Sammy and Dani had their first hockey tournament last weekend, here, and won all their games. Dani made her first goal. On Sunday Lynn and I went to town to watch one of their games before church, and took photos of each of them as they played.
Michael finished splitting all of their wood and brought the wood splitter down to start splitting the rest of ours. Heather got home from Canada last Sunday and said it’s a lot warmer down here right now than where she was visiting (west of Saskatoon). We are really grateful for the warmer weather because our cows are very happily grazing on the 320; every day that they can stay up there is one day less of feeding hay!
Last Tuesday Lynn and Andrea went up on the 4-wheeler to check on the cows, since we hadn’t gone up there for a while, and the cows were doing fine, but some elk hunters were shooting right above them. The elk ran down into the timber on our place, in amongst our cows, and the hunters were coming right after them. Lynn and Andrea were afraid they might come on down and shoot at the elk in our place—where the cows were scattered all through the timber with the elk—so Andrea hiked up through there and spooked the elk back out. The elk ran back toward the hunters, who shot one. So Andrea did everyone a favor—chased the elk back to the hunters, and kept the hunters from possibly shooting one of our cows accidentally in the timber on our place.
The whitetail deer are congregating in our fields and eating on our haystacks at night. We have to keep all the alfalfa hay covered with tarps, but they are still able to get at the lower edges of our big stack. The deer are small and don’t eat a lot—except when there are 20 or more and they start to make a mess of things as well as eat.
On Wednesday Lynn drove his 4-wheeler back up to the 320 to check on the cows again and make sure they are all ok after the hunting activity. He didn’t get far enough to see all the cows, however. Halfway up the ridge toward Preacher’s Spring something went wrong with the 4-wheeler and it wouldn’t go. Luckily he had his cell phone with him, and had cell service on the ridge, and called home. Andrea started up there with our other little 4-wheeler, but by that time Michael had gotten home from doing his chores and I called and told him about Lynn’s predicament. He drove up there and was able to help Lynn get his 4-wheeler home. It had no power on the rear wheels. It could go downhill ok, but not uphill, and Michael had to pull it up the hills with his 4-wheeler.
The next day Michael helped Lynn take it apart and ascertain what was wrong with it. Lynn went to town to order the new parts and we can hopefully get it fixed this week. Meanwhile Lynn will have to use the little old red 4-wheeler that Andrea and kids have been using for driving back and forth between their place and ours.
I’ve been doing lots of interviews for articles and trying to meet several urgent deadlines before Christmas. It’s always interesting doing the various assignments for
numerous magazines, writing about everything from cattle diseases and grazing strategies to equine hoof problems to broodmare care to ranch stories.
One of the most interesting interviews I did this week was with a young man and his family in South Dakota, telling about their incredible life-changing journey following his serious accident and traumatic brain injury 11 years ago. Rodney was a senior in high school, active in FFA and high school rodeo, training young horses. His mother sent me photos, including one of Rodney with some of the horses he was training in high school.
The young horse he was riding that October evening in 2003 must have spooked at something. It flipped over a barbed-wire fence, down an embankment, and was lying there, nearly on top of the unconscious young man when his father and brother found him later that night. The first miracle was that the horse had not moved. It would have crushed him if it had struggled and rolled on over him, but just as important, the body heat from the horse kept him from dying of hypothermia that cold October night. After being shocked back to life by the ambulance crew, Rodney was air-lifted to the hospital in Sioux Falls, and spent a month unconscious in the ICU with his parents at his side.
Many more miracles followed after he woke up, as Rodney struggled with rehab to regain his ability to move talk and walk. He insisted on riding a horse again within less than a week of coming home from the hospital, before he was able to walk—and the horse was the best physical therapy of all. Today Rodney team ropes again with his family. Even though his speech is slow, he expresses himself well, and travels around the country giving inspirational talks about his accident--and his faith. It is stories like these that make my writing job a delight! Here are photos of Rodney telling his amazing story, and talking with people about his miracles.
This weekend Emily had a hockey tournament in McCall. Her team played hard and won some of their games. On Friday Michael brought the backhoe down and worked all afternoon finishing some of the cleanup from the earlier project when we put the new culvert across the driveway. He got all the brush and debris away from the ditch below the new culvert so we can build a fence along it, and put lined the ditch above the culvert with rocks so it won’t wash out.
[photo 6 – hauling out the brush with the backhoe]
Lynn drove the other 4-wheeler up to the 320 and saw most of the cows but some of them were grazing in the timber and he didn’t see all of them. The weather was really warm and the snow was all gone—until yesterday. It started snowing early morning and by daylight we had 4 inches of new snow here, and deeper on the mountains. The cows will have more trouble grazing and we may have to bring them home. Nick got safely home from college on Saturday, after a 2-day drive on bad roads. It’s good to have him home for awhile!
Yesterday a cougar killed a deer in our neighbor’s field a mile below us. One of our other neighbors tried to track it with hounds but didn’t have any luck. We’re hoping it doesn’t hang around here very long.
DECEMBER 22 – Last Sunday Michael and Carolyn drove 4-wheelers up to the 320 to check on the cows and were able to see all of them—scattered all over the mountainsides and through the timber. The snow is getting deep again up there, but the cows were still rooting down through it to get at the grass. Michael’s 4-wheeler had trouble getting up the steeper hills and he and Carolyn had to push it up the steepest part of the ridge.
The next day it was colder. When I went out to feed the horses that morning, Sprout was lame, not wanting to put any weight on her right front foot. We couldn’t tell for sure whether she hurt the foot or the leg above it. We don’t know whether she banged it on the gate while bucking around and goofing off, or stepped on something sharp in her pen, or strained the leg stepping in one of deep holes in the frozen mud. Andrea washed the foot and leg and put DMSO on the leg above the hoof. That evening Andrea and Robbie drove up the creek and got a Christmas tree.
It was even colder the next day, and we decided it was time to bring the cows home and start feeding them hay. Michael had taken the shoes off their horses, so snow wouldn’t ball up so badly in their feet. He, Nick and Heather rode to the 320, and Carolyn went up on a 4-wheeler, and they gathered the cows to bring them home. It took several hours because the cows were still widely scattered, and a couple of them ran back up Baker Creek rather than wanting to come down.
Lynn and I got all the gates ready down here—and moved the bulls out of the main corral so the cows could go through it up to the field be Andrea’s house—then drove up the creek shutting all the gates into neighbor’s fields and lanes along the way. Then we came back down and waited at this end, to head the cows down our driveway when they came. There is still some grass in the pasture where we put them; we may not have to start feeding hay for a few days.
Andrea took Emily to her doctor appointment to have her leg checked. The bone she broke playing hockey last year is healing and growing down over the metal plate and screws and the doctor thought it was doing ok. Later in the afternoon Andrea washed up Sprout’s leg again and applied more DMSO to help relieve the pain and inflammation; she is still very lame. That evening we went to the kids’ Christmas concert at school. Charlie played the trombone in his band group, and Sam played her trumpet. Charlie sang a solo with his choir group.
On Wednesday we started feeding the weaned heifers; they’ve been nosing through the snow to grass but the snow is pretty frozen now and it’s harder for them to get enough to eat. They are happy for the hay. The new parts came for the 4-wheeler and Lynn picked them up in town. Michael put it back together and it runs fine.
We had several inches of new snow, and I took photos of the heifers and the horses that morning—including young Willow enjoying a roll in the fresh snow.
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The creek road was very slippery with fresh snow on top of the ice, and Emily ran off the road down toward Baker, sliding into the ditch. A friend came along and was able to drive the car back up onto the road for her. She went to town for one her GED tests and passed it. She has 3 more tests to take and then she’ll have her GED.
With the colder weather we had to break a lot of ice out of the heifers’ water tubs, so we moved them to the field below our barn, where we can plug in the heated water trough. They appreciate the warmer water, and we don’t have to chop ice every morning.
I took photos of Pig and her friend. Pig is the heifer we rescued last February when she was born at 25 below zero, thawing her out in the house. She ended up with short ears (they froze) but is now the biggest heifer in the group.
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Sprout is starting to put more weight on her lame foot; it seems to be healing. Andrea put DMSO on it a few more times and now she doesn’t need to anymore.
Lynn caught the bad cold that has been going around town and school, and has a really bad cough. Yesterday he was so sick and miserable that he didn’t go outside to do his chores until about noon. Andrea came down and filled our wood box for us, and got some more little bales of hay on her truck, for the bulls.
She and Robbie left late afternoon to drive to Idaho Falls for her pain doctor appointment early this morning. The roads are bad and they didn’t want to gamble on being slow getting there this morning. She finished the appointment and they were just heading down the street to go to the pharmacy when her car quit running. She was able to coast through an intersection and into a gas station. Robbie discovered that the fuel pump had gone out. They were able to borrow his mom’s car to do the rest of the things they had to do in Idaho Falls, then borrowed his dad’s pickup to go get a car carrier trailer from his grandfather, near Blackfoot. They finally got the car loaded late this evening, and will spend the night at a motel before heading home in the morning.
Meanwhile, Lynn was too sick today to do any of his chores. Michael and Nick came down and helped, and also figured out where the deer are getting into the stackyard (in spite of all the elk panels around it). The tracks showed that they’ve been going under the fence at the creek. So Michael and Nick put poles across that spot to try to keep them out, since they are making huge holes in our haystack.
DECEMBER 31 – Andrea and Robbie made it home with her car, we ordered a new fuel pump, and Robbie was able to get the gas tank off her car and put in the new pump. I sent out the rest of our Christmas letters and finished making personalized T-shirts for all the family (drawing horses on most of them, and cartoon characters on Lynn’s and Charlie’s). I wrapped gifts for the grandkids, using the colorful comic strip section of our Sunday newspapers; these serve a dual purpose (not having to buy wrapping paper, and the kids love to save the paper and read the “funnies”).
Two days before Christmas I started getting sick. Lynn and the grandkids shared their respiratory “bug” with me. Then that night the chimney in the livingroom started smoking, plugged with soot. The smoke in the house was so thick that it woke me up at midnight. We opened all the windows and used fans for a couple hours to get the smoke out of the house. Fortunately it wasn’t a very cold night! The next day, Christmas Eve, Robbie got up on the roof and used a long plastic pipe to knock the soot out of the chimney so we could start using that stove again.
I had a bad cough and fever that day and didn’t get much done—went to bed early and spent 12 hours in bed. Lynn helped me do my chores on Christmas day and we spent most of the day resting. Our Christmas dinner consisted of boiled egg and homemade
bread. We felt well enough that evening, however, to go up to Andrea’s house to watch her kids open their gifts.
I also took photos of Andrea and Lynn, and Sammy with her horse T-shirt from grandma. They were all having a great time, and it was fun to be a part of it.
The day after Christmas Michael and Nick brought their flatbed pickup and helped Lynn take a couple feeders and two big bales of straw up to the field for the cows. The pasture is about gone, and the new snow buried the grass that’s left, so it was time to start feeding the cows. Michael loaded two big bales of alfalfa on our feed truck and fed the cows some alfalfa to eat with their straw. The combination makes a balanced diet and the protein in the alfalfa feeds the rumen “bugs” so they can ferment and break down the straw to create energy. The heat of digestion also helps keep the cows warm in cold weather, so it makes a good winter diet.
I was so sick I didn’t get much done for several days, and was coughing so badly by Saturday afternoon (coughing up thick brown crud) that Lynn took me to our doctor, who lives 3 miles from us, across the highway at Baker. Suzanne listened to my lungs, etc. and prescribed an antibiotic, prednisone to help ease the swelling and inflammation in my throat and windpipe, and medication to ease the cough. Andrea drove to town to pick up the prescriptions before the pharmacy closed that evening.
These past few days she and Robbie have been coming down to help me do chores in the morning, and with it so cold lately (down to 12 below zero, and a wind making it even colder) I stayed in a couple mornings and just let them feed the horses and heifers and break ice out of the horse’s tubs.
Andrea and Lynn fed the hay to the cows, and on the warmest afternoon Sammy and Dani brought their sleds down here to sled down our driveway.
We’re having a lot of trouble with whitetail deer getting into our alfalfa. These deer are nothing like our native mule deer that winter in the hills. The whitetail started moving into our valley about 20 years ago, and are now thicker than rabbits. We have to tarp the hay on our feed truck at night and keep a tarp on hay we’re feeding the heifers, or the deer eat huge holes in the bales. They found another way to get into our stackyard in spite of putting poles across the creek where they had a regular freeway. So on Sunday Andrea and Robbie brought their two young dogs down to the stackyard and tied them at each end of the stack. They made a doghouse for each of them, and they are now guarding the hay from the deer. Jasper patrols one end of the haystack and Olive guards the other end.
With the sub-zero weather and deep snow, Michael and Carolyn brought their horses down from the 160-acre mountain pasture yesterday, and put them in the fields on the upper place, where they can feed them a little hay.
Yesterday Michael and Nick came down and helped move the feeders and put out more bales of straw. Nick chopped ice on the creek to open up water holes for the cows, and the bulls in the corral. It was sure nice to have help that day, because Lynn had to go to town to have his eye checked. The previous day, he suddenly had a big brown “floater” in that eye. The eye doctor said it was a small piece of detached retina, but nothing serious at this point.
I’ve lost my voice completely, from the sore throat and coughing. Andrea took me to the ER today because there were no openings at the clinic. They x-rayed my lungs and took blood tests, and determined that at this point it’s still just severe bronchitis—probably from the influenza strain that wasn’t in the flu shots this year—and put me on 5 more days of prednisone to help ease the pain and inflammation. It’s been interesting trying to do phone interviews with no voice (for the various articles I have to write for several horse and cattle magazines), but I can still whisper. And since the people I interview have to do most of the talking, it works!
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