house, so I spun the swather back around and raced into his driveway.  I started grabbing anything I could get my hands on that would put out a fire.  As I ran back and forth with shovels, coolers full of water, and rakes, I didn't notice that I had passed, several times, a literal pile of fire extinguishers.  I raced back out to the field on a 4-wheeler I saw the fire had expanded to the size of, say, the RV I'd soon be living in if I burned down all the homes on Hartstrand.  I dumped the cooler on the flames and extinguished 1/10th of the flames.  A young passerby in flip-flops stopped to help and tried stomping out the flames.  Bad idea.  

That's when I grabbed the fire extinguisher.  Those things are appropriately named.  Honestly, I don't think I'd ever used one before, but I've seen movies and I knew it was a lot like using a grenade (which I also have never used before).  And it worked.  I got about 90% of the fire out and the rest I smothered with my giant, broken grain shovel.  I finally breathed.

My brothers showed up with a water truck and I doused the area.  Neighbors showed up.  CalFire showed up.  I found the rock that the swather blades nicked and likely sparked the fire, so I saved it for my baby book.  I've been cutting hay for a lot of years and this was my first fire.  My dad, who also cut hay for a lot of years, started only one, but it was a big one.  Boray planes were deployed.  This one sufficiently spooked me.  I'm cutting now in a swather/fire truck.  I have shovels, fire extinguishers, piss-pumps, fire shelters, a helmet, and flashing lights.  It might be overkill, but if it happens again, I'll be ready.

Of course, I didn't have time to take a picture.  But here's a cool one of the day the smoke rolled in.

Up and Back

Cats ride for free

 For the purists, summer begins on the solstice in June, for most, it begins on Memorial Day, but for Scott Valley alfalfa growers, it begins when hay season starts.  And, more specifically, it begins when the swathers fire up and start mowing down hay.  

There is usually a span on a couple days, usually in late May, when the farmers start getting restless.  They stare at the skies, then they check, and re-check, their weather apps, waiting for the perfect window of good weather.  When the coast looks clear, they hop in their trucks and start doing laps around the valley, checking to see who was brave, or dumb, enough to start cutting.

Fortunately for me, I couldn't do any of those things this year because I was so far behind, I was still under my machine, changing the oil and prepping it for summer.  I finally got the big red machine ready to go just in time, too, because just when I put on the the last fresh cutting blade, I could hear the distinct whine of a swather motor in the neighbor's field.  And so begins the daily ritual.

Dogs do too

Someone asked me once what cutting hay is like.  You start with cutting a few rounds around the outside of a field, usually 4 but some farmers do 3, then you cut a straight line, either in the middle or along an edge, and start going up, then back.  Repeat that a million times and at some point in late September you've caught up on a year's worth of podcasts and you're done.  It's a job I started doing with my dad as a small kid.  First I'd just ride along with him, then he eventually let me take a few passes, and eventually I was on my own.  A hundred years later, I'm still at it.  Up and back, on repeat.

The Country Club

The view is ok.  I guess.

 I'm a member of a Country Club.  No, don't start humming the Travis Tritt hit from 1990.  This is a genuine, legit country club.  Think: manicured golf greens, goose filled ponds, a driving range, and a cold beer at the 19th hole.  Then think what would happen if the apocalypse happened and the golf course went feral.  It's a cattleman's dream.

A friend of ours purchased this abandoned golf course, one on which I used to play when I thought golf was a fun and worthwhile hobby, and let us put cattle on it to graze down the overgrown grasses.  We spent a few afternoons fixing fences, meeting the neighbors (who had a lot of questions), and adding gates and water troughs.  When the truck released the cattle -- a load of young heifers -- they were in awe.  Not of just the jaw-dropping views of Mt. Shasta, but of the knee high grass.

Release the hounds!

So now, checking the cows is the perfect excuse to grab an old rusty 9-iron, hit a few balls that have been dredged up from the pond, and sit back with a cold one and enjoy the solitude and the view.  Now that's my kind of country club.

Scott Valley Hello

We'll work on driving first, waving later

Whenever my wife and I are driving in a city I always get asked the same question: "Why are you waving at everyone?"  It's a fair question, and I can only say that old habits are hard to break.  Here in Scott Valley, you are pretty much required to wave.  At everyone you see.  I even feel a sense of guilt when I get caught zoning out and I forget The Wave.

And, yes, Scott Valley has its own wave.  It's the peace sign, oddly enough, and I've been noticing lately that more and more people are using it as their wave.  Of course, there are the head nodder wavers, and the flappy-hand wavers, and the one-finger wavers (usually the pointer finger, but sometimes the middle), and the rock-and-roll devil horns wavers, but also, there are an awful lot of peace-sign wavers.  So many that I've officially named it the Scott Valley Hello.

Too cool to wave

Why a peace sign, you might ask.  It all started with my brother, Greg.  His buddy, Roger, works for the county, so we pass him on the road a lot.  When you see the same person on the same stretch of road for several days in a row, you start to get creative with your waving.  Greg started giving Roger the peace sign and Roger thought it was hilarious.  So he started giving it back.  I thought it was funny, so I started using the peace wave at every car I passed.  From there, it took on a life of its own.

 And that is the origin of the Scott Valley Hello.

Corral Humility

This oxbow can support a lot of weight

 We've been spending, off and on, the last few weeks deconstructing, rearranging, and rebuilding one of our sets of corrals.  We set new cedar posts, put up new lumber, hammered nails, poured concrete, welded oxbows, and rehung gates.  Things were looking pretty spiffy, I must say.  We had a few small projects left to make it perfect, but also had a herd of cattle that needed vaccinating, so we ran them through.  We figured it would be a good test of our progress.

I will tell you this: I was feeling pretty proud of the work we did.  We ran the cows through and discovered a few tweaks we'll need to make.  Not the 5 star rating I hoped for, but not surprising either.  Next, we ran the calves through and found a couple more even smaller fixes we'd need to make.  All in all, things were looking pretty good.

Then we ran the bulls through.  There were only 3, but all it took was 1.  He crashed through 8 fences in 2 days -- 5 of which were in our new, beautiful corrals.  It was a lesson in humility, for sure.  And, when we go back to fine-tune our set up (and replace the boards and gates the bull smashed), we might just set the whole damn thing in metal.

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.

Semi-Handy Man

Backhoe operator, carpenter

 My Father-in-Law is an engineer.  I joke that the problem with engineers is that they know a little bit about how everything works, which means they also know how to fix pretty much anything.  It's a wonder they can get anything done; they must fight the urge to fix every problem they see.  Ranchers are like blue-collar engineers (And I know, some of my ranching friends are actual engineers. I'm not talking about you).  We have to be able to do -- and fix -- a million little things to keep a ranch running smoothly.  I have to be a veterinarian, cowboy, mechanic, carpenter, trucker, butcher, logger, hydrologist, electrician, farrier, nutritionist, and plumber.  We're generally just not as precise as engineers. 

Trapper

I was thinking about all this on Sunday as I lay face down in the mud with my head in a hole as I repaired an 1 1/4" pvc pipe that fed 3 water troughs.  I'd hit it with a pair of post hole diggers while I was being extra careful and digging this particular hole by hand because I thought there might be a pipe down there, somewhere.  I was right.  It was the last thing I wanted to do on a Sunday and I wasn't pleased.  Just that afternoon, I'd already been a heavy equipment operator, carpenter, and surveyor. Now I was a reluctant plumber.  And, as my wife and kids pointed out, I could add sailor to the list, because I sure was swearing like one. 

Can You Still Hear the Bulls Screaming?

Baby jerks

The bulls were screaming last night.  If you've never heard bulls bellowing, it sounds a lot like a bagpipe and a chainsaw had a very colicy baby, and then forgot to change its diaper.  They woke Regina up at 1:30 AM, which means Regina woke me up at 1:31 AM.

"Do you hear that?" she asked.

I told her that I do now.

"I think they're in with the heifers," she said as she went outside.

Old jerk

When your wife goes outside in the middle of the night to see if the bulls are out, it's a good idea to join her.  And she was right; an Angus bull jumped the fence and was in with our 2 young Belted Galloway heifers.  Not the cross breeding we want, so we had to chase it out.  And man, was he pumped up.  Two bulls on the other side of the fence cheered him on as I ran laps, chasing him around the pen.  The bulls across the street thought they were missing out, so they joined in on the loud noises contest.  Everyone was hollering, including me.  I won't tell you what I yelled, but it was certainly colorful.

After 3 laps around the pen, the jerk finally found the gate and joined his compadres.  Regina and I spent another half-hour fixing fence by dying flashlight while the bulls kept up their choir.  It sounded like we were in the middle of the elk rut in Yellowstone.

We finally got back to bed, and know what?  They shut up, mercifully.  I suspect they moo-ed themselves hoarse.  But I was so amped up from running (probably less than 100 yards) that I lay awake for another hour, and kept thinking, "The bulls, the bulls, the bulls ..."

   

Manic Spring

Springtime on the ranch is bananas.  It's a little like getting in the passenger seat of a car with an overly-confident 16 year old.  Lots of go fast, stop quickly.  When the sun comes out, as it usually does in February and March, every tractor fires up, every calf needs to get a vaccination, and every project we've put off for the last 3 months needs to get done, NOW.  It's 100 mph until, undoubtedly, it rains, or snows.  Everything comes to an abrupt stop.  The tractors get parked, the corrals get too muddy, and everyone sits at home at stares at their Weather Underground app until ... magically, the sun shines (usually the next day), and we repeat.  It's exhausting.

These 2 photos were taken just seconds apart

Every season has its rhythm.  Summer is when you put your head down and work long, steady hours.  Fall is, well, almost as crazy as the spring (working cattle and haying collide), but it's also hunting season, which makes it exciting.  In the winter we take a breath, and then, blam, here comes spring.  Spring is everyone's scary drunk uncle who has a neck tattoo and crashes your kids 3rd birthday party 
and brings a puppy and hooker so no one knows if they're mad or ecstatic.  And here we are, it's not even technically spring, but it sure feels like it.  So, spring, welcome.  Come on in.