Spring, or something that only slightly mimicked what I would truly consider spring, was not particularly kind to my country. It was cold. It was windy.

We’ve got a little 40-acre piece of ground that really isn’t much more than just a piece of ground. By that, I mean it doesn’t really grow much more than dirt except for a 10-yard strip along the north fence where the end gun from the neighbor’s pivot shoots over the fence.

A while back, about the time winter was thinking about getting serious, I did something I’d never done before: I got a flu shot.

Despite my mostly deserved reputation for tardiness, I was on a pretty good roll that morning. I had most of the feeding done by the time Mr. Sunshine finally eked his lazy head over the snowcapped peaks to the east.

A few years ago, I was asked to tag along on a trail ride in the great Owyhee country of southwestern Idaho with a few dozen state, county and federal officials and several distinguished members of the hierarchy of the Western cattle industry.

If you’re reading this, it means I just slipped in under the wire, not unlike the horses I’ve been chasing this morning – the same horses that were out a few nights ago at 10:30 p.m. when I was 20 miles away on my way back from a meeting in town.

I was right in the middle of a fairly precarious situation when I felt my phone buzzing in my shirt pocket.

The unrelenting early spring wind continued on. It was well into its third day of mercilessly tormenting me. Oh, it had slowed to about 15 mph, but now the gusts were accompanied by flurries of snow that whipped my face like the tail of a nervous colt recklessly slapping at a deer fly.

I brought the old pickup to a Smart Chick Olena sliding stop in front of the house. Any reiner who knows anything would have been impressed – had my mount been a blue roan instead of a beat-up old blue Chevy. To nobody’s surprise, I was running late again.

Back a decade or three ago, I took my first post-college job on a ranch in the wilds of White Pine County, Nevada. I spent a couple years there, and although it was a bona fide big cow outfit, it never attracted the big-time buckaroo types who tend to bounce from one Great Basin ranch to the next.