Calving season. It’s the very best of what the agrarian lifestyle has to offer, interspersed with moments of extreme disappointment that always seem to accompany the absurd futility of the livestock business. There isn’t another time or season of the year that exhilarates me more than calving season. At the same time, however, there is no other time of the year that can take the wind out of my sails, jerk my feet out from under me and kick me in the kidneys like a calving season gone bad.
A four- or five-day cold spell in the early stretches of winter is manageable – something to which I barely give a second thought. An early-spring snowstorm in March that dumps a few inches of the white stuff, with temperatures in the teens and 20s, can make for a two-day month of Sundays when each day brings a half dozen new calves into the frozen heifer pasture. There isn’t a lot of extra help to be found at my place. A shift change means I’m changing my socks at 2:00 in the morning and swapping the faded green wool rancher cap for the crusty 20-year-old black beaver felt when the sun shows up from its hiding spot east of the mountains. So, it goes without saying that Mother Nature, with her irascible unpredictability, plays a large part in my worldview during calving season.
My mood was already on the tart side of sour that afternoon, and I was barely a fortnight into this year’s iteration of calving season. I’d spent a sizable chunk of the previous night in the heifer pasture hunting for the mother of a motherless, but otherwise healthy, little heifer calf I’d found gamely trying to steal milk from a heifer that had just calved herself. The new mother, still pretty unsure of exactly what it was that nature required of her, was quite perplexed by the whole situation. I gathered the little urchin up and took her to the barn and got some warm colostrum in her belly by way of a tube feeder. She was a quick study and took right to sucking the bottle for the second feeding.
With the aid of daylight, I eventually found the reluctant mother of the resolute little calf. Since she’d already given a telling hint as to her temperament and mothering ability through the abandonment of her calf, I decided I’d continue to bottle feed the baby until a more suitable mother option presented itself. Unfortunately, I was fairly certain I’d soon have the opportunity to graft this little calf onto some cow who’d somehow manage to find a way to lose her calf in the near future. It is an understood part of the calving subsection of the Code of the West.
As things turned out, the opportunity to extend my role as bovine social worker was not a long time in coming. After feeding, as I was riding through the largest group of cows in search of new babies in need of tagging, I noticed a lone cow off in the distance at the far northwest corner of the field by the big concrete water trough, a sure sign that she had recently calved. I usually wouldn’t be too awfully concerned about a lone cow during calving season, but since I’d already found a dead newborn in a snowbank earlier in the day, I was a bit on edge, and something didn’t feel quite right about the cow off in the distance. My foreboding premonition was confirmed as I rode up on the nervous cow. There at her feet was the lifeless body of her newborn calf. I immediately recognized the big black cow as one of my favorites – a good mother with a touch of caution in her demeanor but not so much “Crazy Alice” in her that she’d hunt you down and blow snot down your neck as she stomped you in the mud.
Whenever I find a dead one, I allow myself a minute or two for a minor meltdown before I move on with the business at hand. It’s part of my normal therapy routine. Naturally assuming the current environmental conditions to be the culprit, I cussed the cold and the snow and the weather and the poor decision-making ability of the cow. Nevertheless, I knew I now had the perfect mother candidate for my stalwart little bottle calf. My relative optimism was confirmed when the cow dutifully, and with no hint of lunacy that sometimes accompanies a cow with a newborn, followed as we dragged the dead calf through the field and directly into the calving pen.
Since I knew Grandpa always had a sharp knife on hand, I borrowed my octogenarian father’s old hunting knife to cut a chunk of hide off of the dead calf to tie onto the adoptee. Despite all of the theories and solutions that are often slung around the ranching social media sphere, experience has taught me that this is the most reliable method to graft a calf. I’ve rarely seen it fail.
The skinning job took barely three minutes, and I marveled at the edge on my dad’s knife, making a mental note to take care as I made the final slits in the hide so I could tie it on the back of the calf. Regrettably, my mental note was taken by an imbecile. As I forced the tip of the knife through the wet hide, it slipped just a fraction of an inch too far, slicing into my forefinger. I took a quick glance at what seemed to be a gaping gash in my finger and forced the thought of a trip into town for stitches out of my head as I grabbed the spare cotton glove out of my coat pocket and put it on my hand. I sometimes don’t handle my own injuries with much grace, and I certainly didn’t have time for this diversion.
I somehow managed to get the hide rudimentarily tied onto the calf, and as I had hoped, both the adopter and the adoptee cooperated with the process. In short order, I returned to the house to assess the extent of my injury. My wife was at her job at the high school, so the initial triage fell to the other partner in the marriage. I was on my own. Certain that I’d see a deep and gruesome wound on my mangled finger, and after several minutes of self encouragement, I finally convinced myself to remove the bloody glove from my hand. To my great surprise, the slice was clean, and the wound remained closed. I determined I was going to survive, and with the help of a big Band-Aid and some bright orange Vetrap, I was out the door and ready for the next misadventure.
Although my finger was pretty tender for a few days, I was taught some valuable lessons that day. It never serves a useful purpose to throw a fit or rush through something that requires patience and a calm mind. Neither man nor beast benefits from hysterics and angry reactions, and it’s a sure way to cut into something you’d rather not. Perhaps just as impactful was the realization that often, beneath the turbulent surface or bloodied glove of a minor train wreck, things may not be quite as bad as you expect. Sometimes a Band-Aid really can fix the problem.
