Heather Smith Thomas

Spring 2010

2012-02-16T20:23:00.000-08:00

Spring (April-May) 2010

APRIL 25, 2010 – We had warm weather last week but now it’s cold and freezing. We sawed up the rest of our log-length firewood, and even though we’re still having a fire in the stove every day, it looks like we’ll have some wood left over, for a start toward next winter.
Michael and Carolyn branded more of their calves last week, and the 31 yearling heifers they bought. We’ve had stormy weather but they picked a day the cattle weren’t wet.
Lynn has been turning on some of our ditches to start irrigating. Even though it’s been rainy off and on, the wind keeps drying things out, and cold weather slowed the grass growth. We need some moisture and better growing weather.
Our grandson Nick (a junior in high school) did well at his track meet last weekend, placing first in the 400 and 800 meter races, and helping his team finish first in the relay race. We hope he does well at the district meet next month.
Michael and Carolyn borrowed our tractor and loader to haul big round bales from their stackyard on the lower place. They need to get all that hay moved down to the Maurer place before the creek rises and the ground gets too wet to cross the creek with their big truck. We loaned them our flatbed trailer so they can haul our tractor over to Sandy Creek and bring their hay from that place. They are still feeding hay, and had to buy a few more semi-loads to supplement their dwindling supply, because the grass hasn’t grown much yet this spring.

Yesterday they rounded up their yearling heifers to put a few of them through the chute to take out porcupine quills.

They’re also treating a calf for diphtheria; they’ve had several bad cases of diphtheria in baby calves this spring (caused by the same bacteria that cause foot rot), and have saved most of them. They lost one of the calves, however, and grafted the last “extra” twin onto its mother.
They now have just 3 cows left to calve. We are still waiting for our last cow to calve.

MAY 9 – Michael and Carolyn probably won’t lease the Gooch place and lower place this year. Even though they’ve leased it for the past 11 years (and we leased it for 29 years before that), the landlord (who lives in Maine) keeps raising the rent and they can no longer afford it. Ever since they started leasing it, they’ve been paying more than it’s worth (the landlord raised the rent when they started). A bigger problem is that the terms of their lease include a 3 percent increase each year (which is unheard of in agricultural leases) so by now it is priced half again what it is actually worth.
The landlord didn’t believe them when they said their banker thought it was priced too high, and had an independent consultant look at the figures (the number of acres of pasture and hay ground, and what the ranch has produced for the past 10 years in hay and how many cattle it pastures). When the consultant confirmed that the rent was indeed overpriced (and would not be attractive to other leasers because it has no corrals or facilities), the landlord still would not come down in price. So Michael and Carolyn decided to rent some other pasture and try to get by this year without the Gooch place and lower fields. Now the landlord is trying to find a renter, but so far no one else has wanted to rent it. Time will tell whether the landlord finds a renter or whether the place will sit idle this year.
We’ll let Michael and Carolyn use our upper place, the 160 and 320-acre mountain pastures, and our range permit this year, since they will be short on pasture.
Last Sunday we stopped at Andrea’s place on our way home from church, to see the goose that “adopted” one of their dogs. It’s a wild Canadian goose that was hanging around their place for several weeks. It showed up with two other geese in the field next to the house. When the other two left, the lone goose came into their yard and with the dogs and started eating their dog food. Two of the dogs were afraid of the goose but the younger dog and goose became inseparable, and it was the strangest friendship I’ve ever seen. The goose preened the dog, picking bugs out of its fur. The goose became tame enough to eat food out of Emily’s hands. The kids were fascinated by their new “pet” until it finally left a few days ago.

The last 3 cows at Michael and Carolyn’s place calved. Even though the weather has been cold they put those 3 out with a small group of cows and calves and were not watching them at night. We had some blizzards and cold wind, but those cows were accustomed to calving in a barn and went into a loafing shed to calve, so their calves weren’t too chilled.
Our last cow, Rishira, has been ready to calve for more than a week. I was checking her several times during the nights—so we could put her in the barn if she started calving. Wednesday night we had a terrible blizzard and 4 inches of new snow the next morning. It felt like winter instead of early May. It reminded me of when my first foal, Khamette, was born 51 years ago on May 5th, in 6 inches of new snow!
Michael and Carolyn drove to Helena in the snow on Thursday to bring Heather home from her first year of college. She was eager for summer vacation, though it hardly seems like summer yet. On Friday we had a visit with Heather while she and Michael were here with their big truck to load up 8 of our round bales. We won’t need all our hay, with our smaller herd.
Friday night Andrea brought Charlie out here after the kids’ dance and gymnastics program. Rishira was in early labor so we put her in our calving pen under the yardlight where we could watch her from the window. I checked on her all night but she didn’t do anything. Lynn and Charlie got up at 3 a.m to drive 200 miles to Blackfoot for Charlie’s Boy Scout Jamberal (100th year celebration for the boy scouts, with more than 7500 boy scouts). I continued watching Rishira, who put off actual labor until daylight. Even though it got down to 20 degrees that night, the wind quit and the temperature got warmer at sunup, so I didn’t have to put Rishira in the barn. She had a red bull calf.
Lynn and Charlie got home at 5 pm after their day with the Boy Scouts, and we hurried to town for the 2nd night of the kids’ dance and gymnastics program. Today we are recuperating from our long day. When we tried to feed the cows this morning, however, we had a set-back. We pulled out in the field with the feed truck and turned off the motor while we took the strings off the big round bale—and then the truck wouldn’t start. We unwrapped some of the hay and scattered it around by hand, then had to pull the truck back out of the field with the jeep.
MAY 19 – We fed hay with the jeep (backing it up to the feed truck and forking hay onto the jeep) until Lynn could put a new starter on the feed truck. The truck is a 1973 model that we bought in 1978.
On Sunday (after they turned some cattle out on our low range) Michael and Carolyn took a few cows over to our Cheney Creek pasture. It should hold them until the other pastures grow taller. They moved the cows before the creek gets too high to safely cross with young calves.
Nick did well at the district track meet, and goes to the state competition this weekend. The kids have only 1 more week of school. Danielle had tooth surgery last Friday and has a sore mouth, so she skipped a few days of school.
She, Sammy and Charlie have been staying with us a few days while Andrea went to Salt Lake for an appointment with a lung specialist. Dani especially liked playing with the cats and taming some of the new kittens.

The doctor here was concerned about Andrea’s breathing problems and sent her to the specialist in Salt Lake. The lung specialist said she has a lot of scarring in her lungs and airways—damage from the fire, and also from the several times she’s had serious pneumonia, in the burn ICU and in following years. She was in the hospital for a week with a collapsed right lung, a year after the fire, for instance.
She did very poorly on the breathing test because her air passages are so narrow. The specialist put her on several new medications to see if those might help, and wants to see her again in about a month. Andrea says she thinks the medicine is helping a little. Recovery is never complete, for a burn survivor.
While the kids were staying here with us, they enjoyed helping grandma and grandpa and seeing the cows and baby calves, and feeding the horses. Dani made friends with Maggie, one of our gentle old cows, and fed her some grass through the gate.

MAY 31 – What a crazy spring we’ve had! It doesn’t seem like summer yet. We are still feeding hay. Lynn put a new starter on the feed truck and got it working again. The grass is slow growing in the cool weather, but is finally coming nice and thick--from all the rain. Michael and Carolyn turned cows out on the range a few days later than usual but the range grass should be good this year. They borrowed our 4 bulls—3 to turn out on the range and one to use as a heifer bull—since their own bulls are worn out from the first 6 weeks of breeding and they need some spare bulls to finish up the breeding season. We won’t need a bull until later this month.
We’ve had more than a week of heavy rain. On Saturday (May 22) it started to snow and snowed all night—making roads treacherous as the kids drove home from Nick’s track meet in Boise; they didn’t get home till midnight.
At 2 a.m I was wakened by a loud crash. A huge branch broke out of our elm tree and hit the house roof. Power lines broke at 4:30 a.m. By morning we had more than 10 inches of new snow, and no electricity for about 12 hours. A tree was down across the road below our ranch, so we didn’t go to church. We spent the morning taking broken branches off fences above our house, after feeding the cows. Lynn had to brush the snow off our truck windshield with a broom before we could feed them.

One of the trees by the gate was broken down by the snow, and when I went up to open the gate a magpie was sitting on one of the few perches that wasn’t completely covered.

On Wednesday Michael hauled 15 more pairs to our upper place to pasture for summer, but it’s not summer yet. It’s muddier now than in early spring; we’re having trouble driving into the field above our house to feed our cows. Today will be our last day of feeding; tomorrow we’ll move the cows and calves to pasture above the corrals.
The horses are standing in ankle-deep mud in their pens. Young Heather’s mare Classy had her foal a couple nights ago, and Michael carried it into the barn to get out of the wet weather. It will probably have to stay in the barn at nights until the weather gets better.

Early Spring (February-March) 2010

2012-01-25T17:23:00.000-08:00

Continuing updates on our family and life on the ranch

FEBRUARY 18, 2010 – A week ago Michael and Carolyn had another set of twins and had a tough time getting them born alive. The cow was taking too long in early labor so they suspected a problem, and checked her. The first twin was breech—nothing entering the birth canal but the calf’s tail—and difficult to reach the legs. By the time they got that calf out it was nearly dead because the placenta had started to detach. It took several minutes to revive him. The second twin was simply backward and easier to pull. They took the “slow” calf to the house to warm and dry it and give it colostrum. They now have several spare calves in case they need to graft one on a cow that loses a calf. The next morning they had another difficult delivery—a calf with both front legs turned back, but Michael was able to get the calf safely born.
Granddaughter Heather was home from college for a 3-day weekend, and enjoyed helping her folks with calving. They really appreciated her help; they had 30 calves during a 30-hour period, bringing their calf number to nearly 200.
On Sunday Michael loaded 8 more big bales of 2nd cutting alfalfa on the flatbed truck for us. This winter Lynn and I have been feeding some big round bales—grass hay to the cows and alfalfa bales to the heifers, using two different pickups. By setting the bales on their ends, there’s room on the flatbed for Lynn to go round and round, unrolling the hay and pitching it off. The last part of the bale we push off the pickup and unroll it down a hill. Most of the bale cores unroll very nicely that way.

On Monday Michael and Carolyn had another difficult calving. They now have more than 240 calves, with only a couple losses. Yesterday they had another set of twins to deliver, and when Michael reached in to check the cow, he said, “Oh, good! It’s only breech!” After some of the horrendous challenges they’ve had, a breech calf was easy!
I finally went to the doctor to check my knee. It’s still painful, after falling down while running through the rocks to head off the cows when we brought them home from the 320-acre pasture on November 14. An x-ray showed the bones are ok, so the doctor wants to do an MRI to check for soft-tissue injury.
MARCH 2 – Last Friday I went to town for the MRI on my knee. The doctor said there’s torn cartilage and it won’t get better. But it also won’t get worse. If pain gets unbearable he can do surgery to clean up the torn cartilage, which might help reduce inflammation, but I don’t want surgery because that would mean not being able to bend the knee at all for several weeks as it recovers. We’ll soon be calving and I don’t want to be laid up. I can live with it the way it is—being careful to not bend it tightly because that’s when it’s really painful.
My brother came to visit from Boise, and while he was here we drove up the creek to visit Emily Binning—our good friend and neighbor who is dying of cancer. We had a nice visit with her, but didn’t stay very long, so as not to tire her. She is enjoying visits with friends. She has outlived the doctor’s predictions by twice as long as expected, but she’s becoming very frail.
Sunday we brought our cows down from the field and sorted off 24 to sell to Michael and Carolyn—12 young cows and 12 pregnant heifers. Their banker wants them to build up their herd again. Even though we bred our cows to calve in April, these will fit with their late group and will breed back earlier for them next year.
Today we forgot to latch the gate when we drove out of the field below the house after feeding the heifers, and mid-morning the heifers came trooping up through the barnyard, across the driveway, through the calving pen and up to my horse haystack. They made a mess of broken bales, but at least they didn’t go out to the range!
MARCH 18 – The “heifer escape” was a good practice lesson for them on coming out of their field. The next Sunday we brought them into the barnyard instead of feeding them—and they came eagerly when we opened the gate. We took them to the corral and sorted off the oldest and biggest ones we’re selling to Michael and Carolyn. We deloused the others and took them back to the field below the lane to feed them. Michael and Carolyn came with their trailer to haul the 8 heifers to the Maurer place.
Last week Lynn put a new battery in his 4-wheeler so he could get it started. It’s been parked all winter in our second-day barn and we need to get it out of there when we start calving. Also, our weather is turning warmer; he’ll need to use the 4-wheeler to start irrigating. Snow is rapidly leaving the fields and grass is starting to grow.
Our good friend June had a stroke a couple weeks ago and was in the hospital in Hamilton, Montana. She was doing a little better a few days later, and Andrea drove over to see her. Then she had another stroke, and could not recover. She was brought back to Salmon to spend her last days in a hospice room at the local care center, and died peacefully this past Monday. She will be greatly missed.
When Lynn was loading some small bales onto our pickup, one tumbled off the stack and hit his head and shoulder, hurting his shoulder. He put DMSO on it to ease the inflammation and pain but was unable to raise his arm for several days. Granddaughter Heather was home from college for spring break, and she came the next morning to help us feed our cows. Thankfully Lynn’s shoulder is doing better now and he’s able to use it again, carefully. While granddaughter was home from college she helped her folks with their cattle and they branded calves Thursday and Friday while the weather was good. Then it snowed hard again on Saturday.
Yesterday we sorted off 2 of our 5 yearling bulls to sell to Michael and Carolyn and they came to get them.

MARCH 27 – Last week Andrea’s kids spent a day with us. Sammy and Dani had fun making crowns and headbands and all sorts of other creative projects. Dani made a long tail for herself and put stickers on her face for cat whiskers.

Emily learned how to make biscuits, and helped me do chores. We brought our cows down from the field and sorted off some that are about to calve. Emily enjoyed seeing her pet cow, Buffalo Girl, who is close to calving. That cow always likes to see Emily, and walks up to have her head scratched. Ever since Emily was 5 years old and Buffalo Girl was an orphan calf, they’ve had a special relationship. The cow tolerates Lynn and me, but is more bonded with Emily and is very trusting--and not pushy, like some pet cows. There’s just a quiet communication between Em and her cow.

The day after we sorted our herd to put some in the maternity pen, Lilly suddenly developed a larger udder. I noticed this new development the next morning when we went up to the field to feed the rest of the cows, and eased her over to the gate. We brought her down through the field, to put in the maternity pen, too. On Monday we took a big straw bale into the barn on the jeep and spread it into 5 stalls so we’re ready in case weather is bad. On Tuesday afternoon Lilly calved—a red bull calf—but the day was warm and we let her calve in an outdoor pen.
The next day the weather changed—cold, windy and snowing—so we moved Lilly and calf to our “second day barn”. It’s basically a 3-sided shed that gives protection from wind and rain or snow. Lynn had just taken all the “stored” things out of that barn, and the four-wheeler (parked in there all winter).
More cows up in the field are looking like they’ll calve soon, so this morning we brought them all down and put several in the maternity pen and the rest in the pasture next to it—much more handy to get them in when their time comes to calve.

Outie (a 4 year old) started labor yesterday evening and we put her in the barn, with Buffalo Girl in the next aisle to keep her company. Outie calved outdoors for her first calf, and last year (with her second calf) the weather was bad and we put her in the barn. She was horribly nervous, trying to climb the walls. She was more at ease this time, with Buffalo Girl for company. She calved quickly, and the calf was up and nursing within 30 minutes. Buffalo Girl calved today, a nice bull calf, and Emily named him Buffalo Bill.
APRIL 4 – Michael and Carolyn are trying to build their herd back up, after selling everything they could reasonably cull two years ago, when hay prices were so high and they chose to not buy any. This year, hay is priced about 1/3 what it cost in 2008. Their banker insists they get more cows, so we’re selling them more of ours, and the rest of our yearling heifers. Now we’ll have even fewer cows to calve out; Lynn and I are ready to slow down and we don’t mind letting Michael and Carolyn have more of our herd.
On Thursday Andrea and kids left early in the morning to drive to Salt Lake for her checkup at the burn center. The roads were good most of the way, but there was 5 inches of fresh snow in Salt Lake. As soon as her checkup was over, they got out of Salt Lake’s nasty roads and traffic and drove partway home, to stay the night at Pocatello at a motel. The doctors in Salt Lake were not happy with the graft surgery; the skin is healing well, but shrinking up again and negating the progress that was gained in “releasing” the contracture that is pulling on her arm, shoulder and spine.
On Friday Cub Cake (daughter of Cubby, granddaughter of Cinnabear) started calving at 2 a.m. so we put her in the calving pen by the house where we could watch her under the yardlight. It was a very cold, windy night and we were glad she waited till morning to calve. She calved just as the sun was coming up, and licked the calf dry very quickly, so it didn’t need to be in the barn. She had a red heifer named Sugar Bear. Andrea and kids stopped by that afternoon on their way home from to Salt Lake, and Emily got to see Buffalo Girl and her calf.
Emily Binning (our good friend and neighbor) died and was buried on a hillside on their property. A few days later they held a memorial service at one of the local churches. Emily had tape-recorded her own life sketch and it was a joy to hear her voice, telling about her life, her eagerness to go “home” to be with Jesus, and some of the exciting adventures she and her husband experienced during their years as missionaries in many countries.
We were glad to have known her, and to have been friends/neighbors for more than 40 years. At this point in our lives we get continual reminders that life is precious and fragile and that we should be grateful for every day, and its blessings—and to show our friends and family how much we love them. When we are young we take so many things for granted and don’t realize how precious and wonderful these relationships are.
Easter Sunday was a busy day. My nephew Matt Smith came last night to stay with Andrea and then visit his grandmother (my mom) this morning at the nursing home. I stopped in to see mom, too, then Lynn and I went to church with Andrea and kids, then stopped by her house to visit with Matt awhile. This evening we had a late supper for Michael and Carolyn and kids after all their chores, feeding and calving tasks. Granddaughter Heather is home from college for 3 days (going back tomorrow) and her birthday is next week. We had an early birthday celebration for their whole family, since all their birthdays are in April.
APRIL 15 – The day Michael and Carolyn took Heather back to college in Montana it started to snow. They hit a terrible blizzard on their way home, just before midnight, with 8 inches of new snow. The road was obliterated and they couldn’t see from one roadside reflector to the next so they crept along at slow speed trying to stay on the road. It took them more than 2 hours to travel 30 miles. We got only 3 inches of snow here, but it was a nasty blizzard. Nick was doing their chores and checking cows after school that evening and found a cow that had just calved. He managed to get the pair in from the field and into the barn just as it started snowing and blowing.
A week ago our old gentle cow Maggie calved, a nice big red heifer. Weather was nice for a while, then we had another storm. Lynn and I went to town to watch Charlie’s school program, and the rain hit just as we were leaving to come home. We hurried home, with strong winds threatening to blow the car off the road. We put Maggie and her new calf in the barn before they got drenched with rain. Calving this time of year, we usually figure it won’t be bad weather, but we are glad we have a barn!

Winter 2009-2010

2012-01-07T15:28:00.000-08:00

Winter 2009-2010
Continuing the update on our family and life on the ranch:

DECEMBER 20, 2009 – Last Monday when Lynn went to town to get our mail and groceries, the car wouldn’t start when he came out of the store. He had it towed to the repair shop, and hitched a ride home with Jim--who was staying with Andrea’s kids while she was in Salt Lake for surgery on her arm. Andrea had surgery on Tuesday as planned, but due to a scheduling mix-up at the hospital, the surgeon had to work her in between some other surgeries and didn’t have enough time for the whole repair. He only did 2 of the 4 contracture releases—one on her little finger and one on her upper arm—saving the most serious one (over her shoulder) until later. He checked her arm and rebandaged it the next day and released her to come home.
Lynn and I went to Sammy’s 1st grade Christmas program at school, since Andrea wasn’t home yet from Salt Lake. The kids in Sammy’s class put on a skit and dressed as mice, using mouse faces they made from paper plates.

It’s been cold. Ice build-up in the field where our cows are grazing made it impossible for them to drink at the spring, so we let them into an adjacent pasture where they can go to the creek. Lynn was able to chop an adequate hole in the creek ice.
We plugged in the backhoe so it would start, and Michael used it to fill in the low spot in our corral that floods every spring. Then he took the backhoe to the Maurer place (where he and Carolyn will be calving their cows) to work on a spring and take out an old, leaking water trough that needs to be replaced.
Jim came out to the ranch on Thursday and got a Christmas tree for Andrea’s kids, and Lynn went to town to get our car, which had been repaired. Andrea and her friend drove home from Salt Lake. She has her entire arm bandaged and cannot use it until the stitches are taken out.
The cows have been able to keep grazing, without any hay, but they’ve nearly eaten all the grass. Michael and Carolyn loaned us their old flatbed pickup to feed big round grass bales to the cows, since we use our feed truck to feed big alfalfa bales to our heifers.

DECEMBER 30 – I spent several days before Christmas sorting through piles of papers and magazines in my office, and cleaned out the space in front of the window and the old front door—which no longer opens because the log walls settled. Cold air comes in around the door and window, so I stuffed rags in the cracks and put duct tape over them. During the summer of 2000 I stuffed rags around the door and sealed it with masking tape to keep out the smoke from the forest fires, but the masking tape disintegrated over the past 9 years. Duct tape will work better.
The day before Christmas it got really cold again and we started feeding the cows.

Michael and young Heather stopped by with Christmas gifts and we sent ours home with them. Heather is enjoying her 3-week break between semesters at college, helping her folks with their cattle.
Christmas day we cooked a big dinner and had Andrea and kids here. She likes to cook, but with her arm bandaged it was impossible for her to do much cooking.
After Christmas her kids stay with us when she went back to Salt Lake to have the stitches removed from her arm and finger.
We chopped a new water hole for the cows in the creek below the corrals; they have to come into that little pasture to drink. The brush along the creek had a lot of burdock growing there this year, and we didn’t get it cut down. Several of the cows are now covered with burrs.

The weather has been bad—with snowy roads. Andrea and her friend decided not to try to drive home yesterday evening after her checkup and removal of stitches; there were too many car accidents clogging the streets and freeway. They drove home today, and it took 13 hours (rather than the usual 6 hour drive).

JANUARY 8 – Friends from British Columbia, Pete and Bev Wiebe, stayed with us for 3 days on their way south to New Mexico and California. They spend some time every year working with the Mennonite Disaster Service, rebuilding homes destroyed by fires or hurricanes. Pete is an electrician and does electrical work on these building projects. He and Bev both help with construction. We always enjoy seeing them when they stop here. We became acquainted with Wiebes after Andrea’s burn accident in 2000. Pete is a burn survivor, and he and Bev learned about Andrea’s burns by reading my monthly “Rancher’s Diary” column in Grainews, a Canadian farm newspaper.

On Tuesday we had 3 inches of new snow, and Wednesday 2 more inches. Then the temperature plummeted to 10 below zero. The ice buildup in our lower field and lane is increasing; the cows will soon have difficulty crossing it to go to the creek for water, so we moved them up through the barnyard and to “heifer hill” pasture above our house. We’ll feed them there until we bring them down for calving.
Our good friend and neighbor Emily Binning learned last week that she has a large mass in her abdomen; she went to a specialist in Boise a few days ago, and found she has terminal cancer. She decided to not have surgery or chemo. She wanted to just come home and enjoy whatever time she has left—with friends and family. Our 12-year-old granddaughter Emily was devastated by the news, not wanting to lose “big Emily” who has been a dear friend. So this afternoon Lynn brought young Em out to the ranch, and she and I went up the creek to visit “big Emily” who gently told the child her life story and how much she loves Jesus and that she is ready to go to heaven to be with Him. I am grateful to Emily for sharing her love and faith with us, and for trying to help a child cope with the emotional trauma of losing a beloved friend.

JANUARY 20 – Michael and Carolyn vaccinated their cows (pre-calving shots), doing part of the herd the day before young Heather went back to college after Christmas break, and sorted out the ones that would soon start calving.
A week ago Andrea went back to the burn center in Salt Lake (with a friend) for more surgery on her arm. Em and Dani went with them, and we are keeping Charlie and Samantha here with us. This time the doctor did another release on her hand, and the major repair at her shoulder—which meant a new skin graft over the top of the shoulder and in the armpit. He took a large patch of “good” skin from the top/front of her left thigh, the only area on her body large enough to supply healthy skin--that had not already been grafted or harvested for a graft when she was in the burn ICU 9 years ago.
These past days have been very miserable for Andrea, because the harvest site is very painful until it heals. The doctor checked the graft and changed her bandages yesterday, and didn’t like the looks of the graft. It is still very pale and hasn’t started to turn pink yet. If it doesn’t “take”, she’ll need a new graft—which would mean trying to harvest more skin from somewhere else on her body, and they’re running out of places.
While the kids were staying with us, we celebrated Sammy’s 7th birthday.
The weather warmed up this week, which was nice, because Michael and Carolyn started calving. Their first two babies arrived Saturday, with another one Sunday morning and the fourth one yesterday. The next few weeks will be really busy for them, so we hope the weather stays mild. Our cows won’t start calving until March, so we have a little more time to sleep at nights!
Charlie and Sammy have been enjoying their stay at the ranch, playing with the cats, and helping me do chores—feeding the horses.

JANUARY 28 – It’s been a hectic week. We met with Michael and Carolyn and their banker—who wants them to have more cows (to generate enough money to meet their obligations), so they will be buying a few more cows and heifers from us. After that meeting, Michael and Carolyn hurried home to check on 5 cows that were in labor when they left.
Andrea called us from Salt Lake when we got home, to report that the doctor still didn’t like the looks of her graft and wants to see her again in 2 days. We hope her body isn’t rejecting the graft. She may be staying in Salt Lake awhile longer. We’ve been keeping Charlie and Sam but Emily and little Dani have been in Salt Lake with Andrea and Rick. They already missed a week of school and can’t afford to miss more. Lynn decided to drive to Salt Lake on Friday, to bring them home, but the weather looked really bad.
Andrea and Rick left Salt Lake at 1 pm (the same time Lynn left our place). Lynn met them halfway and got the 2 girls, then drove home and got here late that night. The roads were bad, but not as bad as they were the next two days. We had several inches of new snow. Andrea’s checkup on Saturday was still inconclusive regarding the graft, and the doctor wanted her to stay in Salt Lake.
By Sunday Michael and Carolyn had 36 calves. Even though weather hasn’t been too cold, they had to thaw one calf whose mother calved next to a fence and pushed the calf underneath where she couldn’t lick it. They warmed up the calf and fed it colostrum, then put it back with its mother.
Andrea’s checkup on Monday was still not good, but her body isn’t rejecting the dead-looking graft yet, so the doctors want to give it more time.
Meanwhile, we’re managing with all 4 kids, taking the oldest ones 2 miles to the bus each morning, and little Dani to a neighbor’s place at 8 am to catch a ride to Head Start. Lynn goes to town each day to check on their house and feed the pets. In the afternoons the kids ride the bus or go to boy scouts, dance and gymnastic class—and on those days Lynn makes a later trip to town to pick them up afterward. Little Dani is always tired after school and generally takes a nap.
Today Andrea’s graft finally started getting pink in spots and the doctor let her come home. She and Rick left Salt Lake right after her appointment, and got home this evening. After 15 days in Salt Lake, she is REALLY glad to be home.

FEBRUARY 4 – It took a few days for Lynn and me to catch up on things. We really enjoyed having the grandkids here, but it wore us out more than we care to admit! I’m still catching up on some of my article writing that got neglected while I was helping kids with homework, playing games with them, etc.
On Friday I attended a neighborhood get-together for our friend Emily Binning (who is dying of cancer). It was a nice time of sharing.
The next day I wrote a letter to Emily, trying to express how much her friendship has meant to me. This is what I told her:
Dearest Emily,
Lynn and I have been thinking about you every day for the past several weeks, keeping you in our prayers and in our hearts. Knowing that you are coming to an awesome milestone in your journey gives us pause, as we reflect on the immense significance of this next step, and also on the wonderful friendship we’ve had with you for the past 43 years, and how blessed we have been to know you. We appreciate, admire and delight in your trust and faith in the Lord. Your strength of spirit is a huge inspiration to us, and to all who know you. We thank God for this blessing and for the privilege of having you as our friend.
There are so many ways that people leave this world and enter the presence of the Lord. It’s always hard for the loved ones and friends they leave behind, but there are blessings in having a chance to say good-by. I used to think that when my time came, I wanted to leave this life quickly, with as little pain as possible. Over the past 10 years or so, however, I’ve come to realize that maybe that’s a selfish way to look at death, and that even though some ways are harder, there is more time to say good-by, to tell people we love them, to have some “final moments” together before departure.
I am grateful you took the time to visit with young Emmy and me several weeks ago. It was a beautiful sharing that touched me greatly and I hope it helped comfort young Em as she deals with what she considers the harsh finality of death (taking a person out of her life) and the loss of people she loves.
I also enjoyed seeing you at the get-together at Solaases. That was also a nice time of sharing. You are greatly loved and will be sorely missed, but the empty spot you leave behind will be softened and entwined with wonderful memories and by your gentle but firm assurances of Faith and Love. You have made our world a better place, by your kindness, love and wondrous example of a simple, trusting walk with Jesus. Many of us are more open to His presence and guidance because of your beautiful example.
This note is intended to be a love letter, a statement of appreciation and recognition of all that you have meant to me (and to Lynn) and a simple “thank you” for all the fun times we’ve had together over nearly half a century.
We have wonderful memories of getting to know you when Gordon brought you here after you were married, and the memories of doing many things together when we were young and struggling to get started here on Withington Creek--you two building your house and creating your little place and starting your ministry together, and Lynn and me getting started in ranching. All the times we helped each other—I can’t even remember all the times. Helping you build your house, taking messages up the creek until you eventually had a telephone, Gordon helping Lynn with ranch projects (fencing, plowing, haying) in those early years, you taking care of our little kids when Lynn and I had to ride or work cattle.

We did a lot of fun things together (I have fond memories of the rides you and I made together, on Sedge and Khamette—like the time we rode across the valley to visit Della Soule), and we shared many meals and visits. We remember the times when you and Gordon were building your first little house, that first cold winter, and the two of you would often come down here for a meal or a get-together for popcorn, enjoying the warmth of our heater in the front room.
I remember and putting lots of apples through the old cider press, getting firewood, Lynn and Gordon working on the ditch, etc. We had a lot of fun, a lot of good times. My kids loved you like a second mother, and still do. Thank you, Emily, for “being there” for me, for my family, as a friend and neighbor.
With much love, Heather
* * * *
Lynn picked up some things from Michael and Carolyn to mail that afternoon; they are really busy with calving and don’t have time to go to town. Thursday night they had 7 new calves (more than 70 total). Two young cows calved at the same time and were fighting over their calves, rolling them around in the straw. After Michael got the two pairs separated they mothered the calves fine.
Michael and Carolyn had 2 sets of twins Sunday, born within a couple hours of one another. This makes the 4th set of twins for one of those cows. They took the extra calves (named Thumper and Flower) and made a place for them in the garage until they have cows to graft them onto. They now have 93 calves.

FEBRUARY 12 – Last Friday we brought our cows down from heifer hill and Nick helped us put them through the chute and give them their pre-calving vaccinations and delouse them. Even though we deloused them last fall, they were getting itchy again so it was time for another treatment.
Tuesday night Michael and Carolyn had a tough calving situation. The cow had a uterine torsion and the calf was upside down. Michael got it turned but there was still a partial twist in the neck of the uterus. There was no veterinarian available so Michael and Carolyn pulled the calf, which was difficult because of the constriction caused by the twist. The head wouldn’t come through. It kept deviating off to the side. Finally Carolyn worked the puller while Michael kept his arm in the cow to bring the head through. It was one of the toughest calving situations he’s ever dealt with, but once they got the head through the cervix, the cow started straining, and they were able to get the calf out. Mama and baby are doing fine now. Present calf count is 170 babies.
Andrea went to Salt Lake again to have her graft repair checked, and to be fitted for a pressure glove and a pressure garment to help keep the upper arm graft smoother as it heals and matures—to try to prevent the thickening and contracture that made it necessary for corrective surgery. We kept her 4 kids here for a couple of days, until she got home last night. On a bright note, her graft is FINALLY looking healthy, and beginning to heal.

EARLY WINTER 2009

2011-12-15T09:00:00.000-08:00

(November-December 2009)

OCTOBER 24, 2009 – We took care of Andrea’s girls when she went to Salt Lake last week for some tests for Charlie and for assessment of severe graft contractures on her arms. The shortened scar tissue has pulled the little finger of her right hand off to the side, and a thick scar on her upper arm has pulled her shoulder and spine out of line. She’s finally reached a point of pain and disability that she can’t put off corrective surgery any longer. It’s scheduled for December 15. She’ll have to stay in the burn ICU several days after the surgery, since it will involve more grafting to cover the areas after surgical removal of the contractures. We’ll take care of her 4 kids during that time, and help her awhile, since she won’t have use of that arm and it will need frequent wound care. Eventually she’ll have the other arm repaired, also, but not until the first one heals.
Our calves were supposed to be shipped last week but the buyer postponed; the calves won’t go on the trucks until October 28. We weren’t happy about the delay because the weather is getting worse. Michael and Carolyn had their cattle all gathered onto the Maurer place, with enough good pasture to last until the calves were sold, but with this delay they’re scrambling to figure out enough feed for their herd. They’re patching fences and paneling off the back road and haystacks so they can utilize all the available pasture on that place. Lynn used our big tractor to load jackfence panels (from our field below the house) onto our flatbed trailer, to haul over to Maurers to help make an instant portable fence.
After entering the internet world of blogging with my every-other-week installments on Storey’s website: http://insidestorey.blogspot.com ) my other book publisher, Oak Tree Press, set up this site to tell about my book Beyond the Flames and how I came to write it. I periodically update it with new installments, too—trying to tell what has happened between when my book was published (in 2004) and the present time.
On Monday we moved heifers to the field below our lane; they ran out of grass in the pasture above the house. I have them trained to come when I call (I gave them hay hand-outs from my wheelbarrow when we weaned them) and it was easy to move them—we just opened the gate and called them in from the pasture.
Our cows on the 320-acre mountain pasture are still doing well but grass is very dry and mature. We bought tubs of protein supplement and Lynn took those up in the jeep. This will help keep the cows eating that rough feed so they can stay there longer—if it doesn’t snow under too soon.

NOVEMBER 3 – We had a storm the day after Lynn took the lick tubs to the 320—rain that turned to snow. We were glad he got up there with when he did; there’s no way he could have driven up there again for several days. The storm hit just before we shipped our steer calves. It was still windy and nasty the day we rounded them up. Lynn wasn’t feeling well that day (a stomach “bug” and diarrhea—probably the same thing Andrea’s kids had; they all missed school for part of a week) so we it took us awhile. We lured the cows in with the feed truck, sorted off 3 pair (2 red steers and a small one that won’t go on the load) and put them in the post pile pasture. One of the biggest steers was dull, with ears down, so we put him in the chute and took his temperature. It was 104 degrees F. We gave him injections of antibiotic and Banamine and left him and his mama in a different corral—and called Michael to tell him there’d be one less steer than planned, for the load of calves. We fed them hay in the hold pen that evening, and put Shiny (the orphan steer) in the pen by our house.
Early the next morning we got the cattle in before daylight, sorted off the steers in the dark, and were ready to load them when Michael came with his trailer. I used a bottle of milk-replacer to lure Shiny around to the corral. He was weaned a month ago, but he still followed my bottle in the dark, and nearly knocked me down in his eagerness to suck it. When we loaded them in the trailer Shiny was the first to jump in, leading the others.
Our steers helped fill one of Michael’s loads and weighed well (ours averaged 588 pounds) considering they’re only 6 months old and one was raised on a bottle. The stormy weather nearly halted their departure to a feedlot in Oklahoma, however. The 3 truckers debated whether to go or not, with roads closed in Wyoming due to heavy snow. They finally took an alternative route, but ran into bad roads and had to off-load the calves for a couple of days in a big hayfield until roads were open again.
We kept the steers’ mothers in the pasture above the corrals a few days until they quit bawling. The big steer that was sick (Ursala’s calf) was feeling better by the next day but we still gave him another round of antibiotics on Friday, and moved him and his mom to my horse pasture.
We sent the 3 other steers on a trailer load of calves to the auction at Blackfoot. We’ll send Ursala’s steer later.
Yesterday Andrea rode with me—we took the cows (now over the weaning of their calves) to the upper place.

Yesterday evening I became very ill—with vomiting and diarrhea--probably the same “bug” Lynn had earlier. I didn’t get much sleep last night but I’m feeling better today, but not eating anything except broth.
NOVEMBER 12 – I was weak and wobbly for several days, unable to eat much. It took a week to get back to normal. Lynn brought some big round bales (first cutting alfalfa) from Maurer’s place to feed our bull calves, and Michael hauled 8 big bales on his big truck. We may have to start feeding the heifer calves. They still have grass, but it’s snowing this morning and may cover the grass. If it snows much we’ll have to bring the cows down from the 320.
Michael and Carolyn brought their cows from the Maurer place last week, putting some on the lower fields and some on the Gooch place. We’ll be pasturing the upper place with our cows till they eat it all or it snows under. Last Saturday Lynn took the tractor up there, unstacked the big straw bales in the old stack yard and gathered the strings. These are some old bales Michael and Carolyn never used, and the strings are too rotten to move the bales without breaking. We’ll eventually let our cows into that big stackyard to clean up the grass and old straw.
I took shoes off Rubbie this week and trimmed her feet, and later take off Breezy’s shoes.
We weaned Ursala’s steer 5 days ago, leaving him on one side of the orchard fence (in my horse pasture) and the cow on the other. I feed them next to each other through the fence and they are both happy--no bawling at all.

This morning we put them together briefly to move them around to the corral so we could load him onto a trailer that’s taking calves to the auction in Blackfoot, and he didn’t even try to nurse his mother. He’s happily weaned, and ready to go. Michael will pick up the cow later today with his trailer and haul her to the upper place to join our other cows.
NOVEMBER 21 – It was snowing hard last week when Duwayne Hamilton (who hauls cattle to the auctions in southern Idaho) came to pick up our weaned steer—the one that was sick the day we sold our calves last month. Lynn plowed our driveway, to make sure the truck and trailer could make it back out again. Later that morning Michael came with his trailer to haul the cow (the mother of the weaned steer) to our upper place. We put her with the cows on the wild meadow—the mothers of the calves we sold earlier.
The next day, Lynn drove the 4-wheeler to the 320 to check on the other cows (the pregnant heifers, and the mothers of our heifers and bull calves we weaned in September). The snow was so deep he barely made it to the top of that mountain pasture, and most of the grass is covered. The protein supplement tubs were almost all gone. We decided to bring the cows home the next day, since weather predictions indicated more snow, and colder weather.
That next afternoon we drove the jeep to the upper place, and hiked a mile up to the ridge—no sign of cows. We hiked down into Baker Creek and found 5 young cows and herded them up the creek to the top trough, then out through the timber, on our little jeep road, onto the upper ridge.

We met a few cows along the way, and took them all to the ridge. Since we were still short a dozen, I held the herd there, talking to them, while Lynn trudged on around the hill through the deep snow to find the others. After we had them all gathered, he hiked down the ridge, calling them, and they followed. I brought up the rear. The sun was going down as we got to the gate at the bottom of the ridge, and let the cows into the lower part of the 320 acre pasture.

From that point on it got harder. At that lower elevation, on the south-facing slope where snow was less deep, grass was showing, and the cows immediately spread out to graze on the hillsides—no longer interested in following Lynn. We had to drive them the last mile down to the field, which took a lot more effort to turn them down the hill. At 65, I’m not as agile as I used to be. Running through the rocks I tripped and fell down a couple times—landing on my right knee each time. We finally got the cows to the field just before dark. That evening I put DMSO on my swollen knee, and several times the next day, to reduce the swelling. Our cows usually follow us very nicely, but they were hungry that evening. I needed my horse!
On Tuesday Lynn took salt and mineral to the cows in our jeep; they are still happily grazing on the upper place. There’s lots of feed there and the snow isn’t as deep.
Andrea and her friend Rick made several trips to the woods with her pickup and a small trailer, to get firewood. A couple days ago they had a flat tire on their way home, and had to get a new tire—and barely made it home in time to go to work. Andrea enjoys being a waitress at the restaurant, and her friend Rick is one of the cooks.

DECEMBER 2 – We’ve had more snow and cold weather—and a cougar on the upper place. Last week the cows were upset and all ganged down at the bottom of the lowest field, so Lynn called them to the old stackyard and let them in—where they happily started eating the old straw bales. Later that week we got more protein supplement for them; they’ll do nicely on the straw and dry grass that’s left on the fields, and a little protein.
For Thanksgiving we went to the restaurant where Andrea works. The family that owns it closed for Thanksgiving and had a big dinner for their whole family, and invited Andrea and her kids and us to join them.
Weather has been colder (down to 6 below zero); the cows on the upper place haven’t been grazing much in the early mornings. Those fields are in a canyon and the sun doesn’t come up till about 9 am, so they stand in the sun awhile to get warm before they start grazing. So we’re feeding them a few bales of grass hay in the mornings, just to get them going quicker, so they won’t be losing weight. Michael and Carolyn had to start feeding their cows some alfalfa to augment their pasture.

DECEMBER 14 – We’ve had a couple weeks of cold weather, down to 15 below zero. and nasty wind for several days. Lynn started a fire in our other wood stove, and we had to leave our water dripping at night so the pipes won’t freeze. He bought several bags of pelleted insulation and poured it around our water pipes under the bathroom floor. We’ve been chopping ice in the creek for the cows on the upper place; the water holes freeze solid every night. Heifers in the field below the lane are no longer grazing, so we give them a little grass hay in the evening to augment their alfalfa.
The cows on the upper place ran out of protein supplement so we started feeding them a little alfalfa, to encourage them to graze more. We’d like them to use the rest of the grass before it all snows under. They’ve eaten all the straw bales in the stackyard.
The prolonged cold has created serious ice problems on the creek. It flooded across the lower fields and Michael’s cows can no longer get across the creek. There are only a few areas for feeding. He decided to move that group to the Maurer ranch, but had to bring them up through our place and across our bridge and then down the road, since they couldn’t get across the creek on the lower fields.
Yesterday it was warmer, above freezing. The ice on the creek is still very thick, however, and it’s hard to create water holes that will stay open. When we went to feed on the upper place, one young cow (Buffalo Chips) was missing. We heard her bawling from across the creek. She ran back and forth along the brush, wanting to come back, but afraid to cross the ice. We found tracks where she’d gone across, by the water hole. She probably got pushed and shoved when the cows were drinking, and ended up on the ice and went on across.
We didn’t want her to fall down trying to get back across. During the past 35 years we’ve had two cows get paralyzed, with hind legs spraddled out on ice. So we skipped church and focused on the cow problem. Lynn shoveled dirt and gravel into the jeep from one of the steep banks along our road (where it wasn’t frozen) to put on the ice, to make a path across it. By the time he got back up there with the dirt, however, Buffalo Chips had gotten brave and crossed on her own—seeing the other cows eating alfalfa hay and not wanting to be left out. That solved our problem, and we decided to bring the whole herd down to the lower place. We went back up with the feed truck and Lynn led them 3 miles down the road with the truck and I hiked along behind. We put the cows in the hayfield below the barns, that hasn’t been grazed yet this fall. The snow is not as deep as on the upper place, so they were VERY happy.
Andrea and her friend Rick left yesterday afternoon to drive to Salt Lake. Her graft repair surgery will be tomorrow. We hope it all goes well. Jim (Emily’s dad) came up from Nevada to stay at Andrea’s house and take care of all the kids for part of this week, and we will help, too, since Andrea will be gone about a week.

Fall 2009

2011-11-25T08:00:00.000-08:00

Fall 2009
I will continue with diary entries and memories, as I gradually catch up these blog installments to present day—filling in what’s happened between when I wrote BEYOND THE FLAMES: A FAMILY TOUCHED BY FIRE, and what our family is doing today:

AUGUST 20, 2009 – Last Tuesday Andrea came out to the ranch and rode with me to round up cows on the upper place and bring the 4 year old bull home. Our breeding season is over and we want to sell Posie because he’s becoming aggressive and unpredictable. We brought a few of the yearling heifers with him, to create a little herd so it would be easier to bring him. Otherwise he would not have come willingly by himself—he would have tried to go back to his cows.
When we got the cattle down to the corral, we sorted off the bull and put him in another pen (to send him to the auction next week), then rounded up the cows in the swamp pasture to sort off 6 heifers to take to the upper place. Those cattle didn’t want to come down to the corral; they ran through the brush and across the creek. The brush was too thick to go through on horseback, so Andrea went on foot to herd them back across the creek and out into the open, and I led her horse. The cows tried to run the wrong way when they came out of the brush. Rubbie, Breezie and I had to trot quickly through deep bogs to head them off. Breezie came along very nicely as we floundered through the bogs, and didn’t slow me down much as I led her from my horse, so I was able to head the cows and we got them down to the corral. We sorted out the heifers and took them (along with our decoy heifers we brought down with the bull) to the upper place.
Last Saturday I helped Michael, Carolyn, Heather and Nick round up cows off their Sandy Creek range. We trailered horses over there (15 miles) and rode all afternoon gathering cattle. It was the first time I’ve ridden on that range allotment. We sorted off Don Hatch’s cows and took the rest of the herd to Michael’s leased place on Sandy Creek. Young Heather rode one of the green horses she’s been training this summer for another rancher. Nick rode Chester—one of Michael’s best cowhorses.

On Monday I put hind shoes on Breezie; she’s too tenderfooted for any more rides without shoes. I’d forgotten how obnoxious she was about shoeing her hind feet! When we bought her as a 5 year old (12 years ago) she was challenging to shoe, but gradually improved as I worked with her feet and shod her several times each summer. But the spring of 2000 was the last time she was shod. After Andrea’s burn accident that July, she didn’t ride Breezie any more that year, and only a few times each summer after that—not enough riding for the mare to need shoes.
This summer Andrea rode more often, and Breezie was tenderfooted. She was ok with shoeing her front feet, but her hinds were a different story! She kept trying to take her foot away from me, and I’m not as strong as I used to be—she jerked the first one away when I had only 2 nails it. She caught my wrist with a nail (I hadn’t had time to twist it off) and tore a gash in my wrist, and scraped my arm. I had a serious “talk” with her and finished the job, then went to the house and bandaged my wrist. After time off from being shod for 9 years, she apparently reverted back to phobias she arrived with. She was always worse about her left hind foot, perhaps because of bad memories. There’s an old scar above the hoof; maybe she had painful experiences being treated for that injury, and perhaps used that as an excuse to not let anyone handle that foot.
Michael and Carolyn took Heather to Helena, Montana to start her Freshman year at Carroll College. She’s enjoying all her classes, but her favorite is the Human Animal Bond course, which is part of the psychology program.
Lynn took the turner rake off our small tractor, to put the blade on, to clean out the barn (which we didn’t get cleaned this spring before it flooded and was too boggy to drive in there with a tractor). But some yellow jackets were nesting in the attachment hookups on the blade, and came swarming out. He used a can of WD-40 spraying them (it works great as a bee/hornet killer) but wasn’t able to get rid of them all. He went out at night in the dark to hook up the blade when the yellow jackets were inactive.
Today Andrea came to the ranch and rode with me again. We checked troughs on the high range and I was glad to see that the ones Em and I fixed last summer (that had been vandalized) are still working. This was the first time in 10 years that Andrea has been back to the high range--since before her burn accident--and she enjoyed being out there again. It was nostalgic for her—and for me, happy to have her riding again.
Then we checked the 320 and 160 fences and patched numerous places where elk had broken the wires or knocked wires off posts. On our way back down the mountain we could see down into our fields.

We noticed cows in the wrong place, above our fields, so we gathered and took them back where they belonged, and found a big hole in the fence by the ditch. Someone had taken it apart. Andrea and I spent about an hour putting logs and branches across the gap and tied everything together with baling twine to make a fence that would last until Lynn has a chance to repair it with poles and steel posts.
SEPTEMBER 11 – Michael and Carolyn finished hauling our big bales, and their bales on the Gooch place, but their big truck got stuck in the creek. Michael came down and borrowed our backhoe to pull it out. Then they moved their haying equipment over to the Maurer place they are leasing, and Lynn helped them haul and stack a field of second cutting. They still have 4 smaller fields left to cut.
I trimmed Veggie’s feet. Em hasn’t ridden him enough this summer to keep his feet worn down and they were getting too long. I’m hoping she can ride him a few more times this fall, and I don’t want him stumbling because of long toes.
Granddaughter Heather came home from college for Labor Day holiday and brought a friend from her dorm. Samantha loves horses, too. They had a great time riding all 3 days, to move cows and check the range gates up Withington Creek. They also helped Michael and Carolyn work cows on the Maurer place—vaccinating and preg-checking. It was the first time Samantha had ever worked with cows but she enjoyed it. She got a crash-introduction to cattle work and really enjoyed learning how to help put cattle through the chute.
Young Heather enjoyed riding in special performance last Friday at her college; it was a “dances with horses” production--put on by professional dancers (Equus Projects). These dancers come to various communities around the U.S. and practice with local horses and riders for a week, then put on a performance that involves 6 riders and 4 dancers. Several of the HAB students got to ride in this production, and Heather rode one of her professor’s Arabian geldings.
Her professor, Anne Perkins, is head of the psychology department at Carroll and the HAB curriculum is her brainchild. Anne was impressed with young Heather’s riding ability--which I’m sure has been helped by growing up with horses, riding all kinds of horses, and training young horses.
Andrea’s girls stayed with us Monday and Tuesday while Andrea took 8 year old Charlie to Salt Lake City for a doctor appointment. She also visited some of her old nurses at the burn ICU, and had the contractures on her shoulder and finger checked. She needs surgery to release those; her little finger is being pulled off to the side and the contractures at her shoulder are pulling her backbone out of line. But the surgery will require more skin grafting, so she keeps putting it off.
The girls enjoyed helping us do chores while they were here, and playing with their cats—and the new kitten they hadn’t seen before.

Sam and Dani had fun being rabbits, taping ears and rabbit “teeth” to their faces.

They also enjoyed “typing” on one of my old typewriters, which has been “retired” since 1995 when I started using a computer for writing my articles and books.

Lynn took Em and Sam to the school bus Tuesday morning, and Dani helped me all day; her preschool classes don’t start till next week. The days are getting shorter and feel like fall. It froze hard a couple nights ago, and my hose for watering the horses was full of ice. I guess it’s time to start draining it again every day.
SEPTEMBER 19 – It’s really hot and dry. We’ve been short on irrigation water for more than a month, unable to water the fields again after getting the hay off. Right now we’re down to one ditch (out of 6 ditches coming out of the creek at various elevations, to water our many small fields) and the water hasn’t made it across the field yet after Lynn set it there more than 2 weeks ago.
Michael and Carolyn worked their Sandy Creek cows last week, to preg check and vaccinate. They were short one calf off that range. It might have been killed by wolves; ranchers on that range found several wolf-killed carcasses this summer and fall.
Lynn has been working on our corrals and fixing our squeeze chute, in preparation for working our cows. On Thursday Andrea came out to the ranch and helped me gather our cows off the upper place. We brought them down to the swamp pasture above the corrals.

Yesterday I helped Michael and Carolyn start rounding up cattle off our high range. We got 49 pair and a bull from the Baker Creek side, putting them down into the 160 acre pasture.
We got home before dark and I helped Lynn feed a few bales to our cows and calves to lure and lock them in the lower end of the swamp pasture to be easier to round up at daylight. This morning we sorted off the calves and were bringing our orphan calf (Shiny) around to the corral when our vet arrived to preg -check the cows and bangs vaccinate the heifer calves.
All our yearling heifers and cows were pregnant. We weaned the heifer calves and several bull calves, and put the cows with steers in the field above the corrals where there’s good grass. We’ll be keeping the heifers, and selling the steers in late October, shipping them with Michael’s calves.
SEPTEMBER 30 – We kept the weaned heifers in a pen for a few days, where they can’t crawl out. There was a little green grass and we also fed them some hay just to get them gentled. They were used to us walking amongst them last spring when they were babies, and are pretty gentle, but feeding them with a wheelbarrow got them REALLY gentle. The bull calves were confined in the grassy pen below the barn, but Freddy George (the biggest, tallest bull calf) jumped over a panel so we locked him in the calving pen next to the house until we could put them all out at pasture.

After 4 days the cows were no longer worried about their weaned calves, and Andrea and I rode Breezie and Rubbie and took the cows and pregnant yearlings to the 320. It was a hot day and we took them slowly, especially up the last steep hill. But when they got to Baker Creek—with shade and green grass--they were happy.

There isn’t much water in Baker creek, due to the hot, dry weather—barely enough for the cows to get a drink. Andrea and I rode again the next day and worked on a water trough that had been vandalized (just like the range troughs last summer); someone had taken apart the elbow on the plastic pipe that goes into the trough. Andrea was able to put it back together with a temporary “fix” and Lynn went back the next day with tools and a new elbow and fixed it better.
Michael and Carolyn got their second cutting baled (though they had to fix a flat tire on their baler) and hauled. Lynn helped haul, driving one of the flatbed trucks. We got done in time to go to town late afternoon to watch Nick’s cross-country track meet. Nick did the 3-mile run in just over 18 minutes, and came in 8th out of more than 50 runners. He was the first Salmon runner to cross the finish line.
On Friday I helped Michael and Carolyn round up more cows. Some were in the neighboring range; several gates between the Forest Service and BLM allotments were left open by 4-wheelers. We rode to Mulkey Creek and found 3 more pairs and a dry cow, but as we were sorting them from neighbor’s cattle in the timber, the dry cow got away and ran down the mountain with the neighbor’s cows. I held the 3 pairs while Michael and Carolyn tried to get her, but the terrain and timber were challenging (and the group she went with was very wild) so they had to give up. We brought the 3 pair down along the steep canyon above our range, and down to the 160—where we gathered the 150-plus pairs that were already in that mountain pasture. It was 6 pm when we started gathering them off the mountainsides, and by the time we rounded them up and brought them 5 miles down the road to the lower fields, it was dark.

Michael and Carolyn rode again for several days and found a few more of their cows and calves in Mulkey Creek. The rest came home with the neighbor when he rounded up his cattle—all but one calf that’s still missing. Last night we had rain (the best rain since early summer), with snow on the upper place and 320. There was 1.5 inches of water in Shiny’s grain tub this morning. We desperately needed this moisture.
OCTOBER 14 – We’ve had some cooler weather (down to 4 degrees) and Lynn has been sawing firewood. Our power went off for several hours last Sunday. The wind blew two lines together and burned them up, and it took awhile for the power company to find the problem. I always get up early and type articles, but that morning there was no power for the computer or lights, so I lit several candles and wrote letters at the kitchen table, and Lynn and I ate breakfast by candlelight. We couldn’t water the horses because the pump wouldn’t work, but fortunately most of them still had water from the day before. Lynn carried 2 buckets to Breezie from the creek because her tub was nearly empty.
Last Monday I was on the Martha Stewart radio program. She’d seen my book Stable Smarts, and asked my publisher to contact me for her program. She has horses and wanted me to talk about how I became a horse person, and discuss various aspects of horse care.
On of my publisher (Storey) talked me into doing a “blog” on their website, where several of their authors and editors post thoughts and comments. I’ve never done anything like this before, but all I have to do is send my “installments” and photos to the person who does their website. My installments are posted every 2 weeks. In the first one I introduced myself and told about my first horse. The second one tells how I became a cow person. To view my blog, go to http://insidestorey.blogspot.com and click on my name in the list of authors on the right hand side of the page. I guess I’m finally entering the modern world of internet communication.
One more update: Andrea finally decided to have the surgery on her arm that she’s been postponing for several years, to release the contractures (from the skin grafts)—the shortening and thickening scar tissue that’s pulling her little finger and her shoulder and spine out of line (giving her a lot of pain, backaches, headaches, etc.). She’ll probably have it done in November or December. It will entail more skin grafting and a long recovery.

Summer 2009

2011-11-04T13:39:00.000-07:00

LATE MAY – We had a long, cold spring and the grass wasn’t growing. The cows ran out of grass on our small hill pasture, so we sacrificed the hayfield below the house and brought the cows down to graze it until we could fix fences and install a new water trough on our 320-acre mountain pasture.
I trimmed Rubbie’s, Breezy’s and Veggie’s feet and the next day Andrea and Emily rode with me to gather cows on the hill pasture and bring them down to the field. We hoped the hayfield would last the cows about a week, until we could move them to the 320—and then grow back for hay later.
We moved the 12 yearling heifers to another small pasture but were still feeding hay to 7 pairs (the last cows that calved). This was the latest we’ve ever had to feed hay! That Saturday we branded/vaccinated those calves and vaccinated the cows. We took out Rishira’s stitches while she was in the chute. Her incision, from the surgical correction of the uterine torsion, had finally healed.
The next Friday evening we went to our granddaughter Heather’s high school graduation to hear her Valedictory speech. We were very proud of her! Hard to believe that we’d been grandparents for 18 years!
That week we also attended granddaughter Samantha’s graduation from Kindergarten. We were very proud of her, too.
On Saturday Andrea helped Lynn take a new water trough and springbox to the 320. They dug out a spring in the upper draw and installed the springbox to collect the water, to pipe it into the water trough. Over a course of several days they finished putting in the long plastic pipe, and set new posts to fix the fence on the south side of the 320.
MID-JUNE – Michael and Carolyn moved their cows off the low range to the middle range on June 4, and that afternoon we moved our cattle to our 320-acre pasture. Andrea and I gathered our pairs and yearlings, leaving 3 cows (with the youngest calves) home. It was a long trip for the calves (more than 4 miles, uphill) and by afternoon the temperature was hot. We took them as slowly as possible. When we got to the 320 we let them rest and graze periodically as we took them the last mile up the steep mountain to the new water trough. Some of the calves and fat yearlings were panting with their mouths open, and we didn’t want them to suffer heat stress.
It rained hard that evening and we hoped none of them would get pneumonia from the stress. We checked them the next day and they all seemed fine. They were happy to be up on the mountain pasture.
The rain washed mud into our new springbox, and there was mud in the pipeline. Lynn cleaned out the springbox and put a valve on the end of the by-pass pipe, so he can open it whenever necessary to flush out the mud.
Weather warmed up and the grass grew—and the water in the creek was finally dropping enough that the calves wouldn’t drown if they tried to cross it. So on June 11 we let the cows have access to the 160-acre pasture next to the 320. The only water in the 160 is the creek, down in the bottom corner. We were afraid to let the cattle use that pasture until the creek went down to safe level. Now they could use both pastures, watering at the creek in the bottom, and at our new water tank near the top of the 320.
One of Michael’s friends and range neighbor, Don Hatch (age 59), was severely injured that week, when he was bucked off a young horse while riding range. It was a cold, windy day and something spooked the horse; it whirled and took off running down a steep mountain. It was too steep to safely pull the horse around to stop it (the horse would have fallen down if Don had tried to pull it’s head around) and it started bucking. Don tried to control the horse, but split his pelvis during the jarring impacts while trying to ride the bucking horse. When he finally bucked off, he broke his arm in 10 places when he landed on the ground. The horse kept running, but the dogs soon came back to Don. He tried to get up but couldn’t, and lay on the cold ground for 6 hours.
His wife Kathy was worried when he didn’t come home, and phoned Michael and Carolyn at 8 pm. They only had a couple hours of daylight to try to find Don. Luckily they knew which range allotment he was riding. Michael and another neighbor, Bill Andrews, drove 4-wheelers up parallel ridges and Bill saw Don’s horse down in the canyon. In the wind, it was hard to hear anything, so Michael turned off his 4-wheeler to try to hear what Bill was hollering. Then he heard a faint cry for help, farther up the canyon. The wind was blowing just right, or he never would have heard Don hollering. He found Don just before dark, which was a miracle, because Don was severely cold and going into shock, and would not have survived the night.
Actually it was one of Don’s dogs that saved him. She’d snuggled up against him to help him keep warm. Don is hard of hearing and didn’t hear the 4-wheeler, but the dog heard it and suddenly lifted her head. Don raised up to see what the dog was looking at, and at just that instant Michael was going along the ridge above him--at about the only place where Don could see him. Don started hollering, and it was just then that Michael turned off his 4-wheeler. Otherwise he never would have heard Don. Everything lined up perfect; otherwise no one would have found the injured man that night.
Michael drove down off the ridge in the direction of Don’s hollering, and found him lying in the sagebrush, then went back up the ridge to where he could find cell phone service, called Carolyn—who called for help. She and Kathy directed the Search and Rescue vehicles up a jeep track to where they could get to Don. Then the EMTs used a 4-wheeler and cart with a backboard to take him up to the ridge where they found a place for a helicopter to land, setting out lights in the dark, to mark a landing spot in amongst the tall sagebrush. Don was life-flighted to a hospital in Missoula, Montana, where he was treated for hypothermia and shock, and had extensive surgery on his fractured arm. He would recover, thanks to friends and neighbors and a miracle—and a good dog.

EARLY JULY – We put our bulls out with the cows. Andrea rode with me and we took the 4-year-old bull “Posie” 3 miles to the upper place with Rishira and Lilly and their calves to keep him company on the trip. We put them in the small corral, then rode farther up to the 320 and gathered those cattle down to the gate. Lynn met us there on his 4-wheeler.
With 3 of us it was easy to sort out the cows and heifers we wanted to breed to the yearling bull and we brought that small group down to the corral. We then took Posie and his companions up to the 320; they’d had a chance to rest, which made the trip less stressful on the two calves. We then came home again, and took Rosie (Posie’s mother) and her calf up the road with the yearling bull (Buffalo Billy) to the upper place to join his breeding group, and took them across the fields and over the hill to Cheney Creek.
It rained most of the day, and we were soaked by the time we got finished, but the cool weather was easier on the cattle (for their long trip) than being hot. The only bad part was when we first started out, when Andrea and I herded Posie and cows off the road so a vehicle could get past the cattle—and Posie suddenly turned and threatened Andrea’s horse. He rooted his head at Breezy, ready to charge and hit her, but Andrea spurred Breezy to make her hold her ground, and I charged at the bull with my horse, and we both yelled as loud as we could. The bull backed off. If Breezy had flinched away from him, the bull would have taken advantage and rammed her. He was grumpy, from being in the corral by himself, but that kind of behavior is intolerable and we decided we’d sell him after that breeding season.

JULY 5 – I wrote a letter to my friend Liz on July 5, and told her: “Today is the day that always (ever since 2000) makes me pause and reflect upon my entire life and purpose; it is the 9th anniversary of Andrea’s burn injuries and our nearly losing her—and I think this is a bittersweet day for Laurel, too, because this was Sara’s birthday. Such a journey this has been, and I am eternally grateful for the friendship between the 3 of us mothers—you, me and Laurel—because this wonderful, extraordinary friendship has been a very big part of the strength that has sustained me throughout my “detour” into frightening new territory. I thank God for friends, and for the Love that has kept me going and has blessed me, these past 9 years. I know I could not have struggled through that “wilderness” on my own. I think that by trying to help each other, and by accepting the love we offered one another, we became stronger. For this I shall be eternally grateful.”

MID-LATE JULY – Strong winds blew the big tarp off our straw stack. Lynn secured it again and put big bales against it to hold it down.
Our grandson Nick was driving many miles a day to irrigate several ranches, so we sold him our little red pickup (Ford Ranger) for $250; it uses much less gas than the vehicle he was driving. He helped his dad get the red pickup running again. It needed a new starter and fuel filter. Nick was excited to have his first vehicle of his own.
Emily rode with me to check cows, and when we rode across the Gooch place to go up Cheney Creek we had to cross a boggy area next to the ditch. Rubbie tried to jump the ditch instead of walking through it, and when she landed on the other side in the bog, her feet sank so deeply that she couldn’t make the next stride to catch herself. With her front legs sunk up to her knees, she plowed into the mud on her head, throwing me down into the mud right next to her. I rolled quickly off to the side--to be out of her way as she floundered and scrambled to her feet just inches away from me. Em was scared, watching Rubbie and grandma go headfirst into the mud, but it was a soft landing and Rub didn’t step on me as she struggled to get up, so we were perfectly fine. That’s the softest landing I’ve ever had, coming off a horse!
We continued on our way after I got back on Rubbie, and checked the cows in Cheney Creek, then rode on up to the 320 and checked those cows.

Michael and Carolyn started haying, and borrowed our big tractor and flatbed truck to haul and stack their big round bales. We had more stormy weather; one night a big branch blew off the tree in our yard, hit the house and broke out the screen door window, but luckily it didn’t come through the main door.
Granddaughter Heather spent the summer helping her folks irrigate and haul hay, and training 5 young horses for several ranchers.
Michael helped her for a few days with the 2-year-olds that had never been handled, getting a halter on them and starting to halter-break them. She rode a couple of the older fillies nearly every day, getting them accustomed to riding out on the range and following cattle. One Saturday Andrea helped me bring the cattle down from the 320. The water quit running for the new trough, and the best grass was nearly gone, so we moved them down to the meadows on the upper place.
Then Andrea hurried back to town so she could get to work on time. She was working 4 days a week (3 pm until midnight) as a waitress, and enjoying it. She loves serving people, and they enjoy her cheerful spirit. She worked as a waitress 20 years earlier (after she finished high school), and many of her old customers are delighted to see her again. Em was able to look after the younger kids while Andrea was at work, making sure they had supper and got to bed on time.
Andrea and Em rode with me the next Wednesday to our Cheney Creek pasture, to check cows and get pairs back together (some of the cows found a hole in the fence where trees blew down and smashed it), and the 3 younger kids stayed with grandpa.
When we got back, we gave each of them a ride down the road on Veggie, with me leading him alongside Rubbie. It was the first time Dani (4), Sammy (6) and Charlie (7) had ridden a horse, and they were very enthusiastic. I told them they were riding a grandson of the old mare (Khamette) that their mom learned to ride on when she was a little girl.

AUGUST – We finally started haying. Michael cut the fields above our house with his swather. When Lynn hooked up our baler to start baling, he discovered one of our big tractor tires was completely worn out--the tube was poking through. So we had to wait for the guys from the tire shop to bring out new tires ($650 apiece) the next day and replace the old ones. It rained that night, so the hay was too wet to bale. Two days later the hay was dry enough, and Lynn started baling—and the baler quit working! We couldn’t get parts for it over the weekend, so it was 3 more days before we got it fixed, and then it rained again. After it dried out a few days later, he baled part of the lighter hay, and Michael baled our heavier hay as big round bales.
Lynn got ready to haul the small bales to my hay shed (and we moved the last few bales out of it, in preparation for stacking new hay) and the stackwagon wouldn’t start! He tried to charge the batteries but they wouldn’t take a charge, so he went to town and get new batteries. Then it started, but the tilt tables wouldn’t work. Michael helped him later that day and they got it working, but before Lynn could haul any hay it rained again—and rained for 3 days, thoroughly soaking the little bales clear through. We had to let them sit in the field a week to dry and quit heating, before we dared stack them—and they were too moldy for horse hay. Lynn stacked them for the cows this winter. Michael helped us haul and stack the big round bales.
He cut the rest of our hay with his big swather, and baled some round bales. Lynn managed to bale enough small bales for the horses, but the baler had another problem; it caught the hay on fire and nearly burned up! Then the stackwagon started leaking hydraulic oil when he was hauling the 4th load to my hay shed. It would be a major fix job, so we had to borrow a stackwagon to finish. We’ve never had so much bad luck trying to put up such a small amount of hay!
Michael and Carolyn contracted their calves through the video auction, and we planned to sell our steers with theirs to help fill one of their loads. The calves would be shipped in late October.
I reset Rubbie’s front shoes and the next day reset her hinds. I’m getting too old to shoe all 4 feet at once! Her feet were getting long and needed to be trimmed and reshod. I didn’t want her stumbling and falling down chasing cattle.
Michael and Carolyn and kids were nearly done with their haying, and most of their fields had more hay than the year before—thanks to the great job of irrigating done by the two kids. The rain stopped them for a week, however, so they took time out from haying to move cattle to the high range. That first evening they got 40 pair gathered and moved, shut the gates and fixed a water trough—and got thoroughly soaked in a thunderstorm downpour. The next day they rode again and moved about 60 more pairs in the rain. I rode with them on Saturday and gathered 40 more. We rode again on Sunday afternoon for 6 hours. Young Heather rode two of the young horses she was training for another rancher—a different horse each day, and it was great to see how nicely they’re coming along. She and I gathered and moved cattle from one area while Michael and Carolyn gathered a different drainage. Our group was a challenge, with several cows trying to run the wrong way or back down the ridge, and Heather and her young horse did very well.

2011-10-25T13:43:00.000-07:00

Spring 2009
LATE MARCH 2009 – We had a lot of windy, cold weather and some of the cows got sore, chapped teats (when wet from nursing). Freddy’s teats got so sore she wouldn’t let her calf nurse. We noticed her traveling around the field with Freddy George following, trying to nurse, but she wouldn’t stand still. If he tried to latch on, she’d kick him. So we brought them in from the field and put them in a pen by the barn. Lynn and I carried 2 metal panels around from the back yard (where we used them the year before, to make a shelter for Boomerang) and created a small pen at one end for Freddy and Freddy George. In this small area the cow couldn’t travel and the calf was able to catch up with her and eventually get his dinner, in spite of being kicked.
Several more cows calved, and weather was too nasty to let them calve outdoors. We used Buffalo Girl to lead a couple of the young cows into the barn (cows that had never been in there before). The young calves in the field learned how to use the calf houses, to get out of the blizzards.

That week, wolves killed 4 of our neighbor’s calves. The Fish and Game flew an aerial search, but didn’t find them; wolves came down from our cattle range at night and into the fields, then traveled 3 miles back up the mountain into the timber during the day, where they could hide. They also hide under large sagebrush when they hear an airplane.
Lilly Ann calved in the middle of the night in the maternity pen, between checks. Her calf would have been chilled if he’d stayed out there very long, but the yearling bull in a nearby pen awakened me by his bellowing (perhaps he smelled the birth fluids). Lynn and I took the calf to the barn in the sled, with Lilly Ann following.
Freddy’s teats were still cracked but healing, and she was no longer kicking Freddy George, but he developed a new problem. When I went to the barn to check on a calving cow I noticed him getting up and down and kicking his belly. This type of gut pain is indicative of severe intestinal infection that can kill a calf quickly.
There’s no vaccine to protect against this type of bacterial toxin. But we can save these calves if we treat them before they go into shock. We immediately give castor oil (to stimulate the shut-down gut to move again) and oral neomycin sulfate solution (a good antibiotic for GI tract infections). We used a stomach tube to give Freddy George the castor oil and neomycin and within a few hours he felt better. The next day we had another case. We brought Drosophala and calf (Melanagaster) down from the field and tubed that calf with castor oil and antibiotic. We seem to have more of these problems during wet weather—maybe because the calves drink out of mud puddles.
Grandson Charlie’s black cat, Shade, liked to ride in the jeep when we feed the cows, and sometimes climbed in and out of the cab through the window as I drove. He could never make up his mind whether to ride on my lap or help Lynn feed hay on the back. Whenever he saw us going to feed, he came to the jeep, running after us in the field if he wasn’t present when we left the barnyard. One morning he decided to ride on the hood. He perched there, enjoying his good view, all the way to the field and back. I wish I’d had my camera when we drove out in the field; some of the cows were curious and some were alarmed at our black-panther hood ornament. Rishira snorted and couldn’t decide whether to run off or charge at the cat on the hood!

MID APRIL – One morning Rodadendron had a bellyache, getting up and down and kicking. I kept checking her for a couple hours, and eventually her discomfort passed and she was fine. Then on Palm Sunday we came home from church and one of our cows (8 year old Inny) was dead, right by the water tank. She’d been ok that morning when we fed hay, so whatever killed her was very swift. Her 2-week-old calf didn’t even know his mom was dead; we had to go find him. We herded him through the gate and cornered him in the calving pen by using the jeep to make a chute against the fence. We put two halters on him (so we could both hang onto him, because he was too big for one person to handle) and took him down to the pole barn where we could corner him to feed him a bottle. By 11 pm. that night he was hungry enough to be cooperative when we stuck the nipple in his mouth. Within 24 hours it no longer took both of us to corner him, and soon he came to us eagerly for meals.

Two days after Inny died, a 3-year-old cow (Leena) was dull and colicky, getting up and down and kicking her belly. She was much worse than Rodadendron, so we brought her and her calf in from the field and put her in the headcatcher, and gave her a shot of Banamine to help ease the gut pain. We put her and her calf in a pen by the barn.

That evening she nibbled some hay. But she didn’t eat much, and didn’t pass any manure during the night. So the next morning we put her in the headcatch again and gave her a gallon of mineral oil and a pint of castor oil by stomach tube, along with more Banamine and an injection of antibiotic. By evening she finally started passing manure, after being constipated for 24 hours. She started chewing her cud again, and eating.
The next week one of the pregnant cows, Cub Cake, had a bellyache in the night and we thought it might be labor pains, even though she wasn’t due to calve yet. We put her in the barn because it was a stormy night, and I kept checking her. She periodically had horrible cramping and pain, kicking her belly and pawing up the bedding, but showed no actual signs of labor. By morning we were certain it was gut cramps and not labor, and we were worried because she wasn’t passing manure. Then her pain eased and she seemed ok and we put her back out in the maternity pen. Then she quit eating, and also stopped chewing her cud.
So we put her into an isolation pen, to be able to tell how much manure she was passing (not much) and monitored her through the night. We were about to give her mineral oil the next morning, when she went into labor and quickly gave birth to a red heifer. By this time Cub Cake had diarrhea. But the calf was healthy and nursed, and the cow started eating again and chewing her cud. Our vet was unable to determine what was messing up the digestive tract on these cows, but it might have been mold or mushrooms in the hay.
Cub Cake was back to normal after a couple more days, and her red heifer was growing fast.

LATE APRIL - Rosie’s calf got pneumonia within a few hours after he was born, so we treated him for several days, leaving him and his mom in the barn.
Maggie calved on a Sunday afternoon—the first day that was nice enough to have a cow calve outdoors instead of in the barn! By then we only had 2 cows left to calve: Rishira and Lilly.
On Tuesday Andrea came out to the ranch after she got the kids off to school, and helped us vaccinate the cows and brand/vaccinate the calves—all but the little group of very young calves in the swamp pasture. It went a lot faster with 3 of us, and we got done in time for her to drive back to town and pick up Samantha from Kindergarten at 11:30.

That afternoon Lynn and I set 10 steel posts along the old net wire fence above the house. The cows were so hungry for green grass that they were reaching under and over the netting and destroying the fence. Alex Annie crawled clear under it one morning and got into the wrong pasture. By putting steel posts between the wood posts, we were able to raise the old netting higher at the top and secure it lower to the ground at the bottom so the cows couldn’t mash it down or reach under so far. Andrea came out a couple mornings and helped Lynn set 10 more steel posts each time. Lynn’s back was bothering him a lot and he couldn’t do much without pain.
Sammy and Dani came with Andrea and played with the cats and helped feed the orphan calf his bottle. Dani named him Shiney.

The final week of April was very cold, freezing most nights, with snow and wind. I kept getting up at night to check on Rishira. She was overdue to calve and I wanted to make sure she didn’t calve outside in the snow. She was restless—often acting like she was in early labor—but she didn’t calve. On Thursday she finally seemed to be calving, and we put her in the barn at 5 a.m. but she never progressed to active labor—just a few cramps. By afternoon, we decided there must be something wrong, since she’s usually an easy calver. We put her in the headcatcher to check her. Her cervix was fully dilated, but Lynn could barely reach down to the calf; it was not coming up into the birth canal. He couldn’t get hold of the feet.
We called our vet, Jeff Hoffman, to come help us—and he discovered the cause of the problem. The uterus had a twist and the calf could not be born. The vet cut an incision for a C-section, and we mentioned that in 1972 our old vet corrected a serious torsion of the uterus (more than 360 degree rotation) on one of our cranky black cows (named Pandora), just by reaching in through the flank and lifting the twisted uterus and turning it over—back to proper position. So Jeff tried it and was able to correct the twist, which wasn’t as severe as Pandora’s. Then we were able to pull the calf.

It was a heifer, still alive, and we put it in front of Rishira by the headcatcher so she could lick it while the vet sewed up the incision in her flank. We put the pair in the barn, out of the wind, and I helped the baby nurse.
On Monday Rishira’s incision (where the vet reached in to turn the uterus) was draining fluid and a little pus. We tried to put her into the headcatcher to give her an injection of antibiotic, but she refused to go in (remembering the ordeal of delivering her calf!) so we took her and her calf around to our chute runway to put her in our squeeze chute. Her calf ran down the chute first, and Lynn ran after the calf—to try to get it on through and out the front so the cow wouldn’t step on it; she was worried about the calf and followed it and Lynn down the runway.
The cow was so close on their heels that when I opened the tailgate of the squeeze chute to let Lynn and the calf through, Rishira barged in, too, and I couldn’t stop her. There’s not room in a squeeze chute for a big cow and a person—and she pushed past Lynn and jammed him into the side. Somehow (maybe my yelling in her ear) I was able to get the cow to back up, and I shut the tailgate, so I could let Lynn and the calf out the front. Fortunately Rishira hadn’t knocked him down, but she’d slammed him into the side of the chute, scraping skin off his arm near the elbow, and squashing his forearm against his chest, cracking a couple ribs. He was really lucky she didn’t hurt him worse. We gave Rishira the antibiotic, then bandaged Lynn’s arm and put DMSO on the sore ribs to help reduce the pain and minimize swelling and inflammation.

EARLY MAY – The neighbors turned their cows out on the range behind our place. The grass had barely started growing so the cows were reaching through our fences. Andrea hiked along one boundary fence putting in staples and splicing wires where the elk damaged the fence, and Lynn patched fences on the other side where neighbors’ cows were getting into our fields. A couple days ago several pairs and a bull broke down a gate and got into the Gooch place, but Lynn was up there irrigating and saw them before they got very far and was able to chase them back out—and repaired the gate.
We’d planned to put cows on our hill pasture May 10 (we were running out of hay) but when Lynn walked around that fence to check it, he realized the grass was not ready to graze yet. Fortunately we found a few big round bales for sale, just across the valley, and Lynn made 2 trips with the flatbed trailer to get a total of 16 bales--to get us by until we could turn the cows out on the hill above our house.
The grass in our back yard finally grew tall enough to graze, so we brought the orphan calf (Shiney) out of the old barn to live in the back yard. Our last cow, Lilly, finally calved, on a sunny afternoon. That makes TWO cows that were able to calve outdoors that year, instead of in the barn!

Late Winter (January through mid-March) 2009

2011-10-01T08:00:00.000-07:00

JANUARY – After some very cold weather we had several days of unseasonably warm, windy days. The snow settled, enabling the cows to push through the soft snow and graze a little. Then it got cold again and everything became a sheet of ice.
We brought the heifers to the corral last Saturday to vaccinate. Our driveway was so slippery that we first spread a pickup load of old manure (from one of the manure piles that wasn’t too frozen) along the driveway for traction so we could get the heifers safely moved without them falling down on the ice. We vaccinated and deloused the pregnant heifers and put them in the maternity pen. Then we vaccinated, deloused and tagged (with brisket tags) the weaned heifers. Andrea helped us with the heifers. Her kids stayed in the house because it was such a cold day, and drew pictures and entertained themselves making things with paper, scissors and glue.
Michael and Carolyn hauled some of the old big straw bales from the stackyard on the upper place down to the Maurer place to get ready for calving. They had their first two calves on January 10.
We went to Andrea’s house downtown to celebrate Samantha’s birthday (she was 6 on January 15) and Emily’s birthday (she would be 11 on January 19), and got home in time to do chores before dark.

Then we had 2 weeks of cold, foggy weather in which we never saw sunshine. The trees, fences and cattle were covered with thick frost. Temperatures hovered around zero. Our heifers would soon be calving, so we trained them to come into the calving pen—leaving the gate open and feeding hay in there.
Then we trained them to go into the barn. Our driveway was still a solid sheet of ice and slippery, so Lynn spread dirt/manure (from one of the big piles from cleaning corrals) across the driveway for better traction. We opened the barn doors and put a little hay inside and in front of the barn, and herded the heifers across the driveway and into the pen by the barn. We had to herd them into one of the barn aisles the first time, then on subsequent days just took them to the barn pen and locked them there for an hour and they went in and out of the barn on their own. This would make it much easier, some dark night, to bring a calving heifer in from the maternity pen and put her into the barn.

Some of the big 4 by 4 hay bales we were feeding to the heifers were frozen and difficult to chop apart, and hard to get the frozen strings off. This was hay we bought in the fall of 2007 and didn’t use that winter—we had a carry-over because we leased some of our cows to Michael and Carolyn and didn’t feed up all our hay. We were glad we had hay left over, because it became too expensive to buy; the cheapest hay was $180 a ton. We didn’t buy any, and hoped we had enough to make it through winter. Michael and Carolyn didn’t buy the expensive hay. They sold some cows instead, to try to match their cow numbers with the hay they had on hand.
Saturday evening just before dark our cows were running around on heifer hill. Lynn drove up there to see if wolves or a cougar were harassing them, but couldn’t see anything. The next morning when we went up there to feed, we discovered the fence between heifer hill and the next field was flat. The wires were broken, and 2 fence posts broken off. The cows must have run through the fence in their frantic distress. Several inches of fresh snow covered all tracks, so we couldn’t tell if there was a wolf or cougar involved, but the cows seemed ok. We propped up the fence and spliced the wires back together.
Weather continued cold. The cats liked to sit in the sun on my haystack. In the mornings before we went to feed, our young cats liked to sit on the load of hay in the sunshine, or on the hood of the jeep after we fed, since it was warm after the engine has been running. One morning we thought we’d shooshed all the cats off the hay before we drove to heifer hill to feed the cows, but when we got up there we discovered a hitch-hiker. She was scared and crying, so I took her into the cab and she helped me drive while we fed.

By end of January Michael and Carolyn had 70 new babies. Those cold nights kept them really busy, shuttling cows with calves into their barn and sheds at Maurers.
A mule deer doe came into the field above our house and stayed there several weeks. She was injured, lame on her right hind leg. She grazed the tall grass sticking above the snow, and slept next to our calf houses—and was often inside one of them in the mornings when I went to do chores. Lynn took her some alfalfa hay—leaving it by the calf houses—and she nibbled on that. She eventually recovered enough to jump fences again.

Our heifers were very ready to calve, so I was checking them a few times in the night, looking out the window with our spotlight. Lynn took one of the old big straw bales into the maternity pen with the tractor, and we scattered it around for bedding—under the yard-light where the heifers would be easier to see at night

Lynn’s sister Jenelle had an exciting experience when one of her weaned calves got into the old house next to their corrals, and went upstairs. It was afraid to come back down the steep, narrow stairway and was stranded up there, bawling. When Jenelle tried to herd it back down, it went into one of the old bedrooms and nearly jumped out the 2nd story window. She called her neighbor, on her cell phone, and he came to help her rescue the calf. They had to rope it. The calf balked the first time they aimed it down the stairs, and got away from them again, but they finally got it herded down the stairs.
FEBRUARY - Andrea took 6 year old Samantha to the emergency room at the hospital one night in early February. She awoke with a terrible headache and high fever and Andrea couldn’t get the fever down. The doctor gave Sam IV fluids and medication. She had fever and headaches for 5 days, and they never figured out what was causing the problem. Andrea continually gave her medication to reduce her fever, especially at night—when it seemed to be the highest.
We bought a small load of straw—18 big bales (7 tons). Straw was expensive, $70 a ton, but we didn’t have any left from the winter before. Lynn put one of the big bales on our flatbed pickup and we backed into each of the 4 barn aisles to spread it. One bale was just the right amount of straw to straw down the whole barn.
Our heifers have been itching in spite of delousing them a month earlier when we vaccinated them, so Lynn put up a rope between the light pole and the fence and hung a dust bag of lice powder on it. He also wrapped burlap sacks around the light pole, affixed with net wire, and saturated the burlap with delousing oil. The heifers enjoy scratching on that, and delousing themselves at the same time.
One morning when I got up at 5 a.m. to type an article, I checked the heifers with my spotlight out the window as usual, and nothing was happening, but by 6:30 I could see one of them was calving. When we went outside to bring her to the barn, we discovered 2 were calving. So Alex Annie and Rosalita went to the barn together. It was nice that they already know the way. Even though it was still dark, they trooped right across the driveway and into the barn with no problems.
Alex calved first—a little bull calf we named Alexander the Small. He got chilled quickly, since it was only 10 degrees in the barn (before sunup). He didn’t find her udder before he gave up and lay down again. So we got him up and stuck a teat in his mouth. That’s the nice thing about gentle heifers; they don’t mind if you assist their babies. Once he had a taste of milk he became enthusiastic and found the rest of the teats by himself. It’s amazing how much warmer a calf is after he’s nursed! The other heifer had her baby an hour later, a little heifer we named Rosetta. She was up and nursing before she was an hour old.

The day after our first 2 calves arrived, I helped Lynn fix a fence in the pen below the barn and we hauled a big straw bale down there and spread it along the sides of the pen next to the brush, where calves could get out of the wind. We put the 2 heifers and their babies down there after a night in the barn. The next heifer to calve was Buffalo Chips (daughter of Emily’s pet cow, Buffalo Girl). Emily named the calf Buffalo Bunny.

We had a week of cold, windy weather, so I was getting up every hour or so to check on the cows. At that temperature we wanted to make sure the new babies were born in the barn and not outside. When Leoni started calving one night, we put the other 2 heifers (that hadn’t calved yet) in the barn with her—in the aisle next to her stall—to keep her company and help keep the barn warm. Body heat from several cows always makes the barn warmer. Leoni had a bull calf and he was up nursing in less than an hour, before he got too chilled.
That next evening no one was calving, so we slipped away for a couple hours to Bob and Jane Minor’s place for supper, for my birthday. Andrea and kids came also, and when we went home the 3 girls came with us to stay for the weekend. Andrea and Charlie left early the next morning to drive to Idaho Falls for his hockey tournament.
The next day, Valentines Day, was busy. The kids wanted to see baby calves, so we took them to the pen below the barn where Em was able to catch and pet her calf, Buffalo Bunny. The little girls were able to pet the newest calf in the barn.
One of the heifers, Lemmony Snickit, was restless all morning. We’d planned a 90th birthday party for my mom at the nursing home that afternoon and were getting ready to leave for town when Lemmony became obvious in her labor. We put her in the barn and Lynn stayed home and watched her. The little girls and I went to town for the party. My brother and his wife drove up from Boise, and we invited some of mom’s old friends. Out-of-town family members and friends sent cards and e-mail messages for mom, which we read to her at the party. Lynn had to pull Lemmony’s big bull calf, then after he was certain she was going to mother the calf, he came to town also, and was able to be there for the last part of the party.

A few days later we brought the cows down from heifer hill and deloused them. In spite of the fact we deloused them in late October, they were very itchy again. We also gave them their pre-calving vaccinations. The first cow through the chute rammed back and forth as I was trying to give her a neck injection, and she smashed/bent my wrist against the chute. These old squeeze chutes were not designed for neck injections! Fortunately she didn’t break my wrist—it was just badly bruised and sprained. After we sorted the cows—some into the maternity pen, some into the horse pasture, and took the April calvers back to heifer hill—I put DMSO and an ice pack on my wrist to help reduce the swelling and numb the pain. I kept an ice pack on it all night, and by the next day it was doing much better in spite of turning black.
We put straw in the calf houses in the field above the house and put the heifers and babies in that field. We had part of the bale left so we backed into the barn aisles to unload the extra straw in the barn, and found Shade (Charlie’s black cat) under part of the bale that had fallen over! He seemed a little dazed, but otherwise ok, and glad to be out from under the straw! He must have been on the back of the truck after we put straw in the calf houses, and got pinned when the extra straw flopped down.

Some of the cows calved in late February. The second calvers had never been in our barn; they calved at Michael and Carolyn’s place as heifers (on lease). So we used Buffalo Girl as a guide-cow to lead them into the barn.
Our last heifer, Tessiana, calved February 21. She had a nice bull calf, fast and easy and we named him Tezzarro. Later that same day Roddedendron calved (daughter of Roddenia). This was her 5th calf and she’s always had them standing up. This one was no different; she didn’t lie down to calve, just dropped the calf on its head.
EARLY MARCH - The snow started melting and our calves were eating dirt and gravel along the corner of the field where the ditch washes away the sod, so Lynn put an electric wire across that corner to keep them away. This is something we have to do every year; even though the cattle have a good salt/mineral mix available at all times, the calves still like to nibble dirt. If they ingest gravel it can kill them, so we fence off that gravel bar.
We brought the rest of the cows down from heifer hill and sorted out 2 that look like they’re getting ready to calve, even though the vet who preg-checked estimated they wouldn’t calve until April. We didn’t want to take a chance on them calving up there in the snow/cold weather, at risk for being eaten by coyotes or wolves. We led the cows down through the field, with the jeep, and got stuck in a snowdrift just above the corrals! We had to use the feed truck to pull it out.
We’re then had more cold, windy weather. One of the windows at the top of the barn fell out and broke, so Lynn climbed up there with a ladder and stapled clear plastic over the opening, to keep the wind and snow out of the barn!
One night Drosophila calved quickly, out in the maternity pen, before we realized she was calving. So we used our new calf sled to pull that calf to the barn. Freddy calved the next day, a black whiteface bull calf (Freddy George). We put those pairs out of the barn the next afternoon, but that night it snowed—a heavy wet snow. By morning Freddy George was breathing fast, so we treated him for pneumonia. We spread a big bale of straw in the old sick barn and moved Freddy and calf into that barn for shelter.

That day the Fish and Game did a wolf count by helicopter, along our Lemhi valley, and counted more than 90 wolves.
Our grandkids spent another weekend with us while Andrea took Emily to her final hockey tournament. Their little team has slowly gotten stronger, and they ended their season winning most of their games, against teams much larger, from bigger towns.
While the younger kids were here, they wanted to see more baby calves, but the weather was so cold and stormy (6 inches of new snow) we didn’t take them outside. They entertained themselves drawing and painting pictures while we were feeding and taking care of cows and calves.
Lynn hurt his back again, and I helped him for a couple weeks--opening the heaviest gates, breaking ice on the creek for cows in the swamp pasture, carrying in the wood, etc. Our friend Bob Minor came over one afternoon and split enough wood to last several days. We managed to get everything done, just more slowly.

Some nights it snowed so hard that I couldn’t see anything with my spotlight from the window, and had to go outside every hour to check the calving cows. After our biggest snowstorm the temperature dropped below zero. and we had another week of really cold weather. A couple newborn calves in the barn got chilled before they were an hour old, so we helped them nurse before their mouths got too cold. We used the old sick barn as a second day barn for calves that needed to be moved out of the main barn but needed another day of shelter before going out to the deep snow in the field. The calves there know how to use the calf houses, but sometimes it takes the new ones a day or two to figure it out. We put more straw in the calf houses, and also in the calving barn. By late March the days were warmer, however, and our snow was actually melting again. We were hoping it would eventually be spring.

Early Winter 2008 (November-December)

2011-09-15T08:00:00.000-07:00

One morning in mid-November another weaned steer was dull and off feed, with a snotty nose, so we brought him into the pen by the barn and gave him an antibiotic. He was doing much better by the next day, and grazing again. I think the changeable weather was a stress, making the calves more vulnerable to respiratory infections.
Andrea took Emily to her hockey games in Montana that weekend, and we kept the 3 younger children. On Friday we took the 2 little girls to their dance class, and Charlie to hockey practice. The kids enjoyed helping me do chores each evening, feeding Boomerang (the crippled calf) and playing with the cats.

Charlie went with Lynn to the upper place to move protein tubs from gopher meadow to the upper field where the cows are still finding some grass. We were hoping to make the grazing stretch for another week or more before we bring those cows home.
The next day one of our neighbors came to help Lynn butcher Boomerang. The calf was only 7 months old but his limb deformities were making it harder for him to get up and walk around. In spite of his young age and gangly stature (not much bulk) he was heavier than we thought. His carcass weighed about 600 pounds and had more meat on it than we realized. It was interesting to see how deformed his ribcage was; the left side—at the front--had a large area in which the ribs were protruding inward toward the center of his body. It’s no wonder he had trouble with that front leg and had a hard time walking. We knew his leg bones were abnormal and that his ribs stuck out too far at the rear but we didn’t realize his ribcage was so deformed internally.

Thanksgiving morning I rode Veggie to the upper place and we gathered our cows to bring them down to the lower fields. They followed Lynn (with the feed truck) and I followed the herd. The cows were glad for better pasture. That afternoon we went to Andrea’s house for Thanksgiving dinner.

Michael and Carolyn were trying to stretch their pasture as far as possible, hoping to not feed hay until January. Hay cost more than $200 per ton, delivered. The price was coming down a little, thanks to a drop in fuel prices, but still too high--especially with the severe drop in cattle prices. It never works to feed high dollar hay to cheap cattle. Even though cows weren’t worth much that fall, Michael and Carolyn decided to pare their herd down to what their hay supply would accommodate for the winter. They sold a few more of their older cows.
They also decided not to lease any of our cows. They’d leased some that past year, but we pastured those cows all summer and fall. Michael and Carolyn still had 6 of our pregnant heifers. They planned to get those back to us before calving season, as soon as they had a chance to sort them out of their herd.
We had several inches of snow December 3, but it melted, then another couple inches. We tried out some steaks from the butchered calf and they are very tender and delicious. He was worth the extra bother of raising him on a bottle.

Lynn and I hiked around the lower fence between our pasture and the big lower fields where Michael and Carolyn will be putting their cows, since we knew there were bad spots in the fence that needed fixed. Lynn put 2 more wires along the lower end where the old fence is low and sagging, and spliced a spot where hunters had taken the wire apart to make a big hole for deer to go through. The hole was big enough for cows to go through. There were several other places that I was able to patch with tree branches laced through the wires. Lynn set 4 steel posts in another spot where a bull crashed through the fence earlier this fall and broke off the wood posts.
After it snowed, Michael and Carolyn started feeding the 150 cows on the Gooch place, feeding one big round bale (alfalfa) each day until they could get them moved to the lower place. Their most urgent task after the snowstorm was to move another herd of cows out of their leased place on Sandy Creek. Later they moved their cattle down to the lower fields.
Lynn drove to town to pick up Andrea’s 3 youngest children who stayed with another weekend. Andrea left late that night with Emily (after Em’s hockey practice) to drive to Idaho Falls for Em’s hockey tournament. This was her third season playing hockey and she was really enjoying it. Charlie, Dani and Samantha had fun with Grandma and Grandpa and decorated our little Christmas tree. We started a fire in the living room stove; the temperature was dropping below zero.

We had cold weather for awhile, down to 12 below zero with a nasty wind (making the temperature equivalent to about 30 below zero). Lynn covered our old well more thoroughly to make sure the water pipes in the bathroom didn’t freeze. The old hand dug well is right next to the house and we don’t use it anymore, but it creates an air space next to the bathroom. While Andrea and Emily were at the hockey tournament in Idaho Falls, Lynn drove to town several times to keep the fire going in Andrea’s stove at her house, to make sure her pipes didn’t freeze.
We put more protein tubs out for the cows, and for the 12 weaned heifers below the lane; they were still grazing in spite of the snow and we didn’t want to feed hay yet. Even though the short green feed is deeply snow covered, the cattle are eating the old tall grass on the hillsides and along the ditchbanks, thanks to the protein supplement—which was less expensive than hay.
Just before Christmas we had good luck and got 5 of our 6 pregnant heifers sorted out of Michael’s herd on the lower place. When they put 150 of their cows on the lower place, their 40 heifers and our 6 heifers were part of that group and we were trying to figure out the easiest way to get them home.
When I was feeding my horses one evening, I saw some cows coming up through the small field between the lower place and our field. That small field wasn’t supposed to have any cattle in it, so I realized the gate between it and the lower place must be open. Lynn and I were about to hike down and chase them back, and then realized they were heifers and one of them was ours. A few more were coming; part of the herd was finding the open gate and coming up through the little field toward our place.
We saw several more of our heifers near the front of the group. So we opened the gate into our field and Lynn guarded it (so our 12 weaned heifers wouldn’t get out) as I carefully sorted our heifers one by one around the corner and through the gate. Our heifers, being gentle and tame, and remembering us from when we fed them a year earlier as weanlings, were easy to sort out of that big herd of cows—which speaks highly of their intelligence, memory and trust, since they hadn’t seen us for almost a year. There were only 5 of them in that group, however. The 6th was probably down farther on the lower place with the rest of the cattle. We got our 5 sorted out and herded the 45 extra cows back down through the small field and out the gate they’d come through, and shut the gate.
We kept watching for the other heifer every time we drove by the lower place, but didn’t see her until a week later. Lynn was driving out our lane to go up the creek and deliver Christmas gifts to neighbors when he noticed 2 young cows near the gate, away from the main herd. One of them was our heifer and the other was a 3-year-old cow we sold a couple years earlier to Michael and Carolyn—and she had been in the group that came into that field a few days before, so she knew about the gate. Lynn slowly and quietly opened the gate without startling the cows, and got the 3year old through the gate, and then the heifer saw the open gate and followed her. He locked them in that little field and came to get me.
We fed some hay to our group, to help keep them happy on our side of the fence and also to attract the heifer and her friend. They came hiking toward the gate when they heard the feed truck. The difficult part was getting the timid heifer through the gate without the cow, but we managed to do it, then took the cow back down to join her herd on the lower place. So all our heifers were safely home again!
Our cows ran out of pasture a few days later, so we moved them to another field. Lynn called them and they followed him out of the pasture, through the barnyard, and out through another pasture to a field they hadn’t grazed yet. Our cows are very trusting and will follow us anywhere, knowing we are taking them to a new pasture

The end of December, a deer was killed right above our house by a cougar, in the midst of our cows. This was the 3rd cougar kill on our creek in 2 weeks. The other 2 deer were right next to our neighbor’s house above us. We hoped the cougar wouldn’t start killing cattle; Michael and Carolyn lost 2 calves to a cougar a few years earlier.
Lynn plowed all the neighbors’ driveways again, and plowed a better trail up to the haystack, to make it easier to load hay. Michael and Carolyn took their cows down to the Maurer place for winter feeding and calving. We were glad we got our heifers—saving the effort of sorting them out down there and hauling them home. It snowed for several days so we had to start feeding hay; the grass was all snowed under.

Our friends Pete and Bev Wiebe from Kelowna, BC arrived, and stayed 2 days on their way south to help with a mission project in southern California, rebuilding several homes that burned in the brush fires that summer. Pete and Bev are the ones who helped make it possible for Andrea and me to go to the World Burn Congress. Pete is a burn survivor, and we got acquainted in 2000 after Andrea’s accident, when he wrote to us to give encouragement. We have been very grateful for their friendship, and enjoyed their visit in our home.

Fall 2008

2011-09-01T08:00:00.000-07:00

SEPTEMBER 2008 – That fall was cold, freezing hard every night. Andrea and a friend helped us get more firewood. I was working on a revision/update for my book STOREY’S GUIDE TO RAISING BEEF CATTLE. My publisher (Storey) likes to periodically update their books, and since it had been 10 years since this book was published, they wanted a new edition. I also received page proofs for my next book (CATTLE HEALTH CARE) to check over.
One Saturday Emily rode with me for 4 hours to check the water troughs we fixed the week before—the ones that had been vandalized. The big trough in Baker Creek was still working (the elbow I’d put back together and the clamps on the pipe ends were still holding), and the one at the head of Baker Creek was still okay. The twines I’d wrapped tightly around the slashed pipe elbow were still there and very little water was leaking through. But one of the other troughs was empty; the pipes I put together were apart again, probably because I hadn’t been able to get the clamps tight enough using my pocketknife to turn them. This time I had a screwdriver and was able to fix it better. We discovered that another trough had been sabotaged, with a hole jabbed in the upright plastic pipe. All the water was leaking out the hole instead of going into the trough. I patched it by forcing a stick into the hole to create a plug.

The next day we moved our cows to a new pasture on the upper place, so they wouldn’t be adjacent to the range cows drifting home along our fence. We didn’t want our bull fighting other bulls through the fence or getting out on the range. Michael and Carolyn vaccinated one group of their cows--the ones that summered on their leased places at 17 Mile and Sandy Creek.
Then they rounded up their cattle off our range, and were short a couple pairs. Those may have gone into the neighbor’s range while the gates were open earlier in the fall. The next day we had a hard rain, the first really good rain that fall. Michael and Carolyn rode all day in the rain, moving their Sandy Creek cows.
OCTOBER - Emily rode with me again to gather our cattle off the upper place and bring them down here to the fields, to put with our smaller group.

On the way through the corral we sorted off Michael and Carolyn’s bull that was with our cows all summer, and took him down through the barnyard and pasture to put him with their other bull on the lower place. He threatened to charge at our horses, and at Lynn—who was on foot opening gates. Right after we got the bull through the gate, Lynn stumbled onto a ground nest of yellow jackets and they flew around his head stinging him. One stung Emily on the ear. We left the bull and came back to the house to put antihistamine ointment on Em’s painful swollen ear, and Lynn’s stings, and I gave Em some Benadryl tablets to counteract the reaction and swelling.
The bull, meanwhile, crashed back through the fence into our field. Since he was too dangerous to handle, we left him alone, but we opened all the gates into our lane and holding pen. By the next morning he’d come into the pen, bellowing at our bull in the corral. Lynn carefully and quietly slipped behind him and shut the gate. The bull was still on the fight and dangerous.
We talked to Michael and Carolyn and offered to buy the bull and butcher him. We were afraid he might hurt anyone trying to load him in a trailer to send to market. They decided to trade him for the 4-wheeler of ours they used all summer to irrigate.
In early October I moved some of my hay bales around by the gray horses’ pen, and left some hay near Breezy’s pen, enough for a week—to make it easier for Lynn to do my feeding chores quickly and easily while he took care of Andrea’s 4 children here. Andrea and I went to the World Burn Congress in Raleigh, North Carolina.
This is an annual gathering of burn survivors, family members/caregivers, hosted by the Phoenix Society for Burn Survivors, and that year it was held in North Carolina. Ever since Andrea’s burn injuries 8 years earlier, we’d wanted to attend one of these conferences, but never felt we could afford the time and expense. That fall, however, our good friends in Canada, Pete and Bev Wiebe, insisted that we should go. Pete is a burn survivor who wrote to us after Andrea’s accident, to encourage us. We became acquainted with him through many letters and finally met him and his wife in January 2008 when they stopped here at the ranch on a trip south.
Pete and Bev attended the World Burn Conference in 2007 in Vancouver, BC. They also attended the Canadian burn conference during the summer of 2008. After these experiences they felt Andrea and I should go to the next one. He and his wife encouraged us and helped make it possible. These friends paid our registration fees and informed us that the Phoenix Society often helps with expenses of first-time attendees who can’t afford transportation and hotel fees. So, with their help and encouragement, we were able to do this.
Andrea and I flew to North Carolina on September 30 (we drove to Missoula, Montana early that morning, then flew to Minneapolis and then on to Raleigh). The WBC was awesome. There were more than 700 people attending (burn survivors, family members, caregivers), with about 300 first-timers like us. It was an adventure, flying to NC (Andrea’s first time on a big airplane instead of a life flight!), and fun for us to be doing something together. But the most wonderful part was the 4 days of intense inspiration—meeting other burn survivors and their families/caregivers and hearing their stories, being part of the sharing. The love and energy arising from something like this is fantastic, as beautiful people (wearing outer scars—and some with missing fingers, limbs or without facial features--but beauty shining forth from inside) gently and compassionately helped those who were still struggling with extreme mental and emotional pain as well as physical pain. To be a part of this was truly wonderful, re-affirming our resolve to spend the rest of our lives helping other burn survivors and their families. While we were there, another burn survivor took our photos (she was taking photos of all the attendees) and sent us copies afterward.

Andrea really appreciated being able to participate in this conference. It was so special for her; she spent every possible moment meeting and connecting with other burn survivors, encouraging the ones who are not as far along as she is, and drawing strength from some who have overcome horrendous challenges to become the emotionally strong and inspirational people (in spite of continuing handicaps) they are today. It was an intense time of sharing—the ones who were farther along on their journey (life after a burn) encouraging the ones still struggling to cope with the physical and mental pain/trauma of a serious and life-changing burn injury. Andrea was somewhere in the middle, far enough along to be an inspiration to some who were still struggling, and inspired by those who were farther along in their journey. It renewed her desire to help others and this is something we both will be doing for the rest of our lives. Andrea hopes to do more with burn survivors; someday she’d like to help with the summer burn camps (for children).
We continue to cherish this experience at the WBC and have kept in touch with many of the new friends we met. We hope to attend another conference sometime in the future. Some attendees keep going back year after year because it gives them such a re-charge for living. There’s nothing quite like sharing experiences and helping other people, to help you through your own challenges—giving you strength when fighting your own dragons. Helping someone else is extremely therapeutic! We shall carry this experience in our hearts forever; it shall color our emotions and relationships and hopefully help continue to make us more loving and compassionate human beings. After getting home again, it took awhile to madly try to catch up from 6 days being gone (and Lynn was glad to have us home again, after taking care of Andrea’s 4 little kids). He was worn out, but managed fine with the kids, getting them to school, kindergarten, Head Start and their various activities. Emily helped with the younger kids, assisting with their homework and getting them ready for school. It was an exhausting week for all of us, but we were so glad we did this.
That same week, Michael finished baling the last of his hay and got it hauled, just before a big snowstorm. We put Boomerang, our crippled calf, in the barn. We moved our cows to a new pasture, and discovered 2 cows and a calf were missing. They’d gone under the fence by the ditch and into another field, so we rounded them up. We weaned the calves, hoping the stress of bad weather wouldn’t cause illness, but they all came through it just fine.

Michael and Carolyn weaned most of their calves during October, but had problems with fences. Something spooked a big bunch of calves in their weaning corral at the Maurer place and the calves crashed through one side of the corral and got back with their mothers. Nick helped Michael fix the fence, and they had to sort off those calves again. They hauled the cows to one of their other leased places, on Sandy Creek, to get the cows farther away.
We butchered the ornery 3-year-old bull (the one we traded our 4-wheeler for, from Michael and Carolyn). He is very tasty, and much nicer in the freezer than on the hoof threatening people!
We put our weaned heifers in the little field above the house, hoping the grass wouldn’t snow under. We were short on hay and hoping to stretch our pastures as far as possible that fall. We bought a ton of protein supplement (in lick tubs) and took some to the upper place for our cows, hoping this would help them utilize the rough dry feed and encourage them to continue to graze. The protein supplied what was lacking in the dry grass. There was enough old dry grass to last several weeks, and the protein supplement was a lot cheaper than hay. Very plain, low quality hay was costing about $200 per ton to haul in. Good quality alfalfa was even more expensive.

Michael and Carolyn fenced some of their stackyards on their leased places, where cows had been crawling into the haystacks. They took 6 metal gate panels from the sick barn and our makeshift fence in the back yard (where Boomerang, the crippled calf, was living earlier in the summer) to make a quick fix on their stackyards.
One evening Rishira’s big steer (Sher Kahn) was lame and lying down in a corner of the weaning pen. I made him get up and noticed that his right hind foot was sore; he didn’t want to put any weight on it. We decided to treat him for foot rot. By morning he was not only lame, but very dull and not eating, and staggering when we brought him around by the barn to put him into the headcatcher. We gave him antibiotics, and a shot of Banamine to ease his pain and fever, and left him in the pen by himself with hay and water. By mid morning he was feeling well enough to start chewing his cud, and by noon was picking at the hay, feeling better after the shot of Banamine. By the next morning he was dull again and not eating or drinking, and very constipated, so we gave him more Banamine, and force-fed him several gallons of water (with electrolyte salts), a quart of mineral oil, and some molasses to give him energy. This helped, and the next morning he was up and eating again, and passing manure.
That evening the weather got worse, so we opened the barn doors so the sick steer could go in to get out of the rain. We had rain for 2 days and he spent most of his time in the barn. After the weather improved he was well enough to go back out to the pasture with his buddies.
Michael and Carolyn found their last missing pair—a cow and calf that went to the neighboring range during the summer and showed up with the neighbor’s cows.
Andrea’s youngest girl, Danielle, had her 4th birthday on November 4, and we had a little party for her at Andrea’s house downtown.
We had very cold weather after the rain. Lynn took more protein to the cows on the upper place. Michael and Carolyn hauled 100 more cows to the Gooch place from Maurers, making 5 trips with 2 trailers. There was enough grass there to last several weeks if it didn’t snow under.

Nick and Heather both went to the state track meet and did well. Nick placed first in his 5000-meter race, and Heather placed 5th in hers. The next weekend Nick was invited to the Junior Olympics in Boise and placed 12th in his cross-country race. He qualified again for the invitational track meet in Australia next year, but wasn’t sure if he wanted to try to raise the money again to go.
Michael and Carolyn shipped 3 semi loads of calves in mid November. The steers went to a feedlot in Colorado and the heifers went to a buyer here in Idaho who bought their heifers the past several years. With the dramatic drop in cattle prices that fall, some contractors were backing out on their contracts, so we were relieved that the buyers of Michael and Carolyn’s calves still honored their contracts.

Summer 2008

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JULY 2008 – The area around my hayshed was full of tall grass, so I let Breezie and Snickers graze it down so it wouldn’t be a fire hazard when it dried out. Michael and Carolyn were custom cutting hay all month, and trying to irrigate all their leased places.
One Sunday a neighbor called to say he had a cow and calf of Michael’s that came in from the range with their cows and he’d put the pair in his corral. Michael was cutting hay, so Lynn and I hauled the cow and calf to our corral.
The next morning I put front shoes on Rubbie, and rode with granddaughter Heather to take that pair back to the range, gathering up 7 more pair on the low range that had come down through the fence. We took them back up to the middle range pasture. When we came home we rode through the lower fields and gathered 11 cows and calves that had come through the fence from the neighboring range, and brought them up to our corrals so their owners could come get them. While rounding them up, I accidentally rode through some old barbed wire hidden in the tall grass. Rubbie’s hind legs were tangled in it. She didn’t panic, so I was able to get off and have Heather hold her while I pushed the loops of wire down to the ground where I could hold them down with my feet and gently pick up Rubbie’s feet one by one and get them out of the wire.
Lynn cut some of our hay and got it baled. We moved the last few bales out of my hay shed so Lynn could start hauling and filling the shed again. Andrea came out to the ranch and rode with me for 5 hours; we gathered 9 more pair from the low range that came back through the fence. We put them on the middle range, fixed a water trough, then rode along the fence to see where the cattle were coming through. We found a hole where the top 2 wires were broken and the bottom 2 mashed to the ground—probably from elk travel. We spliced the wire and patched the hole, so the cows would stay where they belong.
[[use photo of me and Andrea ready to start our ride, and 2 photos of Andrea moving cattle]]

On July 10 our grandson Nick (age 15) and 2 other boys from Salmon went to Boise, to meet up with the rest of the runners to fly to Los Angeles and then to Hawaii, on the first leg of their trip to Australia for the invitational track meet. While in Hawaii they toured Pearl Harbor and Nick saw the cemetery where my uncle Dix Moser (who died in World War II) is buried, and took photos of the headstone.
The track team did a practice run on the beach at Waikiki and ran to the top of Diamondhead Crater. At the Down Under track meet there were 300 runners from Australia and New Zealand, and 200 from the U.S. Nick placed 3rd in a cross-country race with about 100 runners. They got home in late July, and Nick went back to his summer job, irrigating and changing sprinkler pipe.
AUGUST - Lynn finally went to a doctor to check his back. It has been bothering him for a long time. The last few years he’s had pain and numbness in his left leg and foot. Nothing showed on x-rays, so he had an MRI, which showed bone spurs and a pinched nerve. The doctor wanted to try cortisone shots (into the area between the vertebrae where the nerve is pinched) to see if that would relieve pressure on the nerve. In early August Lynn cut our last 2 fields of hay, hoping to get those baled and hauled before his first cortisone shot (since he was not supposed to do anything strenuous for a few days after the shot).
Andrea and kids were here one day and the two little girls drew pictures and made headbands, and Charlie (age 6) rode around with Lynn baling hay; that little kid loves tractors! Lynn didn’t get the last field baled before he had his first cortisone shot, and it rained the next day. It took a few more days for the hay to dry out enough to bale and haul. His back was painful for several days from the shot, since the doctor made 3 tries to get the needle into the joint space, because of all the calcium deposits in the way. The cortisone helped for awhile; the leg was still numb, but not as painful.
[[photo of Dani & Sam, making headbands]]

Michael, Carolyn and kids started moving their range cows from the middle pasture to the high range. I put hind shoes on Rubbie that morning and rode with them. They didn’t get a very early start, due to irrigation/sprinkler problems on the Maurer place, but we rode all afternoon and into the evening and gathered cattle from the south end of the pasture. One of the dogs began having problems as we finished gathering, just before we started the long trek up Baker Creek. He was hot, but also having gut pain and was staggering, dragging his hind legs. So granddaughter Heather took the dog home. He couldn’t travel, so she picked him up and got on her horse, holding him—mounting her horse from the uphill side—and carried the dog 2 miles home on the horse.
[[photo of riders going through gate, starting out to find and move cattle]]

We had a near catastrophe before we started up Baker Creek canyon. As we were bringing cattle down into the canyon, a few went out through the cliffy rocks instead of down the trail, so Michael rode out through the rocks to head them down. He got off his horse to lead him through the worst of it, and sent the dogs after the cows. When he turned Captain around to lead him back out of the rock cliffs, the horse scrambled and panicked—and reared up, with the cliff right behind him. For an instant it looked like he was going over backward, right over the cliff, teetering there on the edge, past the point of no return. The only thing that saved him was Michael pulling on his head, serving as an anchor. Just as Michael was afraid he’d have to let the horse go—or be pulled over the cliff with him—Captain regained his balance and got his front end back down.
[[photos of Michael riding Captain]]

The rest of our ride was without incident, except for a freak hailstorm that hit us as we got toward the high range—drenching and pounding us with big hailstones and huge raindrops, with the sun still shining! It cooled us and the cows off nicely.
[[photos of Nick and cattle after the rain]]

We made a longer ride the next day (Sunday) and gathered 75 more pairs, then gave the horses and dogs (and ourselves) a day off and rode again Tuesday. Rolley, the dog that was sick on Saturday, was recovered enough to go again. It was a LONG hard day, gathering the final cows. We split up and covered 3 drainages, taking cattle to the top. Rubbie and I gathered cattle in the middle canyon and herded 25 pair up through the brush and headed out to the ridge near the top—which took a lot of effort. I needed to be in 3 places at once and had to outrun several pair that tried to go back down the draw while I was gathering others out of the brush above them.
Eventually we got all the groups converged at the top of the pasture and took them around the mountain to the high range. On the way home we found 4 more pair in the bottom of Baker Creek. As we started them up the canyon, Michael’s horse began having muscle spasms (a different horse than the one he rode earlier—a spare horse that was not in shape). So he led the horse back down into Baker Creek and stood in the shade before starting to lead him home. The rest of us took the cows up to the high range, and caught up with Michael an hour later. The horse was recovering by then, and we got home before dark.
Andrea moved back to Salmon from Challis. It’s nice to have her closer, and her kids were looking forward to going to school here again. She’s renting a house on the edge of town. The kids were staying with us some days, while Andrea made trips to Challis to get her things moved.
Our handicapped calf, Boomerang, ate all the grass in our back yard, so we moved him to the pen in front of the calving barn. He followed me around the driveway, as I enticed him with his bottle. The kids still enjoyed playing with him and feeding him a bottle, and grain. He was growing rapidly, but still had abnormally long legs and an upward bend in his back. We did some research and found out that his deformity was due to a genetic defect in the Angus breed (fawn calf syndrome). He must have inherited a recessive gene from each parent. This was the first case we’d ever seen.
[[photo of Emily and Boomerang by calving barn]]

Lynn had his second and third cortisone shots. I drove him home from the hospital each time since he wasn’t supposed to drive or do very much after the injection.
We had temperatures up to 100 degrees F. in mid August and then had cold nights. It froze hard one night and nipped Lynn’s garden and froze my hose for watering the horses. He went out before daylight that morning and sprinkled his garden in hopes it would help keep it from freezing, and most of it survived. After that, we covered it nearly every night, and I started draining my water hose.
The evening of August 24 we had a birthday party for Charlie (just turned 7) at Andrea’s new place. Emily and Jim got there about 8 p.m. after driving all day from Tonopah, Nevada. Em spent the summer there with her dad, and he brought her back when he came to spend a month working for his friend in Montana as a hunting guide—so Andrea didn’t have to drive to Nevada to get Emily. Jim borrowed a saddle pad from us, since he forgot to bring his. He brought some of his antler lamps and chandeliers, to sell here in Salmon. Jim has been doing well with his antler art, making some beautiful pieces.
The next day, Lynn took some things into town for Andrea and picked up Emily. She and I made a short ride on Veggie and Rubbie on the low range. This was Emily’s first chance this year to ride with me since her ride in June to help me check cows on our 160-acre pasture. She stayed overnight with us, and rode again with me. We went to the high range, through our 320-acre pasture, but didn’t have time to go very far. She enjoyed the chance to try out her new binoculars, to check the cattle. We made sure there was still a little water in Baker Creek and that the top gate in the 320 was still shut, then hurried home so Lynn could take Em back to town on his way to go locate a water well for some people near Challis.
[[photos of Emily riding Veggie001 & Em checking cows001 & Em & Veg003.]]

A bear went into our neighbor’s cabin up the creek while the neighbor John was gone to town. When John came home he discovered that the bear had gone through the screen door, trashed the kitchen, rubbing on the cook stove and licking grease out of a frying pan. A few days later a bear was on top of the chicken coop at another neighbor’s place.
Lynn set steel posts in the fence below our house where the range cows got into the lower place this summer, and was able to get the fence standing up again. It’s swampy there and hard to hold a fence where the range cows press it, trying to get into the field. The cows on that range would be drifting home along that fence in the fall, so it needed fixed. The next day Lynn fixed fence on the upper place where deer and elk had broken off a post and pushed the fence down, and made a wire gate along the road by our old stackyard. We had a couple metal gates there earlier, but took them last winter for a more urgent purpose, so we needed another gate for the stackyard.
On Sunday Emily rode with me again and we made a longer ride to check troughs and gates on the high range. We discovered that someone had vandalized almost all the water troughs, taking the upright plastic pipes apart at the elbows where the pipe comes out of the ground to go up into the trough. For several of the troughs, I was able to find the pieces of pipe they’d thrown into the bushes or down the hill. I put the pipes back onto the elbows, and used my pocketknife as a screwdriver to tighten the clips to hold them on.
[[Em riding Veggie checking water trough]]

Our most crucial trough at the head of Baker Creek was also dry. Apparently the vandal hadn’t been able to loosen those clips to take the pipe apart, so he used a knife or something sharp to hack a big hole in the plastic elbow where the pipe comes up out of the ground—and all the water was leaking out. Fortunately I always carry baling twines in the coat pockets of the jacket tied to my saddle (for emergency fence and gate repairs). I tied twine tightly around the bend of the elbow where the hole was, making many wraps around it to cover the hole. It still leaked, but blocked the hole and enabled much of the water to come up the pipe and into the trough.
We also found two gates open into the neighboring range, and shut them. From the cattle tracks going through, it looks like some of Michael and Carolyn’s cows had gone missing. They would have to search the neighbor’s range to find them.
[[Em riding Veggie 002]]

Lynn and I moved our cows in the swamp pasture to another pasture, taking the bull out on the way through the corrals. We moved the cows on the upper place from the wild meadow to the fields across the creek, to eat the regrowth on those pastures. We’d planned to sort out the bull from that group (one of Michael’s bulls), and haul him home. We got the trailer backed up to the corner of the corral, sorted out the bull, and tried to load him, but re ran back past us twice. On the third try he went under a gate and broke it, so we decided he could just stay with the cows till we could bring them home to vaccinate later in the fall.

Early Summer 2008

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LATE MAY 2008 – Lynn hauled our big tractor home on the flatbed trailer, from the ranch on Sandy Creek—where Michael had used it during winter to load hay. Lynn used it to smooth out manure piles on our upper Wild Meadow before he started the irrigation water on that field. We hauled manure up there from the corrals several years ago but never took time to spread out the piles, so it’s nice to finally have that accomplished.
I was working on the edited manuscript of my next book, checking the edits and adding clarifications and a few more illustrations. I finally got that finished and sent back to the publisher, and had more time to write articles for horse and cattle magazines.
Our weather finally warmed up and leaves came out on the trees. Everything was about a month late that spring, including the grass. Michael and Carolyn had to buy several more semi loads of hay to get through the spring till grass. There was no extra hay for sale in our valley. It had to be hauled from Montana, making it very expensive.
We were still feeding our cows until mid-May when we moved them to the pasture above the corrals. We locked them in the lower end, away from the creek, to eliminate the chance for any calves drowning, in case they tried to cross it. With the warm weather, the snow on the mountains is melting and the creek is very high.
We had more snow than usual this past winter, and this is the first big run-off after the 2003 fire. Though grass is now growing in the burned area, the soil is still not very stable; a lot of silt came down the creek and into our ditches.
Michael and Carolyn spent several days sorting pairs (on the Maurer place) and hauling them to summer pasture—some to the Sandy Creek place, some to leased pasture at 17 mile, some to our range, using 2 stock trailers.
Lynn and I hauled water tanks to the State Land pasture and pumped for those cows. That pasture has no water, but we can pump water from our ditch in the field next to the county road. We put a long pipe through the culvert under the road and string out hoses to hook up to it—from the pump in the ditch, and then to our tanks in the dry pasture. We have enough troughs to hold water for several days.

JUNE – Granddaughter Emily played baseball on her school team, and we went one evening to watch her last game of the season. It rained hard during the end of the game but the kids kept playing, and we held plastic garbage bags over our heads to keep from getting soaked.
We finally got Boomerang (the handicapped calf) out of the barn and into the back yard. He was walking much better, and needed to learn to eat grass! The weather was so wet and cold that we made a shelter in one corner of the yard, using an old canvas tent, and plastic tarps over the top of it to make sure it doesn’t leak. He spent a lot of time in his shelter when it was raining or windy.

]

Lynn and I drove up on the State Land pasture with the 4-wheeler one Sunday to check on the grass and the cows and discovered Peggy Sue had foot rot. We’d seen all the cows a few days before when we were pumping water for them, and she was ok, but was now severely lame. We started to bring her and her calf down the steep hill to the road, following them on foot, but her calf ran back to the herd. So I brought Peggy Sue down by herself (she was too lame to try to run off) and Lynn went ahead with the 4-wheeler to open the gate. We brought her a half-mile down the road to the corral and put her in the headcatcher, giving her antibiotics. Then I followed her back up the road and put her back into the State Land pasture.

In early June I trimmed the horses’ feet in hopes Emily could come out and ride with me, but the weather was too wet and cold; it snowed one day, and never got above 40 degrees F for several days. We had a fire in our wood stove nearly every day that spring, and ran out of firewood, so Andrea and her friend sawed and hauled a trailer load of wood from up the creek. Usually by mid-June many ranchers are cutting hay, but not that year. The hay crop was way behind.
In late June Michael, Carolyn and kids branded and vaccinated the last of their late-born calves. Lynn and I branded and vaccinated our group. The calves were about 2 months old and had grown so big that it was all Lynn and I could do to tip them, on the calf table, to brand them. We’re not as young and strong as we used to be!
The next day Lynn and I moved the herd on our upper place, putting them across the creek to the field next to the mountain. The creek had finally dropped enough that there was less risk for drowning calves. Moving our cows is always easy; all we do is call them and they’ll follow us anywhere. They followed Lynn to the gate panels by the creek and waited for him to open them.

My nephew, Matt Smith, spent several days with us in late June, coming from Seattle. He had some good visits with my mom (his grandmother) at the care center. It’s nice that mom is a little stronger and more lucid than she was during the fall and winter; she appreciated his visits.
Andrea finally made a trip to Salt Lake for long overdue appointments with a couple doctors—to check on her skin graft problems and to have a large lump checked in her breast. The breast lump checked out ok so we were relieved. And the mole mapping on her legs gave no indications of problems this time. It had been 3 years since she had those grafts checked and the doctors prefer she check them every year, since periodically they’ve had to remove malignant tissue. She had some mole growths on her back that were removed prior to her burn accident, but some had apparently been left. When skin was taken from her back to graft over the burns on her legs, some of that tissue was transferred with the grafts. She’s had several crops of black moles appear on her legs, and those moles had to be removed.
One of the highlights of her trip this time was reconnecting with some of the nurses, physical therapists and others at the burn center who made such a difference in her life that summer 8 years earlier when she spent so much time in the burn center struggling to survive. She made a point this trip to look up many people she wanted to see again, and they were delighted to see how well she is doing.
She had good visits with several of the burn ICU nurses, including some that were no longer in the ICU (like her 2 most favorite nurses—Kim, who was now at the cancer center and Matt Harringer who was now a flight nurse, helping bring seriously ill or injured patients to the University hospital). She was so delighted to reconnect with them. She said this trip was really special, seeing many of those people again.
There were emotional reunions. In her earlier trips down there for checkups, with Mark, he wasn’t interested in doing things like this, and never wanted to take time. Now that Andrea was no longer with Mark (though the divorce is not yet final, and he was putting her through a lot of emotional and financial trauma trying to gain custody of the kids) her life was easier now in some ways, and she hopes to do more things she’s wanted to do—such as help encourage other burn survivors as they struggle back toward a more normal existence. Someday she’d like to help with burn camps--to help encourage young burn survivors, and maybe attend one of the burn conferences. Her life will be more her own, once she gets this divorce behind her.
While Andrea was gone for 4 days, the 3 little kids stayed here at the ranch with us. The oldest, Emily, was spending part of the summer with her dad, Jim, in Nevada. He moved to Tonapah a couple years earlier. Andrea planned to drive down to get her before school started. Emily enjoyed helping Jim in his shop, learning how to cut and polish turquoise stones that he puts into some of his antler lamps and chandeliers.
While Andrea was in Salt Lake for her doctor appointments, Charlie, Samantha and Dani had fun here, helping me do chores, helping feed the crippled calf in the back yard, painting pictures to send to their big sister Emily. We got 2 postcards from Emily, so the little kids wrote her “letters” and made pictures to send back to her. The highlight for them seemed to be playing with and feeding the calf in our yard. Little Dani would ask me several times a day if it was time yet to go feed “maa maa”. His name was Boomerang but when we called him we’d say “maa maa” (and he came galumphing out of his tent to come suck a bottle), so Dani thought his name was maa maa.

A few days after Andrea got back from Salt Lake, she came out to the ranch while the kids were at the Mahoney House (the family safety center where Mark had supervised visits with them once a week), and rode with me. It was the first time she’d had a chance to ride her horse since we were rounding up cattle off the 320 and 160-acre mountain pastures the previous fall. We only had time for a short ride, since she had to be back to pick up her kids after a 3-hour visit with their dad. We rode Rubbie and Veggie to the upper place to check on our cattle up there. It was great to be able to ride together again.

Michael was extremely busy that summer, doing custom hay cutting. It was a hectic year for him, taking on 5 leased ranches and trying to get things functional (old falling down fences, broken sprinkler systems). Our grandkids Heather (age 17) and Nick (15) were good help; they put in long days helping with the irrigation and changing sprinkler pipe. In early July, however, Nick was preparing for a 2-week trip to Australia and Hawaii for international track meets--a wonderful opportunity for a 15 year old kid. One other boy from Salmon was going, and they each had to raise almost $5000 apiece for the trip. They did a lot of fundraising projects, and Nick worked odd jobs for various people, and also had donations from family and friends to make the final total. This trip would be quite an experience for a kid who had never been on an airplane, never seen the ocean, never traveled very far from home (only to track meets in our region).
Lynn was helping Michael that summer, wherever possible, on some of the irrigation and fence fixing. He took our stackwagon to a ranch north of town to stack hay for a client of Michael’s (a job Michael didn’t have time to do). I kept writing as many articles (for horse and cattle magazines) as I could, since we were definitely not to the point yet that we could slow down in trying to help our kids financially…
As we tackled all the projects that summer, we were grateful that we had children, and were still able to help them—glad that we DO have kids and grandkids! And another
blessing has been the ever-widening circle of friends and loving people whom we would never have met but for Andrea’s burn accident and the way it changed our lives. We now have a lot more empathy for other people, and more understanding about the truly important things in life, and this understanding helps us strive to keep things in proper perspective.
We weep with others when they have trauma, and we rejoice with others as they find healing or peace. In late June we received an e-mail from an older couple who were at the burn center when Andrea was there 8 years earlier (Royce was severely burned in a methane gas well explosion, and was in the room next to Andrea in the ICU… and nearly died several times from his injuries and from pneumonia). Royce and Marie live in Georgia and they had a good friend with a child that had severe seizures from a very young age, and had recently undergone surger. A wide circle of friends has been keeping that family in their prayers.
Royce and Marie sent me an e-mail forwarded from the mother of that child:
“Today marks the 3rd week since Catherine’s brain surgery and the 20th day with no seizures. I am in such amazement as I watch her play and interact, learning anew how to engage with her world. We’ve coaxed a few chuckles. Then suddenly, today, she offered smiles from nowhere; she’s attempting (very humorous) to run, and is responding to us in new ways. She is more “here” with us than I’ve seen in the last 2 years.
“I feel like I’ve walked out onto a beach after a storm. The air is fresh and peaceful but the view is littered as the water recedes. Upon closer inspection, it isn’t all refuse. Strewn around are remnants and seaweed I wish to cast back into the tide, never to be seen again, but beachcombing also reveals treasures from the depths that I could never have imagined.
“The depth of my understanding and certainly of God’s love and mercy now have nothing to do with whether this reprieve in Catherine’s seizures is permanent or whether they will return to torture us all again. The joy I have in simple, uncomplicated days is steadfast and rich. The experience of His enduring presence will ever outshine the best of any outcome we could ever seek on Catherine’s behalf. These are miracles and treasures of immeasurable value.
“As I take in all that I am able, I know my portion is for today. For whatever lies ahead, whether calm or storm, the portion will be ample to fill the need. And this time I am breathing in deeply the fresh aroma of His promise to supply that ample portion.
“Many blessings and thanks to those who beachcomb alongside and help us fill our buckets with treasures. I pray that you enjoy them as much as we do.”
* *
Lynn and I felt that her words were worth sharing, since we know how wondrously surprised a person can be, at times, by joy—and treasures unimagined that are suddenly given to us as we travel though days that sometimes threaten to overwhelm us with adversities…

Spring 2008

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That spring, we tried to “catch up” on many projects that had been put on “hold” for so many years. I sorted through piles of papers, magazines, manuscripts, etc. that had accumulated for 8 years (following Andrea’s burn accident, when for so long we didn’t have time for anything except the very basics). Lynn built more cabinets, shelves and drawers for the kitchen end of our house. It was nice to have that project—one we started 35 years earlier--more near completion, with shelves and cupboards for some of the things we’d stored in odd places.
In March, Michael and Carolyn sent a load of cull cows to the sale at Blackfoot. They had a lot of “shakedown” in the herd of cows they bought the previous fall—some of those cows didn’t mother their calves, turned up open (not pregnant) or had some other problem.

Since they were short on cow numbers from the heavy culling, we sold them 22 of our cows/heifers and then decided to lease them most of the others. We hauled the leased cows to Maurer’s place where Michael and Carolyn were calving the last of their cows. None of our pregnant heifers had ever been hauled before and some were reluctant to go into the trailer. One heifer ran back over the top of us, knocking me down one direction and Lynn the other. We weren’t hurt (except for a pulled muscle in Lynn’s leg), but we felt like human bowling pins!
The local butcher came out to process 2 of Michael and Carolyn’s cows--one that was too old and crippled to sell, and a big wild cow they bought last fall. She calved in January when the weather was cold. They couldn’t get her in from the field to put in the barn, so she calved out in the snow. Then she wouldn’t follow the newborn calf when they put it in the sled, so they still couldn’t get her to the barn. They dried the calf in their trailer house by the stove, fed it colostrum, and took it back out to the cow, but she wouldn’t mother it.

So they grafted it onto another cow. Later, when they tried to round up the whole herd, that cow ran off and wouldn’t come with the group. So she stayed there with the calving bunch for 2 months. When the butcher came, Michael drove out in the field on his 4-wheeler and was able to get close enough to the wild cow to shoot her in the head before she ran off.
In April, a stray dog showed up and “camped” in our driveway. We realized she’d gotten on Michael’s truck when he was hauling hay from another ranch. She didn’t belong to anyone in that neighborhood, and no one responded to our “lost and found” announcement on the radio. She was a nice old dog, well behaved, and our grandson Nick wanted to keep her (since his old dog Spud died that winter), so she found a new home.
Emily had one more hockey tournament, in Boise. Andrea brought the 3 smaller children to stay with us for several days while Andrea and Em were in Boise. The kids were fascinated with my old typewriter (which I uncovered on my cluttered “old” desk) and they enjoyed “typing” on it, delighted to hear the bell ring for the carriage return. They are familiar with computers but had never seen a typewriter. Young Dani spent a lot of time typing “stories” and one morning Charlie got up early just so he could type on it while I wrote articles on my computer.

Early April was cold, some nights down to 5 degrees, and windy. Emmy’s pet cow, Buffalo Girl, was ready to calve so we put her in the maternity pen where we could watch her at night in case we needed to put her in the barn. We were hoping our little herd (the ones still here at our place) would hold off until the weather warmed up!
Michael and Carolyn branded/vaccinated their calves. The power was off for nearly 5 hours while they were branding the first group, and they had to borrow a generator to run the electric branding iron and clippers (winter born calves need clipped, to do a good job of branding).

Weather continued cold and windy, with new snow now and then. Our little group of cows here at home started to calve. Buffalo Girl had a nice big bull calf, but the evening she calved it was so cold and windy we put her in the barn to calve. Two other cows that calved that past week had to go in the barn to calve because we were having a blizzard.

With the cold weather, the gras
s wasn’t growing much. Michael and Carolyn ran out of hay for their cows, so they rounded up one group to haul over to Maurer’s (one of the ranches they are leasing) where there was some old grass—with a little new green grass coming up in the old stubble. The next day they moved 160 pairs from our lower fields, taking them to another pasture where there’s a little more grass. The cows dispersed to graze and some of the calves didn’t know where their mothers went, and a few came through the fence and back down the road. Lynn and I “trapped” them here in the corral, so Michael could haul them back up in the trailer.
One of our neighbors called, and told us there was an injured dog lying in her barn. It was our granddaughter Heather’s old dog, Jake. He was badly mauled, with deep puncture wounds in his chest. The dog had to be shot, and Michael surmised that a large animal like a cougar must have grabbed the dog. Nick and Heather both lost their dogs but fate has a way of compensating. The stray dog that Nick adopted a few weeks earlier was pregnant—and had 6 pups!
Michael and Carolyn branded 60 more calves at the Maurer place, including calves from the cows we leased them. They planned to keep the steer calves and we’d keep the heifer calves, so they put our brand on the heifers.
One cow had a long-legged calf that can’t stand up. His legs were crooked and weak. Michael and Carolyn fed the calf with a bottle for a few days then realized it would be awhile longer before the calf could get up and around on his own, so they brought him here for us to take care of.
“Boomerang” had diarrhea when they brought him home, so we gave him a kaolin/pectin mix to slow and soothe his gut. He had a good appetite and was always eager to eat, even though his legs weren’t strong enough to stand up for more than a few minutes and he had to nurse his bottle lying down.

I treated Boomerang for diarrhea for more than a week; he was never sick—just had loose feces. I gave him doses of probiotic paste (to replenish proper “gut bugs”) for several days, and that seemed to help his digestion. He was getting a lot stronger and by the time he was a week old he was able to get up without help, and nurse his bottle standing up. He even tried to buck and play, so we hoped his legs would strengthen and straighten more with exercise.
In late April Lynn and I went to town to watch the high school track meet. Both Nick and Heather were running in several events. Nick had been shaving more seconds off his running times, in the short races as well as the long ones (800 meter, 1600 and 3200 meter runs). He was looking forward to the international track meets in Australia and Hawaii in July; several students from Salmon had been invited to attend.

April 26, 2008 was the first anniversary of my father’s passing. I was missing my dad a lot, but felt he was still very close to me. A friend in Kansas (one of the ranch families that came into our lives, helping us with encouragement and prayers when Andrea was burned, and whom we’ve corresponded with ever since) sent me a bit of wisdom in a letter (a saying she keeps above her desk): “Life is eternal. Love is immortal and death is only a horizon—and a horizon is nothing save the limits of our sight.” Indeed, that’s a wonderful way to put it. The horizon is only the limit of what we can see—not an actual boundary at all.
That spring, my Mom was actually stronger than she was a few months earlier and using a walker again (with help) instead of a wheel chair. My sister and I took her out to the cemetery on the anniversary of Dad’s death (which was also their wedding anniversary), and we had a very pleasant time of remembrances.

In late April I received a very special letter from my friend Liz (whose son Ty was severely burned the same summer Andrea was burned), and she sent me a copy of an article “My daughters are fine but I’ll never be the same”, written by Harriet Brown. The author expressed our feelings very well.
As I mentioned to Liz in the letter I wrote back to her, we are NEVER the same after nearly losing a child. We’ve changed in good ways and bad ways. It makes us appreciate LIFE and savor each day. We are thankful that we still have the relationship, the family member that we almost lost. And yes, we are intensely grateful for the help we received (from doctors, other people who emerged out of the woodwork to help us) and we have a HUGE well of gratitude for the many important things and acts of kindness we can never pay back and can only accept with grace. It puts things into a whole new perspective and gives us better priorities. Knowing what’s REALLY important, we are better able to shake off and not be as caught up in small things that don’t really count or matter.
Yet at the same time, we also have this primordial fear that is always there in the bottom of our soul—the fear of something else happening to that child or loved one—since the cushion of false securities has been jerked away. The buffering illusions we might have once been satisfied with (or the thought that these things only happen to other people) have all been swept away. We have looked directly into the stark reality of death of our child and we know that never again will that child or anyone else we love be “safe”. This knowledge is always there, in the back of the mind, in the hidden recesses of the heart, and it can eat away at us and destroy us. It crops up and stares us in the face at odd times or whenever some little (or big) thing reminds us of the frailty of life—especially the life of our snatched-from-death child.
For a long time I was plunged into adrenaline-surging worry every time Andrea got pneumonia again, or even a bad cold, or scraped/poked her delicate grafted skin and it took forever to heal, or her blood sugar got too high, or whatever… the list goes on and on. What a riptide of gratitude/joy and heart-stopping worry! No wonder we mothers become nut cases! It’s truly a roller coaster of extreme highs and terrible black-hole lows. The only way I could deal with it sanely was to give her future into God’s hands, and back off in my own fussing. This helped and still helps, but I have to still remind myself to do this sometimes when new crises occur—whether health-wise or other.
After time went on after her burn accident and we were all well along in the “recovery” journey--and life regained some “normalcy” (a nebulous, wispy idea of normal)--the gut-wrenching worries eased somewhat, and life continued along on a more even keel. But we still are intimately tied to our once-injured children in a way that some parents cannot understand. Once wounded, once they are nearly lost forever, we can’t “let go” of them, like other mothers can. We have definitely lost that “illusion of safety” as Harriet Brown called it. We do seek out, and feel more connected with, other parents who have gone through similar journeys, and I know that I am helped and calmed and uplifted by this fellowship with others who truly understand.
And life doesn’t suddenly get easier or simpler just because our loved one survived. As Liz said in her letter to me, it’s an unpredictable rodeo-bull ride. One minute we are hanging on and keeping our balance and doing pretty well, and the next moment we are about to lose it—and maybe even in danger of being trampled and gored. And sometimes we just have to pick ourselves up out of the dirt and get on again.
The trauma we were all going through that year with Andrea’s divorce (and not knowing how that would end up, with Mark still trying to hurt her as much as he could) was something we didn’t expect—or tried not to expect, because there were early warning signs. Andrea didn’t realize what she was getting into, not knowing the extent of his alcohol problem, and then she tried for so long to still make it work, before she finally hit bottom and realized she had to get out, to save herself and her kids. She commented to me that spring that there “sure aren’t any happy endings where everybody lived happily ever after”.
But we go on, and do our best. As I told Liz in my letter, “she WILL survive this. She knows, and we know, that even though this is horribly devastating (mentally, emotionally, financially), it still pales in comparison with the epic journey through the burn center. Having come through the unimaginable and survived, we can put all other things into perspective and know that we can, by the grace and love of God, come through them. There are always setbacks and challenges and I guess it’s a good thing we don’t know what’s around the next corner or how this old bull we’re riding is going to move next. We just pray that God will give us the strength to deal with it, and to handle it with grace.”
I have been very grateful for my “support” group—other mothers of burned children—because we’ve all tried to help each other through the toughest times. Life is a roller-coaster of trying to cope with the plunges into dark trauma and juggling those with the everyday tasks of life—which we need to be more grateful for, since they keep us walking a refreshingly “normal” path.
In early May Lynn and Michael cleaned several ditches with backhoe and tractor, and got most of the irrigation water started. The weather was still cold and there were no leaves on the trees yet, but the grass was starting to grow.
Lynn cleaned out the calving barn with tractor and blade before it got too wet in there; once the irrigation water starts, the ground beneath the barn subs and gets wet and it’s impossible to use a tractor without getting stuck. Even though we had one cow left to calve (Rosie), we hoped it would be nice weather, or if necessary we’d put her in the other barn, in the stall next to Boomerang.
Rosie finally calved at 1 a.m. May 7, in a rainstorm. We named her heifer Rosie’s Raindrop. The calf was up and nursing quickly, so we didn’t put them in the barn. Later that morning we were starting to cook an early lunch, when the power went off. We had the wood stove going, so we finished cooking on that stove. The power was off until late evening, so it was nice to have wood heat and a way to warm up food for supper! I warmed water on the wood stove to mix up the mid-day bottle for Boomerang. We were feeding him 3 times a day; he was always hungry, and growing fast.
We finally had a few days of warm weather. Michael and Carolyn turned their cows out on the range in mid-May and rode around the range fence to shut all the gates. They got sunburned; it’s been so cold this spring that we were always wearing coats—no chance to gradually get used to the sunshine!

My publisher (Storey) sent me the copy-edited version of my next book (Cattle Health Handbook) to check over. It would be a companion book to my Essential Guide to Calving, which came out that spring.
I was hoping my publisher and editors wouldn’t keep me too busy that summer; I wanted to have a chance to ride range a few times to help Michael and Carolyn move cattle.

Late Winter 2008

2011-07-01T08:00:00.000-07:00

By late January 2008 our calving season was in full swing, but weather was very cold. In mid-January Michael and Carolyn bought their cows down from the Gooch place, leaving cows that had already calved. They sorted out the ones that would calve during the next few weeks, and put them the field below our house (where they could be watched at night and put into the barn if needed).

The newest calf on the Gooch place was born in deep snow and became too chilled to nurse its mother, so they took it home to their house, where they fed it colostrum by stomach tube. It spent the night in the basement and they took it back to its mother the next day.
Two cows calved in the big field on the lower place, so they brought that group up to the corrals to sort, putting the most ready cows in the fields below our lane. Michael and Carolyn hauled the later-calving cows to Maurer’s (their rented place), making 6 trailer trips and hauling the last load just after dark.

Later that night we had a blizzard and severe wind, so they came in the middle of the night to check the calving cows. They had several new babies that had to be put in the barn.
The next day a semi-load of straw (small bales, to use for bedding in the barn stalls) arrived and Michael unloaded it here in our holding pen. He and Carolyn spent most of the day feeding, taking care of new calves, putting straw in both barns and hooking up the light for our old “sick barn” that they now use for calving. They cleaned out the old trailer house so they could stay here nights and watch the cows round the clock. It was too cold for new babies out in the snow (down to 28 below zero several nights). One cow had a set of twins but one was tiny and soon died.

A load of big straw bales arrived last Thursday. After it was unloaded, the empty truck could not make it up our icy driveway, spinning its tires. Michael put a big straw bale on his loader hay tines, and after a couple of tries (and as much speed as he could get from the chained-up tractor going up the lane) was able to push the truck up to the top of the lane, using the straw bale to push with.
Samantha’s 5th birthday was January 15 and Emily baked her a cake.

Emily’s 10th birthday was January 19, and we went to see one of her hockey games. Her team played several games in a tournament that weekend, and won them all. Andrea brought a cake for Em to share with the team after their final game. We didn’t get to see Em and her siblings very much that winter; Andrea and her kids were staying with a friend at Challis, 70 miles away.
Andrea was having a really tough time. She and Mark were divorcing, and at that point the divorce was far from settled. Mark and his lawyer were pushing for Mark to have custody of the kids, but Mark was physically abusive when Andrea went to pick up the kids at his house (after she let them stay with him a few days). That led to a restraining order, and Mark could only see the children under supervision, at the local family safety center. The judge thought that would be best for the kids, because Mark would not be drinking or abusive in that environment.
We were hoping that eventually Mark might realize that if he’s to have a decent relationship with his children he must make an effort to help make it work, rather than just trying to cause Andrea as much grief as possible. I kept praying that someday he’ll look at the bigger picture—for his sake and the kids. Andrea was suffering a lot of stress because of all the emotional trauma Mark was putting her through, and the financial challenges, but those little kids gave her a purpose to keep going.
Lynn and I were in anguish again that winter (another lesson in priorities) when we learned the sad news that our neighbor’s daughter-in-law shot herself. She’d been going through depression that fall and winter but everyone thought she was doing a little better. Things like this make us reassess our priorities once again and get our small crises into perspective--and spur us to hug our kids and grandkids and be grateful for all our blessings, and to let the small problems run off our backs like gentle rain. It’s not always easy to learn life’s lessons, but more and more I am convinced that our purpose here on this earth is to be more loving, more tolerant, more compassionate and understanding. Life is too short for anything else.
A journey through the burn center certainly puts all of life’s other challenges and traumas into perspective. As an interesting note regarding Andrea’s burn injury, which by that winter was 7.5 years past—Andrea fell off a stool trying to reach a top shelf in her cupboard, and hurt her knee, and the x-ray of her knee showed NINE staples (still there from the skin grafts) in that part of her leg. Three were caught in the knee itself, one was stuck into her femur and the others just floating around in the tissues.
During January, Lynn made bookshelves for our living room, shelves that we’d originally planned to build but never got accomplished—many things got put “on hold” in the years following Andrea’s burn accident. With the new shelves, I spent time sorting and putting many of my stacks of books, magazines, manuscripts, etc. on shelves, getting the piles off the floor. It finally began looking like a living room again, instead of a very cluttered office! That month I also finished the glossary and other final loose ends for my cattle health care book—a companion book for my Essential Guide to Calving, which was published that January.
Our weather in late January became more cold and windy. The wind created such a big snowdrift above our house that Lynn had to plow with the tractor so we could get through the gate with our feed truck to feed our cows. He also plowed the neighbors’ driveways. The drifts were too deep for their cars.

Lynn opening gate to field, in snow Michael and Carolyn had to warm many chilled calves by the stove in their trailer—sometimes so many at once that they used duct tape (writing the mama’s numbers on a piece of tape, stuck to the calf’s back) to make sure they didn’t have any mix-ups when taking the calves back out to their mamas. They took turns checking cows at night, to find any new calves before they froze to death.

It was a tough calving season. Michael and Carolyn bought 150 new cows the previous fall, bringing their total to 450 cows. They had a hired man for a while, but after they found out he wasn’t doing his job during his shifts (resulting in a number of calves freezing to death) they had to fire him—so they were struggling through most of the calving by themselves, with not much chance to sleep.
The coyotes began harassing the cattle, killing 2 newborn calves. One night the cows on the lower place trampled a calf in their efforts to defend their babies. The cold weather and constant night work with the cattle, with very little sleep, took a toll on Michael and he got pneumonia. He finally went to a doctor, who put him on a powerful antibiotic and wanted him to go to the hospital. He refused to go to the hospital because he had too much work to do (they had 18 new calved that day).
One night in early February Lynn and I were awakened by a baby calf bawling by our back door. It had come from a small holding pen where cows with new calves were kept for a day or 2 before going down to the big herd on the lower place. The calf had wandered back toward the barn pens where it had lived day before. We woke Michael and Carolyn and they took it back to its mama.
After our own chores and feeding, Lynn was helping Michael and Carolyn most days, driving a feed truck, helping Carolyn catch and doctor sick calves on the lower place, etc. They were getting some cases of scours (diarrhea)—in calves that were born during the cold weather and didn’t get their colostrum soon enough. The colostrum contains antibodies against calfhood diseases.

Lynn and I were helping our kids as best we could, but we were slowing down in our abilities to be much physical help. Lynn did almost all their town errands, however, which saved them time and energy. And we often let them know whenever there was a calving problem in the groups close by, where we can watch those cows.
When Lynn and I calved in January, for 35 years, we had some challenging weather (a few years that were extremely cold, down to 30 or 40 below zero for awhile) but we lived with the cows and didn’t have as many (only 180 at most)—and our cows were all trained to respect us and to be handled on foot. We put almost every one of them in the barn to calve; whenever we’d see one in labor we’d put her in the barn. We still had to dry some calves in the house by the stove when it was too cold in the barn, or if one slipped by our notice and was born outside, but at least the cows were manageable, which made everything a whole lot easier.

Lynn had to plow driveways again that February, after we had more snow and wind. One of the drifts was more than 3 feet thick and crusted. We hadn’t had that much snow since the year Em was born (1998)—when we had to constantly keep the driveway plowed in case Andrea had to head for the hospital at a moment’s notice to have the baby. Later that same winter it snowed so much it broke power lines and we were without power for 22 hours.
After a short span of warmer weather in mid-February, we had more cold, and a blizzard. Michael and Carolyn had some new babies that had to be warmed up in the trailer house “cow camp” and fed colostrum. Some of the cows they bought the previous fall were so wild and uncooperative they couldn’t get them in from the field to the barn to calve, and when they left them out in the field to calve, the cows wouldn’t follow their newborn calf in the sled. The only alternative was to bring the baby indoors, to warm and feed, then hope the cow would claim it when they took it back to her in the field. One big ornery cow refused to mother her calf after they brought him back, so that calf was living in the trailer along with a couple other “bottle babies” awaiting adoption—to be grafted onto any cows that lose their calves.

One of the house calves was named Tigger, a tiny twin. Tigger was so small and timid that one of the big heifer calves in the house took delight in bullying him, so he’d hide under the table or behind the stove. The big heifer was very aggressive and made herself at home in the trailer house, even jumping up on the bed to sleep!
Our 10-year-old granddaughter Emily was playing ice hockey with our local girls’ team, traveling with the team to various jockey tournaments around Idaho and Montana. She stayed overnight with us one night so Lynn could take her to town early the next morning to catch her ride to Butte, Montana for a game. Parents had to take the kids to the games and sometimes Andrea was unable to go—so Emily went with another family.
Our other grandkids were also doing well in their sports; Heather and Nick were finishing up their basketball season and Nick was ready to start track again. He and another boy from Salmon were invited to go to Australia that summer, to compete in track events, traveling around Australia for 2 weeks. He was really excited about this adventure, and our community helped with fund raising projects to raise money for the two boys to make that trip.

In late February Lynn and I brought our small herd of cows in from the field. Heather and Nick didn’t have school that day and helped us put our cows through the chute and vaccinate them. While putting our cows through the chute, our biggest cow got stuck in the runway. She couldn’t go forward or back, and Lynn had to pound the crosspieces off the tops of the upright posts (crosspieces that hold the runway in place so it can’t widen). Then the uprights had a couple inches of “give” and the cow was able to squeeze on through. After we finished vaccinating the cows we sorted them; we were selling 10 cows and 12 bred heifers to Michael and Carolyn. Michael hauled the 22 head to their leased place where they had about 100 cows that would calve in March and April. Our little group fit right into that herd.
We put the rest of our cows on Heifer Hill, but the snow was so deep that we could hardly drive through it with the feed truck. We had to feed going downhill, so we wouldn’t get stuck.

We kept Andrea’s 3 youngest kids (Dani, Samantha and Charlie) with us for 4 days while Andrea took Emily to the regional hockey meet at Miles City, Montana, nearly 600 miles away. They came through a terrible blizzard on their way home and were held up by a traffic jam on the freeway near Butte, Montana. Several semi trucks had slid off the road and were blocking traffic. They finally got to Butte and stayed there overnight, coming home the next morning.
Some of the “late calvers” at the Maurer place started calving. Michael and Carolyn were exhausted. They were hoping the weather would warm up so they wouldn’t have to check the cows so often at night.
One of the cows Michael bought a couple months earlier at a sale calved at Maurers, and when he went to move her and the calf out of the pregnant cow group, she started pawing the ground before he even got out of his truck. Then she charged him, and all he had for a weapon was an old shovel handle. She kept pounding him with her head and all he could do was keep hitting her on the head with the shovel handle (and knocked one of her horns off) until she finally backed away. He realized that if he’d tried to get away from her she would have knocked him down and killed him. He finally got her and her calf into a different pen—so she wouldn’t be a hazard every time they had to go into the group of pregnant cows.
We had a blizzard the next day, and the power was off for several hours (I cooked lunch on the wood stove). Lynn and I put one of Michael and Carolyn’s cows and new calf into the barn just before the storm hit; the calf was newborn and already chilled in the wind, and would have gotten colder in the blowing snow.
That storm put down several inches of new snow, making it even harder to get around in the deep snow on Heifer Hill, to feed. A few days later we brought our cows down and sorted off a few to leave in the maternity pen here by the house. One young cow, named Kitsel, had been getting more udder for a couple weeks, even though she was not due to calve until early April.
The next morning when we fed, we noticed blood in the snow, and Kitsel had blood on her tail. She wasn’t acting like she was calving; she ate her hay and showed no discomfort at all. But I watched her through the window as I did my morning typing and noticed she discharged some fluid. So after lunch we put her in the headcatcher by the barn and Michael and Carolyn helped us check her. Her cervix was partly open so she was definitely calving, but all Michael could feel at first in the uterus was a mass of spongy tissue that had to be placenta, even though the “buttons” (cotyledons) were not normal. He finally located the calf, very small and coming backward. We gave the cow an IV injection of oxytocin to hasten dilation of her cervix so we could pull the calf.

After we got the hind feet out, the calf wouldn’t come on through the birth canal—even though there seemed to be plenty of room. I was able to put my hand clear up over his hindquarters, through the pelvis, but we finally had to use the calf puller to get him out. When his body finally came out we could see why it was so difficult; his belly was 3 times as large as it should have been!

The placenta, when the cow passed it a few hours later, was abnormal, with no blood in it at all (very pale and clear) and only a handful of normal cotyledons; the rest were big, flat and rotten. Our vet told us later he’s only seen a couple freaks like this, and he had no idea what might cause such an oddity. The bright note, however, was that we were able to graft “Rosie” (Michael and Carolyn’s orphan calf from an old crippled cow) onto Kitsel and they became a happy pair.

Michael and Carolyn sorted off and hauled the last of their pregnant cows from our place to Maurers—so all their calving cows were in one place. The next day, they had another calving problem; one of the cows they bought was trying to have a big calf with head turned back (down underneath its body). Michael was unable to get the head straightened out, and finally had to call the vet—and together the two of them were able to get the calf out. It was dead by then, so Carolyn came back to our place, loaded up Tigger (the last orphan bottle baby) in the pickup cab and took him over to Maurers to introduce him to a new mama.

Late Fall And Early Winter 2007

2011-06-15T08:29:00.000-07:00

Andrea didn’t make it to Salt Lake for her appointments on November 14. She cancelled them because she had too many urgent things to do, working on the divorce problem and getting her life organized again. We hoped she wouldn’t wait too long to have her health issues checked on, however. We didn’t know how serious they might be.
My sister put Mom into the local nursing home (Discovery Care Centre), in mid-November. We knew she would find some plusses there, having more contact with people. Several of her old friends were there and even though Mom was often very confused, she still knew who we were, and knew her friends, and enjoyed visiting with people.
That winter we were trying to help Andrea get through her personal crisis and financial problems. She and Mark had a lot of debts and we set up a plan to help pay those. I worked as many hours a day as possible (doing articles and book projects) and still tried to find some time for those grandkids. I prayed that the good Lord would help me keep going a while longer.
In November I got the final page proofs checked over for my new book ESSENTIAL GUIDE TO CALVING, which was then published by Storey (the publisher who’s done most of my other cattle and horse books). I could then concentrate on getting the next book finished (on cattle health care), which had an extended deadline at Christmastime. I worked on it for nearly a year and planned have it finished sooner, but there were too many major interruptions!
It was a stressful year, with my father’s death, mom’s declining health and mental status, Andrea’s marriage ending (she and Mark divorcing and both of them going through a tough time dealing with it). All the normal ranching challenges and crises seemed somewhat incidental that year. It’s a good thing we don’t know what’s around the next corner, in life, or we’d lose courage. But the Good Lord gives us strength when we need it, so we keep going—and we sometimes find unexpected blessings amidst the trauma and heartache. One good thing about our life as ranchers—we are always optimistic. We have to be, in this business. There’s always promise of a new day, a new year, a better season. Indeed, we are eternal optimists. Like an old rancher once told me, he’d had 2 good years in the cattle business—1980-something, and next year. Yes! There’s always next year!
Lynn worked a few days cleaning up branches in the yard that he sawed off our big elm tree earlier—pruning the tree before branches crashed through the house roof. He used duct tape to attach a small bow saw to a long piece of PVC pipe, so he could safely aw the branches off from the ground or standing on our roof, rather than trying to use a ladder and chain saw.

Michael and Carolyn spent several days helping friends and neighbors work cattle. We often fed their horses (the 2 they kept here) a few hours before daylight so they could come with their trailer and get them and be at another ranch by dawn to help gather cows. They vaccinated their own cows a few days later.

Our weather warmed up briefly and rained off and on for 3 days, then froze and created a lot of ice. Lynn helped Michael haul hay for several days. Michael purchased 100 tons from a rancher at Leadore (50 miles up the valley) and he and Lynn made 2 trips a day with a couple flatbed trailers and got it all hauled. After one late trip (unloading after dark) Michael had to go home and euthanize old Mr. K (Nick’s gelding). Nick loved that old horse; they’d spent many hours riding range and in 4-H horse classes—including roping classes--but Mr. K had become old and stiff and had been retired for about a year. He had been losing weight, then developed swelling in his legs and was very weak and could hardly get up.

Michael took the backhoe up there the next day to bury the old horse, and thanks to a few days of warm weather the ground wasn’t frozen yet. In fact, it was so muddy in our corrals that Michael also had to haul gravel to the waterhole approach where the 84 weaned calves are trying to drink; they were bogging down.
Weather got cold again before December and Michael and Carolyn had to bring the last of their upper cows (on the 320) down to the fields and feed hay. Our friend Bob Minor brought his tractor and wood splitter over to our place and helped Lynn for 2 days splitting firewood—that big woodpile that Dan Watson (our friend from Manitoba) helped Lynn cut and haul.
Michael spent a few days helping his friend Don Hatch build fence, trying to get brace posts set before the weather got too bad; the ground is solidly frozen now after a week of sub-zero weather. Lynn helped them one day, so they could get finished sooner. The cold weather and ice created an ice flow across our lower fields where some of Michael’s cows are, so he took the backhoe down there and fixed the place where it was leaking out of the creek.
We had new snow on December 1, and the roads were very slippery and icy. An oncoming car slid into Andrea’s car at an intersection in town and knocked the back end of her car about 10 feet, but didn’t do much damage—just knocked the tire off its rim and it went flat, but the car and kids were ok.
We started feeding our cows hay. Their pasture was nearly gone and the new snow covered what was left. Michael and Carolyn brought their horses down to one of the lower pastures to spend the winter there. There was still some rough feed there and the horses were able to paw through the snow to grass.

Michael and Carolyn drove to Arco to watch one of little Heather’s basketball “away from home” games and we took Nick to his game here—and enjoyed watching him play. Both kids were doing very well in basketball.
In early December Michael and Carolyn deloused/dewormed their 84 calves and put them in the field below our lane where they have more room--and a lot cleaner than the corral where they were weaned. Something spooked those calves a few nights later. They knocked over 2 of their feeders and ran through the fence, breaking off 6 wood posts and knocking it flat. We hoped the wolves weren’t back again. Wolves were becoming a bigger problem everywhere in the West. One of our friends in Montana lost a 2-year-old cow, killed by a pack of wolves.
The next week, we had 3 inches of wet, heavy snow. Roads were slippery again. The fellow who hauls cattle to the sale at Blackfoot, in southern Idaho, came to pick up a bull Michael and Carolyn were sending to the sale and we helped load the bull (it was a full load with other cattle already in the trailer). Our lane was so slick the truck couldn’t get up enough speed to make it to the top when he left our corral. It spun out and slid backward down the lane and into our fence. It bent the trailer fender and tore up the fence, but that was better than sliding farther down the driveway and hitting our house.
The truck and trailer were stuck there, completely blocking our lane. Luckily we have gates in the adjacent maternity pen both top and bottom, and Michael was able to drive through it to get around the blocked lane to go get our big tractor up at his place, and Lynn was able to take the little tractor (with blade on it) that same route and get above the stuck truck--to blade through the ice to dirt and gravel. By the time Michael got the big tractor, Lynn had plowed most of the ice off the driveway. The big tractor, with chains on, and a big round bale on the back for traction, was able to pull the stranded truck and loaded trailer up the lane.
It was very slippery here for several days. Walking down the lane, Lynn slipped and fell, catching himself with one arm, tearing some of the muscle and attachments in his shoulder. It was very painful for several days, but we put DMSO on it morning and evening and his shoulder was soon doing much better. He was able to feed the hay, and also got a load of dirt on the pickup to shovel into our ditch above the house where water was leaking around the headgate and creating an ice flow down across the field where we were feeding our cows. Never a dull moment!
A couple weeks later the ditch was still leaking and creating more ice across the field, so Lynn took our flatbed feed truck down the road a mile to where the County crew was widening the road, and they put a loader dump of dirt on his truck. He took the dirt to our ditch head and hauled it in buckets (since he couldn’t back up to the headgate) to put around the leaking area and finally sealed it off.
One of Michael’s cows got injured and couldn’t get up, so they made a “house” for her with big straw bales, to keep the other cows away from her and give her shelter. They put big bales around her, a tarp over the top, and a gate panel in front. She was eating and drinking very well and seemed to be recovering—until one morning after dogs or coyotes got in there with her during the night and chewed her up pretty badly. Michael decided to put her out of her misery.

In December Michael and Carolyn finalized their lease on the Maurer ranch, just around the hill from our place. They also planned to buy Maurer’s cows and expand their own herd.
Andrea moved a lot of her things to Challis (70 miles away), where she was staying with a friend. Emily and Charlie spent several nights here with us so they could continue to go to school here and so Emily could go to hockey practice; Lynn took them to the bus in the mornings and picked them up in the evening. On occasion we had the 2 little girls here, too, and they enjoyed drawing and painting pictures for Grandma while I was busy working on my book (Cattle Health Handbook, a companion volume for my Essential Guide to Calving). I got the manuscript finished just before Christmas.

The day before Christmas we had 4 inches of new snow, blowing and drifting, and roads were slick. Lynn put some small bales of hay in the back of our pickup, for traction. I went to town several times that week to visit my mother at Discovery Care Center (which provides assisted living for elderly people). We drove to Challis to have Christmas dinner with Andrea and kids and her friend—a slow trip on slippery roads.
Michael had a semi-load of straw (big bales) hauled here in late December. He was getting ready for calving, since some of the cows he bought from Maurers would start calving early. Lynn hauled a few of the left-over small straw bales from last year (stacked on the upper place) to give our heifer calves bedding in the sub-zero weather.
After finishing my book project I finally had time to sort and put away a lot of things that piled up, and Lynn helped me make room for another cabinet in our dining room, so we can store more things out of the way. He also made more bookshelves in the living-room, for stacks of books. We actually got all our couches and counters cleaned off for the first time in several years!
My sister and brother cleaned out Mom’s old apartment and gave me a few boxes of things, including the drawings and paintings I did for my folks while I was in college. We hung some on our walls and I saved some to give to our children and grandchildren.
In early January it was 10 below zero and we fed our cows extra hay. We were hoping none of Michael and Carolyn’s cows would calve in the cold weather. Some of the cows they bought were getting big udders and ready to calve.
Charlie and Emily stayed with us again for 2 nights and Lynn took them to the school bus. Nick and Heather also stopped by on their way to school to borrow crutches. Nick hurt his foot and ankle and it was too painful to walk on.
Lynn took Emily to her year-end Girl Scout awards meeting, where she received her special awards for the year.

On January 3 Michael, Carolyn, and a neighbor trailed their cows home from Sandy Creek (more than 10 miles, along the back road). Lynn drove the feed truck to lead the herd, and the rest of the crew herded the cows on 4-wheelers. They did pretty well except when the cows had trouble going through the small gates by the cattle guards. One cow bogged down in a muddy gateway and several cows walked over the top of her. The 4 men couldn’t get the cow out of the bog, but fortunately Michael had a nylon rope on his 4-wheeler and was able to pull her out of the mud with that. Once the herd made it across the highway and headed up our creek road (with only 2 miles left to go) Carolyn drove the feed truck while Lynn came on home—since we had company visiting here from Canada. We’d been corresponding with Pete and Bev Weibe since 2000 when Andrea had her burn accident (Pete was severely burned a couple years earlier, in an electrical accident), but this was the first chance we’d had to actually meet them. Andrea drove from Challis to meet them, also.
The next week we had more wind and snow, drifting across fields and roads. Lynn used our tractor and blade to plow our driveway and several of the neighbors’. We started feeding our cows twice a day. We would be reducing our herd again before calving season. Michael needed more cows (to get up to the total his banker thought he needed) so we were selling him 22 of ours, cutting our small herd down again. He also went to a sale in Butte, Montana and bought 33 more cows, bringing their herd to 550 cows--to satisfy his banker.
Andrea changed schools with Emily and Charlie; it was easier for them to go to school in Challis than try to finish the year here. Em stayed with us on the nights before a hockey tournament however, so we could take her to town early in the morning to get a ride with friends. The 2-day tournaments were in various towns in Montana—often a very long drive.
Michael and Carolyn’s first calf arrived early one morning, up in the field. Fortunately the weather warmed up (20 degrees) so the calf didn’t freeze. They had 2 more babies the next day, and a total of 4 by January 12. Then they brought all the cows down to our field below the lane, where they could watch them better and have access to a barn if needed. They were preparing to camp here again in the old trailer house during calving season—where they could warm and dry any cold calves by the wood stove.

Fall 2007

2011-06-01T08:00:00.000-07:00

We finally got the cattle moved to the high range August 18 –22, the latest ever. Carolyn was still swathing on the custom haying jobs, so I helped Michael and Nick for several days, gathering cattle. After 4 days of hard riding, my old mare Rubbie was very sore (at age 20 her stifle joints have arthritis) so I put DMSO on her stifles to reduce the inflammation. It helped her immensely, reducing the pain.

Michael’s new swather broke down again, just before finishing the last custom hay job, so instead of spending a couple days fixing it, he borrowed our old pull-type swather to finish the job.
This had been a long, hot dry summer, and the longest fire season ever, partly because we had so much grass that year. Every lightning storm set new fires. We were still suffering from dense smoke, from all the fires.
The abundant grass was a blessing, however. Even though it was dry, the cattle were doing well. Michael and Carolyn got an extension on their grazing period for our range. We usually bring the cattle home Sept. 16 but that year they didn’t fill the permit (with cattle on 2 other leased places) and the BLM gave them an extension since there was so much grass—and they didn’t have to round up their cows till October. They hauled several tons of protein supplement out on the range to augment the very dry grass.
Then it rained for 2 days, and cleared the smoke out. Our fire season was finally over. Michael, Carolyn and kids pregnancy-checked and vaccinated their cows on the place at 17 mile and Sandy Creek (they brought them all to a neighbor’s corral early that morning) and it rained all day. Even though they took several coats and jackets and kept changing to dry ones, they got miserably cold before the day was over.
After the rain we had a hard frost. Michael and Carolyn started rounding up cattle on the Baker Creek side of our range, putting them into our 320-acre high pasture. They were also gathering cattle for our range neighbor, Grant Maurer, who was paralyzed the year before in a 4-wheeler roll-over accident. Grant’s hired man quit, so Michael and Carolyn volunteered to gather the cattle and to help preg-check and vaccinate them.

At 4 a.m. one morning in early October our cows and calves in the field below the house were running and bellowing. Lynn and I went out with flashlights but didn’t see anything, but later Michael told us he’d seen a big wolf in our lower fields the day before.
The next day, I rode Rubbie to help Michael and Carolyn look for cattle in Mulkey Creek—the neighboring Forest Service allotment. Our range neighbors round up this time of year and generally drive their cattle through part of our range to take a shortcut, since our cattle are usually out of there by then; we generally round ours up a couple weeks earlier. But with our permit extension, Michael and Carolyn still had cattle in that pasture. When the neighbors went through with their cattle they were probably surprised to run into Michael’s cows. Instead of sorting them, they took those cattle along with theirs into the Forest Service allotment and then left the extras along the way as they took theirs home down Mulkey Creek. At least they were kind enough to call Michael and mention he had about 50 pair on the wrong range. So the next morning we rode to try to find them.
We rode through our middle range on the way over to Mulkey Creek, checking for any cattle that may have strayed back into that pasture, since hunting season for elk had started and gates were left open. It was raining when we got to Mulkey Creek, and we found about 30 pair on the rim of the canyon along the boundary fence, trying to come back to our range. We got them through the adjacent pasture and into our own range then went back to Mulkey Creek, dropping down into the canyon to search through scattered groups of neighbor’s cows that were still there.
It started to snow and visibility became poor and the footing treacherous on those steep mountainsides—with 2 inches of new snow on top of the mud. We found 2 more pair of Michael’s and Carolyn’s in the upper canyon and had a challenge getting them through the timber and over the mountain since they wanted to run back down the canyon. But we got them, and none of our horses fell down chasing cattle on the steep slippery terrain. We picked up 8 more pair when we got to the Withington Creek side. By then we were soaked and cold and it was too late in the day to go back to gather the 30 pairs we’d put into our high range pasture on the far side of our allotment. It was past chore time when we got home. I put DMSO on Rubbie’s stifle joints, fed the horses, and then tried to warm up.
My feet and legs were so cold, the only way I could think of to warm up fast (since our bathtub wasn’t functional at that time) was to sit on the bathroom counter with my feet in the sink in hot water, putting hot wet washcloths on my cold knees. Even though I was miserably cold, I’m always glad for a chance to get out and ride range again. We no longer run our cows on the range; we’ve been letting Michael and Carolyn use our range permit, so I’m not riding out there all the time like I did in the past—so I enjoy every time I can ride and help them move cattle or bring the cows home.

Michael and Carolyn rode again the next day and found a few more cattle in Mulkey Creek and gathered the ones we stuck in our high range, along with some that were already there. I would have ridden with them again, but my mom had another bad episode (falling down) and was in the hospital, so I went to see her.
The next few weeks, Michael and Carolyn helped some of their friends work cattle (preg-checking, vaccinating, shipping calves) and often loaded their horses in the trailer before daylight to go spend all day at these gatherings. We moved our cows and calves to the field above the house so they’d have good pasture until we sold our calves.

Michael hauled our calves to the sale at Blackfoot (a 3 hour drive) in mid-October. We put our cattle in a pen near the house the night before. We sorted the calves off into a different pen, in the dark on Friday morning, by flashlight, since our yardlight wasn’t working. Lynn had unhooked the wire to our yardlight earlier that fall, when he was sawing branches off the elm tree by our house. Part of the tree was threatening to crash down on the roof, so he sawed some big branches off, and took down the electric wire so it wouldn’t get wiped out by falling branches. We managed to get the calves sorted and loaded in the dark and Michael made it to the sale on time, in spite of a flat tire on the trailer that had to be changed along the way.
The next week I rode with Michael and Carolyn for 2 days to round up the last of their range cattle, and then helped gather their cattle and Maurers from our upper pastures (and Andrea rode with us when we brought the cattle home to the corrals). We sorted out Maurers’ cattle and took them home for him.

Friends from Manitoba came to visit for several days that fall. They were making a trip through part of the U.S. and were living in a pickup and camper on their trip. They camped in our back yard. While they were here, Dan helped Lynn get 5 pickup loads of firewood, sawing up some of the dead trees on our high range.
Dan had been reading one of my columns in Grainews (a Canadian farm newspaper) for more than 30 years; we got acquainted about 20 years ago when he called on the phone to ask advice about treating a calf with diphtheria, a calf his vet had told him to shoot since he would not be able to save it. We told Dan how we treat our cases of diphtheria (using DMSO to shrink the swelling in the throat so the calf can breathe) and he saved that calf—and several other cases since then. That was the beginning of a long-distance friendship and it was nice to finally meet him in person.
We had corresponded by letter and e-mail, and agonized with Dan as he went through the ordeal of losing his wife to cancer a few years earlier. That fall, he had a lady friend who had just gone through her own challenge of cancer and chemo. She lost her husband to cancer 14 years earlier. We enjoyed meeting the both of them. Since that time, Dan has written a book, Hitchhike to Heaven, about his experiences, and losing his wife, and it was recently published. Life is never easy, but it has its wonderful moments, and for these we are grateful. Friends and family are the best blessings.

October and November were very hectic, that fall. I was trying to get a couple books finished, and keep up a full schedule of writing articles. My editors kept giving me more assignments and at this point in our lives I’m not yet in a position to turn down any work, so I kept slogging along. I felt like I was on a treadmill, going faster and faster and I couldn’t keep up anymore, even on important things. I've always let the little things slide and I was YEARS behind on a lot of stuff, but was now getting behind on the important things, too.
My hectic pace seemed to have escalated since Dad that April. Mom was failing rapidly and confused most of the time, in a dream world—with no real line between reality and make-believe. Whenever I spent time with her, the things she talked about were like hallucinations, and I humored her as best I could. We were still trying to care for her in her own home (with people spending time with her periodically through the day and night, though she actually needed someone with her all the time). She missed Dad, and wasn’t very happy, and confused a lot of the time.
We were also facing another challenge; Andrea and Mark were splitting up. They nearly ended their marriage a few years earlier when he became hard to live with because of his drinking--and she left him for awhile. She gave it another try, but their relationship hadn't gotten better. She finally decided it was too hard on her and the kids to stay with him. His drinking was only one of a number of issues (another was financial--they were about to lose their home because they were so deep in debt) and there were many other issues and complexities involved in the failure of their relationship, as is usually the case with a failed marriage. At that point we were just trying to help them both through this a traumatic time.
We spent a week moving her things out, and getting her and the kids settled back into the little mobile home here on our ranch where she and Jim lived for 6 years. Lynn and Michael and Carolyn (with their stock trailer) and Bob Minor (the good friend who helped us during that traumatic summer after Andrea’s burn accident) made numerous trips, throwing stuff in boxes and bags and hauling it 25 miles over here (and some to a storage unit), while I took care of the kids. Lynn and I were trying to help ease the trauma on those 4 kids. The past several years had been tough on them and this new crisis was even more traumatic. So, we were hoping to get back to some sense of security and normalcy for those kids, giving them a lot of love.
One day we went for a drive in the mountains with Andrea and the kids, for a change of scene. We drive up over the Continental Divide and into Montana and back, stopping along the ridge in the forest, for a winter picnic—by an abandoned log cabin. The kids had fun and it took our minds off our problems.

On top of the trauma of trying to wade through the minefield of a bitter divorce, Andrea was having more health problems. She had a painful lump under one arm, under her grafted skin, with pain shooting down her arm and also into her chest. She had a doctor look at it, finally (she ignored it until the pain got really bad) and the doctor set up an appointment for her in Salt Lake for November 14. She would be going down there early that morning and coming back the next day. She also had a severe pain in her abdomen one night and went to the ER, where the doctor thought it might possibly be her gall bladder but wasn't sure. They gave her pain medicine via IV and it didn't phase the pain, so they had to give her a shot of morphine. They never figured out what caused that pain but it finally eased off so she was just going to wait and have that checked out, too, when she went to Salt Lake.
It seems like we go from one crisis to another, but with the grace of God we get through it—yet it's hard to relax and let go of the worry mode when it’s our kids we are concerned about. We never stop agonizing over whatever problems they may have. I have a little more trust than I did before the summer of 2000, knowing that underneath it all is a Love greater than I can imagine. I was reminded of this, one day that hectic Fall, when out of the blue I got 2 letters from people who had no clue what we were going through with the marathon move of Andrea and the kids and all the emotional trauma that accompanied it (Mark was drunk and making it more difficult and there were other complicating factors). I got those 2 letters from friends who felt compelled to let us know they were thinking of us and praying for us, asking for the "covering grace of God, and strength for your every movement." Yes, we needed that.
As I get farther along this wondrous detour from "normal" life (whatever that is), a detour that began in July 2000, I continually marvel at God's grace and Love. Life does not get easier, but the journey seems to polish us and knock more sharp edges and stickers off us. I am grateful for the Love that gives me strength and courage and keeps me going, and for friends who walk with me. The comfort and encouragement we give one another is priceless and precious. Our loving friends help carry me through the hard spots. Knowing their empathy and their own courage (facing their own challenges) gives me comfort and peace and also the strength of will to get up and face it all again every new morning. In spite of all the challenges, every new day is a gift and I am renewed, with strength from outside myself.

Summer Of 2007

2011-05-15T08:00:00.000-07:00

By mid-May 2007, our cattle were finally all out on pasture for summer grazing. Michael and Carolyn turned some of their cows and calves out on our range, and hauled the rest to rented pasture 10 miles up the valley, and to another range about 20 miles away where they are renting another ranch on Sandy Creek. They were very busy patching fences and getting the irrigation water started on the Sandy Creek place. Most of the fences on that place were falling down, and they had to keep working on them all summer to keep the range cattle out.
Our cows went to pasture on our upper place and were glad to be out on green grass—and we were glad, too, since we were running out of hay.

We were also thankful for the rain that month, and the storm that put down 4 inches of snow in late May, because we were late getting some of our ditches cleaned so we could start the irrigation water. Michael fixed a few of the worst ditches with the backhoe, and pulled Lynn (on our tractor with blade) through the boggy ditch on the Wild Meadow. All through the summer Nick and Heather (age 14 and 16) helped Michael irrigate the Sandy Creek ranch. Heather got her drivers license that spring, so she and Nick could drive over there themselves.
In early June I put shoes on two of our horses and Emily (9 years old) came out several times to ride with me, riding 21-year-old Veggie. We had to lengthen the stirrups on her little saddle; she’d grown a lot since the previous Fall when she rode last. On one ride she helped me check all the cows on the upper place and we rode around the Cheney Creek pasture fence on our way home, patching places where the staples were missing.

I helped Carolyn and young Heather gather their herd of heifers from one of our pastures and we took them up the road to our upper place, gathered our cows out of the fields and took the whole group to our mountain pasture next to the range. Emily and I made several rides up there during the following weeks, to check on the cattle.

Later, when we moved the cattle down to the Cheney Creek pasture, we discovered several bulls right outside the fence, on the neighbors’ range. They had moved all their cattle to a different range pasture, but apparently missed these bulls. So Carolyn, young Heather and I herded them away from our fence and took them to their proper pasture. One of the bulls was mellow and manageable, but the other two were a challenge. One of them kept threatening to charge at us. Two of them were always trying to fight and kept running up the canyon the wrong way, and we did a lot of galloping through treacherous terrain to keep all 3 of them headed the proper direction. We finally got them to the next range pasture and put them in with the cows they were supposed to be with. During wild chases like that, we are grateful for fast, athletic horses that can safely gallop around in bad footing and rocks without falling down.
With 3 leased places, Michael, Carolyn and kids stayed very busy that summer. Young Heather and Nick irrigated their fields on our creek, using 4-wheelers, and changed sprinkler pipe daily on Sandy Creek. With cattle on 2 range allotments they did a lot of riding, as well.
Lynn and I hauled water tanks up to our hill pasture above our house, and put a pipe through the culvert under the road, to pump water from the field ditch into the tanks for our heifers. That pasture has no water, but we are able to use it by pumping from the ditch across the road. With several water tanks, we only had to pump every 6 days for that small group.

Michael and Carolyn traded in their swather for a newer model and started custom hay cutting in early July. The new swather runs faster and takes less fuel than the old one. They hoped to save time that year; Carolyn could run the swather most of the time while Michael did a lot of the irrigating on all their rented places. The unforeseen challenge, however, was that the new swather kept breaking down and Michael had to spend a lot of time and money fixing it.

In between writing articles for horse and cattle magazines that summer, I was working on another cattle book for Storey Publishing (The Cattle Health Handbook), and also the page proofs for my Essential Guide to Calving, which they would be publishing that fall.
Emily spent a week at Girl Scout camp, where she enjoyed riding and learning to shoot a bow and arrow. Heather spent a week at basketball camp in Washington; her knee healed nicely after the surgery to replace the ligament she tore the year before playing basketball.
In early July Michael and Carolyn hauled their horses to the range on Sandy Creek and brought home one of their 3-year-old bulls that had gone into a neighbor’s pasture. The next day we rounded up the cows in Cheney Creek, sorted off the yearling heifers and young bull to bring down to the main ranch, and hauled their 3-year-old bull to put with our cows on the upper place. We put Michael and Carolyn’s heifers with ours—on the hill pasture—with our 2-year-old bull.
The next morning we pumped again for the heifers, very early in the morning while it was still cool, so the pump wouldn’t overheat. With twice as many heifers on that hill pasture, we had to pump every third day.
Michael and Carolyn ran out of hay for their horses, so I gave them some of mine. Nick and Heather came down with their feed truck and loaded a dozen bales every 3 days. They also planned to do our chores (feeding the horses and a bull in the corral) when we went to a family reunion near Seattle.
I finished getting some last minute articles done before our trip. Lynn put a big jar of cat food under the porch for the kids to feed to the cats while we were gone, and it disappeared! Raccoons, who come sneaking around to eat any leftover cat food, probably took it, and were probably trying to figure out how to get the lid off.

Lynn and I actually left the ranch for a few days that summer (an unusual event, for us hermits) for a fast trip to the Seattle/Tacoma area. My mom's family had a reunion on Fox Island to celebrate my aunt's 96th birthday (she was mom's only surviving sibling) and also to celebrate the 100th anniversary of the family property on Fox Island where my mom and Aunt Marj grew up. It had been 40 years since Lynn and I were over there, so we went, knowing this would be the last time we'd see some members of the family.
We left on a Friday, after getting up at 4 a.m. to do chores and drive out to Andrea’s place, where we transferred our things to her van. We went with Andrea and her 4 kids in her van, and drove straight through to Seattle, making it in 12 hours in spite of numerous "potty stops" for all the little kids. I was glad Andrea was driving; she's bolder in city traffic and has better reflexes and endurance than us old hermits!
The kids had fun on the beach at Fox Island finding seashells and crabs, and enjoyed going out on the water in a rowboat. They had a lot of fun with some cousins their age (actually 3rd cousins; they share great-great grandparents).

We enjoyed reconnecting with family, some we had not seen for many years. It was good to get back home, however, and back into our work groove. We spent Saturday and Sunday at the reunion, and drove back the next Monday. The trip was fun but totally exhausting and it took several days to catch up!
Our hay was overdue to be cut, so Michael brought his swather home and cut part of our hay before going on to his next custom cutting job. A week later Lynn baled the hay, then welded a broken tie rod end on Michael’s tractor. He’d barely finished when a lightning storm hit, and our power went off for 2 hours. I was trying to type an article, but couldn’t finish it until the power came back on (the disadvantage of modern technology! I never had this problem with my good old antique typewriters!).
I took the last few bales of horse hay out of my hay shed and hauled some to the corral for Michael and Carolyn’s horses that are living at our place. I was letting two of our horses, Breezie and Snickers, graze the tall grass by my hay shed, so it wouldn’t be a fire hazard, and to get it cleaned up before we drove in there with the stackwagon to stack the new hay.
Weather was hot and dry, and some of the water troughs on the range quit working. I rode with Michael and kids to check the cattle and troughs and helped them fix one of the troughs that needed a new pipe.

We had another thunderstorm, with lots of lightning that started several new fires. That summer was one of the worst fire seasons in Idaho. A terrible fire in southern Idaho burned nearly 700,000 acres, destroying many range allotments and killing cattle. We had a brief, hard rain July 20 that helped keep lightning from starting more fires during that storm. It also dampened the baled hay we hadn’t hauled; it took a couple more days to dry enough to stack. Most days, however, the weather continued hot—up to 105 degrees--and we were immersed in thick, heavy smoke from all the fires.
One of our neighbors called to say there were 30 range cows in his place, so Michael, Carolyn and kids rode all evening to gather and take them back to the range—and then fixed the fence that had been knocked down. They took the cattle back to our middle range pasture, clear up to the Bear Trough, to make sure they’d have water. Some of the other water sources were drying up.
While crossing the brushy draw below the Bear Trough, Michael’s horse ran into a stout branch (hidden in the thick brush). The branch caught under the saddle horn and lifted the horse’s front end off the ground. When the branch snapped up off the saddle horn it hit Michael in the stomach and flung him backward off the horse about 10 feet. He landed on his neck and back, between two huge sharp rocks. If he’d landed on either of those rocks he would have broken his back, so he was very lucky. He was stiff and sore for several days, but basically uninjured.
On another day, Michael, Carolyn and kids found 4 range cows in their lower field that had come home through the low range; someone left one of the middle range gates open. So they took them back to the range, only to have a worse problem when they got home; a friend called to say there were 180 pairs of stray cattle in their leased pasture on Sandy Creek—the pasture they were saving for fall feed. So they grabbed their trailer and fresh horses and rushed off to deal with that problem.

On August 2 Michael brought his swather home and cut the rest of the hay on our creek. That same day, one of the neighbor’s bulls from the range on the east side of our place was wandering up and down the fence bellowing and trying to get in. He was all by himself because the rest of those cattle had been moved to a different range pasture, and we hoped he wouldn’t crawl through the fence. The neighbor warned us to not go near that bull on foot, since he was very mean and aggressive.
For a couple weeks I was going to town every afternoon to stay with my mom awhile and fix her supper; she was in failing health and needed someone with her most of the time. My sister was gone for 2 weeks so friends and family members were taking shifts being with mom. We needed someone with her during the nights however, since she had fallen a few times and was unable get up. My sister got her a life alert button to wear around her neck. This notified a central office whenever she pressed it, and someone would call us, and we’d drive to town to help mom. One morning we went in at 3:30 a.m. to take her to the emergency room at the hospital because she was having severe abdominal pain.
One evening on our way home from town (after helping mom with supper and getting her ready for bed) we discovered 3 cows and their calves coming down a new lane (which had been created for a subdivision on one of the ranches near us). The cattle were almost to the highway. Lynn slammed on the brakes and we backed up and stopped the cows just before they got out on the highway. One pair was Michael and Carolyn’s. We called Carolyn on our cell phone and she and the kids came and helped us herd the 3 pairs back up toward the range. Riders had left a gate open, and the cattle had come down through the neighboring ranch where none of the fences are functional anymore because the owners were subdividing it.
There was nothing to keep the cows from coming clear to the highway! We drove home and Lynn got the 4-wheeler and went out there to try to bring the cattle up through the range gate; it was getting dark and there wasn’t time to get horses. We herded the cattle on foot and by 4-wheeler and finally got part of them into a field by our road. One calf was too wild and didn’t see the gate--and ran back over the hill in the dark. But we left the gate open, and he came back the next day and got back with his mama.
By mid-August the fire situation was getting worse. I interviewed several ranchers in Nevada and southern Idaho who were seriously impacted by the range fires. The fires in our area were also becoming more serious. Many nights the air was so smoky we could hardly breathe and we weren’t able to open our windows to cool the house.
Michael and Carolyn rode all day on August 15th to gather range cows on their Sandy Creek allotment, but were short 20 pair. They had to ride several more days to try to find them. They also needed to move their cattle on our range to the high pasture, but hadn’t had time to do it. I wished I could help them, but there hadn’t been time to tear loose from all my commitments!

Remembering My Father

2011-05-01T08:00:00.000-07:00

It’s been 4 years since my dad passed away—on April 26, 2007, on his and mom’s wedding anniversary. For this particular blog installment I want to honor him and repeat the words I spoke at his memorial service (May 4, 2007). Following those memories, I am adding the tribute I wrote about him for one of our local farm newspapers.
A Few Thoughts About My Father..
Growing up as a preacher's daughter was a unique though sometimes challenging blessing. A preacher's family in a sense includes his whole parish, and Dad was a very caring and busy shepherd for his flock. Yet I don't think that any of us kids felt deprived or that he didn't have time for us. We always knew that we were loved.

Love is the greatest gift that my dad gave me. It wasn't always spoken, but I always knew it was there. I knew that he loved me, encouraged me, wanted the best for me, and this helped me through the awkward years of growing up and beyond.
Dad touched the lives of many people, and he certainly touched mine and made a huge difference in my life. I could always count on his wisdom and fairness, his love and understanding. He was patient and kind, and a great teacher. He always took time to answer questions, or to help a struggling young person come up with his or her own answers to the toughest questions of life. He always had advice, for anyone who sought it, and he also encouraged us kids to sort things out and come to good decisions. My family will probably always remember some of his little sayings, like "Do the wise thing.” “Do your best and leave the rest." He gave us many snippets of wisdom to live by.

When I went to college I was timid and shy, and still struggling with some of the major questions of life and faith--and very, very homesick for the ranch, my horses, my family. Long distance phone calls were expensive, so we wrote lots of letters. His letters of advice and encouragement had so much wit and wisdom that I often shared them with my roommates. I still have those letters. After college he and I considered collaborating on a book we were going to call "Dear Daughter, Dear Dad". But that was one of countless projects and great ideas that we never quite got around to doing.
A wonderful gift my father gave me was the example he set, in his own life--an example that helped me as I began my own journey. His faith and trust in a heavenly Father who loves us all, and loves us unconditionally, has made the most difference in my life. Dad's preaching and teaching always pointed out that Jesus came into this world to tell people about God's love for us--to open our hearts and lives to that Love. Jesus' parables portraying God as a loving, forgiving father was something I could easily relate to, thanks to my wonderful Dad, in whose love I was confident.
This concept, of God as a loving father, made sense to me. If God was anything like a father, who always wants the best for his children, then God must indeed love us very much. Dad was a wonderful example of the wisdom and love a father can have, and since I could always trust my own father, I early on developed a trust and an awesome respect for the One who loves us most. In my early struggles to learn about God and to try to figure out what I believed--about life, love, death and all the big unknowns in this world--Dad's simple faith and common-sense theology helped shape the direction my steps took in that early part of my journey. Indeed, this was the most precious gift my dad gave me, and I am ever grateful.
Dad had a long and fruitful life, a beautiful life--doing a wide variety of things and touching people in all kinds of situations. He was a very unique and special person. And even though I miss him greatly, I am comforted by the faith he had, and by my own.
The life of someone we love always seems to end too soon; we want to keep them with us forever. There are lots more things I'd like to have said to Dad, or done with my Dad, that I'll never get to say or do. But because of that love and faith he nurtured in me, I know that this is not the end of our very special relationship. He still loves me. Our father-daughter bond and friendship is not over. He still knows I love him.
Love is always there, even when everything else in this life fades away. There is nothing stronger than love. This is God's greatest gift to ALL his children. Dad, you showed me this by your own faith, your own examples, and now, even though I'll miss you horribly--and grieve very deeply for my loss--I am also confident and joyful, and at peace with the fact that you are now enjoying the full warmth of our Father's love... and probably swapping stories and jokes with a lot of old friends and all the angels.

Tribute to my Dad (a remembrance written in May 2007)
Most of the stories, articles and columns that I write are about horses or cattle—a spin-off from my lifelong love of these animals. This interest and love began early, when I was a small child. This interest grew into a desire to be a rancher and spend the rest of my life working with horses and cattle. Much of the credit for the direction my life has taken must go to my father, Don Ian Smith. Dad passed away April 26, at age 88. I will miss him greatly, but I will always be grateful for the influences he had on my life.
Dad grew up on a farm near Rupert, Idaho, where he drove teams of horses to help his father in the fields. He started farm work at a young age, coming home after school and giving his father a break by harrowing the ground his father had spent all day plowing with a 3-horse hitch. By then the horses were tired and easy for a small child to handle. He was proud to be able to help his father, and he enjoyed working with the horses.
Growing up during the Depression, he learned the value of hard work and innovation. He did many kinds of jobs to work his way through college (Willamette University at Salem, Oregon). He and a friend spent one summer in the East as tree surgeons, making enough money to pay for their next year's tuition.
He met the love of his life, Betty Moser, at Willamette, and they were married in a little church near Seattle, Washington. Dad did his graduate work in Evanston, Illinois--to become a Methodist minister. I was born in February 1944 while Dad was serving a student church in Winthrop Harbor, Illinois.

My folks moved back to Idaho when I was 4 months old; Dad served as pastor of the federated Methodist-Presbyterian church in Salmon for a couple years, and then served a Methodist church in Burley, Idaho. During those years at Burley, he took care of the family farm at Rupert and I often went out there with him (when I was 3 and 4 years old) to check on the steers he'd bought to graze the ditch-banks. I clearly remember the steers--and the electric fence I was warned not to touch. Those 6 steers summered well, and when Dad sold them he made enough profit on that venture to buy mom her first automatic washing machine.
[photo – me at age 4 on fence, on Rupert farm]

My fascination with cattle began in those years; I loved to go with my Dad to check on his steers. Also, my little brother and I stayed with a farm family on several occasions when our folks went to church conferences, and I loved to sit in the hay manger feeding the milk cows.
Dad came back to Salmon in 1950 to build a Methodist church, and I started first grade. I'd wanted a horse from the time I could walk, toddling around with a stick horse. My favorite toy was a little stuffed horse named Shorshay (my baby word for "horsie"). That little cloth horse soon became threadbare from being loved and lugged around everywhere I went.
When I was in third grade my dream came true. We got a horse, and Dad bought a small acreage up Withington Creek--where we lived for 2 summers--and we had a place to keep the horse. Then he started buying the adjoining ranch. Unlike most Methodist ministers who move every few years to serve different churches, Dad put down roots and spent 18 years at Salmon. I was grateful for this--being able to have my own horses, and starting my own small herd of cows (for college money) by working on the ranch. Irrigating, digging post-holes, riding range--these were tasks I thoroughly enjoyed. I wanted to spend the rest of my life involved with livestock.

Dad was also instrumental in my becoming a writer. As a child I was shy--often at a loss for words when talking to people. I had trouble expressing myself vocally, but I could put the words on paper. Because I loved horses, I often wrote long, rambling stories about them. When I was 12, Dad suggested I write a shorter story, and he helped me send it to Trails for Juniors, the Methodist Sunday School paper. It was accepted and published, and I received $10 for it. After realizing I could actually earn money for something I loved to do, I wrote more stories--first for children's magazines and then for horse and cattle publications. By the time I went to college I'd sold dozens of articles, and my writing helped pay my way through college.
I went to University of Puget Sound in Tacoma, Washington, and graduated in 1966, but during those years I was terribly homesick for the ranch. I didn't want to live in a city. When Lynn and I were married we spent our first summer on a dairy farm at Gooding, Idaho, then came back to Salmon--where we'd both grown up--to start ranching in 1967. We eventually purchased my parents’ small ranch and the adjoining one.

Dad's love of the land (and of horses and cattle) was a big factor in shaping my life, and his understanding and appreciation for rural people helped shape his ministry. Though he later served several other churches and built a very large church in Boise where he served for 14 years, a part of him was always rooted in the land. The simple wisdom and practicality of his faith shone through in all of his sermons and writings; his inspirational books (By the River of No Return, Wild Rivers and Mountain Trails, Sagebrush Seed, The Open Gate) have been very popular because they are very down-to-earth and many people can relate to the stories he tells and the message within them. When he finally retired for the third time, after serving several small churches that had no pastor, he and mom came back to Salmon in 2001 to spend the rest of their years among old friends and the mountains they loved.

Dad, you'll be greatly missed. But I want to say thank you for your wisdom, advice, and for providing an opportunity for me to travel a path that I have truly loved. I couldn't have done it without you.

Spring 2007

2011-04-15T10:01:00.000-07:00

Our cows were scheduled to start calving in mid March that spring, but Rosie calved early, On March 6. We had just put the cows in the maternity pen and put out straw for them to bed on because the ground was muddy—due to several inches of new snow the week before. We were about to go to bed that evening when I looked out the window and saw a new calf. Rosie was licking it, but she had a lot of help—some of the pregnant heifers (ready to have their first calves) were very curious and trying to smell and lick the calf, too. So we spread straw in one of the smaller pens and put Rosie and her new baby in there, so they could bond and not be disrupted by the other cattle.
One of the heifers (Magnolia, a daughter of Maggie) calved the next evening. She calved fast and easy, but the sac around the calf’s head didn’t break and I ran out to the pen to get the sac and fluid away from the calf’s nose so he could breathe. We have our calving pens next to the house so we can watch from the windows (with yard lights at night) and get out there quickly to save a calf if we need to.
We had a lot of wind that spring, so we put more tarps along the side pens as windbreaks. If the newborn calves can be out of the wind they don’t get so chilled.

A few nights later, however, it was very cold when Cub Cake (daughter of Cubby, granddaughter of Cinnebear) calved, so we put the baby in our big plastic sled and pulled him to the barn, with mama following.
Some of the older, experienced cows prefer to calve in the barn when weather is nasty, and it’s easy to tell when they’re in early labor, even if they are not obviously showing signs of labor. For instance, Rishira came down to the gate one morning at chore time, wanting to come into the calving pen so she could go to the barn. She showed no signs of labor all day, but by evening it was obvious that she was calving, and she had her baby at 9 pm.

We had a busy spring, because even though we weren’t calving in January anymore, some of the weather in March and April wasn't very good, and we still had to keep close watch at night and put some cows in the barn.
Michael and Carolyn finally finished calving their 280 cows; the last slowpokes calved in early May. Our smaller herd started in March, and all but 3 had calved by early April, but those last 3 kept us checking on them at nights during nasty weather. The last two calved during snowstorms, so they had to go in the barn.

We had a lot of problems with coyotes and wolves that winter. Michael and Carolyn lost a total of 7 calves to predators--2 calves were killed and eaten; the others were young calves that got trampled by cows when predators were harassing the herd. The cows were stampeding around and bellowing, and on 5 different occasions this resulted in the fatal trampling of a newborn calf.
We had a wolf in our field above the house one evening at dusk. We'd just eaten supper and heard the cows bawling. We ran out there and the cows and calves were running around the field bellowing. Two people on 4-wheelers were parked up on the road, watching. I ran out into the field to "talk" to the cows and they finally calmed down, and the guys on 4-wheelers drove into our driveway to tell us that when they came around the corner above our place they saw the cows chasing what they thought at first was a large gray coyote. But coyotes don't go into that field with the cows, because there's netting on all the fences and it's hard for coyotes to get in. A wolf, on the other hand, can easily jump the fence.
In early April Michael and Carolyn branded their big group of calves, with the help of some of their ranching friends. The next weekend I helped them and their kids brand and vaccinate their 2 smaller groups. Young Heather’s knee was healing after her surgery, but she still had to wear the knee brace. Nick and Carolyn did most of the calf-pushing to get the calves into the little chute for branding.
[[use several photos—Nick (2 photos), Heather (with knee brace),

That spring I got a long letter from Liz. Her son Ty was doing well, working at a food store and writing/playing music, seeking his own path in life and trying to find his way. Like Andrea, life has not been easy for him in many ways, but they both gained strength and perception that will stand them in good stead whatever comes. In some ways these two young people have gained an emotional maturity that most people take years and years to find (and some never do). Liz and I had confidence in their ability to "land on their feet" regardless of whatever buffeting gusts and storms come their way.
Liz also sent me a copy of the letter she wrote to Laurel in early March. Our continued communication meant. I felt a strong and beautiful connection with these two women, even though I’d never met either one of them face to face. They were like sisters to me, or soul mates. The 3 of us are very different, yet we share something so deep, so important, and very special. I still cherish these friendships and am grateful for each of them; we've all been a great strength and help to one another through a challenging but wondrous journey (that I could hardly believe was nearly 7 years along, that spring, in its progress).
This "net" of love has been a godsend. It helped sustain me many times. Sharing the pain, the struggle, the spiritual growth that blossomed from it--this sharing has been very special, very instrumental in how my own journey evolved. I hate to think what those past 7 years would have been like for me, without it. Having this network, knowing that Lynn and I were not alone in our journey, knowing that there were others who understood exactly what we were struggling through, and finding hope and comfort in that knowledge--and in turn trying to help Liz and Laurel through the tough times--this was one of the biggest factors in making those years a blessed journey of discovery and of love.
Liz’s letter to Laurel was so full of "life" and it beautifully expressed the emotions surrounding a part of life that is hard to embrace--the death of a loved one. Liz’s mom had passed away that spring. Losing a parent is something we all expect, but it's never quite real until we do. I very much appreciated those comments and feelings, because I had just lost my dad. He had been in failing health, gradually becoming less functional--and his disabilities were more than mom could handle. He was near the point of needing full time care, but his independent spirit would never have tolerated that, so I was thankful he was able to die at home.
He passed away the morning of April 26, 2007, after some serious episodes of failing health. He had been in the hospital a few days the end of March because of congestive heart failure. He wasn't able to breathe very well and the doctor put him on oxygen for a while in the hospital. Then he was doing a little better and went home again.
A few weeks later on a Thursday he and mom were walking over to the hospital (just across the street from their apartment) for a doctor appointment for dad, and he tripped on the curb by the hospital and fell, hitting the back of his head and knocking himself out. Several people rushed out there, and one of them started mouth-to-mouth breathing. Then a doctor gave him CPR; Dad still had no heartbeat and wasn't breathing. They finally got him going again, and the doctor was amazed that Dad wasn't brain dead. They put in a trachea tube to assist his breathing, and it took him a few hours to stabilize, but he came out of it.
He had a sprained/broken ankle, a concussion, and some cracked ribs from the CPR, but no brain injury and he looked a LOT better by the next day. I had really good visits with him that Saturday and Sunday in the hospital, and he was his old self again. He was able to go home from the hospital that Monday. He was in pain from the ankle and the cracked ribs, but able to sleep better in his own bed.
A couple nights later he fell again, going with his walker to the bathroom. Mom couldn't get any response from him and called 911. The EMT's came and took him to the ER again, where they put him on oxygen and then sent him home. He slept pretty well the rest of that night and was doing better. The oxygen helped. But the doctor told mom that it was just a matter of time and that he might have 2 more days or 2 months. His old heart was giving out. He was on oxygen full time after that, but the oxygen machine had a long hose and he could get around the house and to the bathroom and to his rocking chair in the living room--and had some wonderful visits with family and friends who came to see him.
But he collapsed again Wednesday night; my mom and sister had a hard time getting him into bed. The next day was Mom and Dad's 66th wedding anniversary and he hung on until then; he died early that morning in my mother's arms. He didn't want to end up in a nursing home, and he got his wish, dying at home, surrounded by love.
The doctors were amazed that he didn't die from the effects of his fall a week earlier, but I think the main reason Dad didn't slip away from us then was that he was hanging on for some very important reasons. It was like the door was open, and he could see it was open, but he wasn't quite ready to go.
There had been a tragic rift in our family and he hadn't had much interaction with our son Michael (Dad's oldest grandson). Dad hadn't seen his 2 oldest great-grandchildren for 6 years. Michael visited Dad once, the year before, and wanted to reconnect and continue having a few visits, but hadn't taken time to do it. When a person is young, he thinks there's always another day. Michael visited Dad in the hospital after his fall, and promised to bring his kids to see Dad--and Dad was looking forward to that, very much. He also wanted to hang on until his wedding anniversary; many times he kept asking mom and my sister what day it was, and when their anniversary was.

Those last days, Dad had several wonderful visits with friends and family, including a great visit the evening before he died--with Michael and Carolyn and their kids. Those kids (age 14 and 16 at that time) hadn't talked to their great grandpa since they were 8 and 10 years old. They now have that wonderful memory and will always know that their great grandpa loved and cared about them very much.
Dad collapsed later that night (another episode of passing out and not breathing for awhile), and mom and my sister had a struggle getting him into bed. But he rallied and had a pretty good night. In the morning when mom got up, dad was awake and aware, and she played their music box for him. It played their special song (from their honeymoon 66 years ago), and he knew it was their anniversary--and then he had another passing-out episode and she couldn't get him sitting up so he could breathe, and he died in her arms.
Life throws lots of curve balls at us, and we're still learning how to play the game. As we get older we try to learn how to go with the flow and take each new development as it comes along. It's not always easy, and I am glad that the Lord gives us the strength we need when we hit the various potholes and detours in the road. I was glad for the opportunities to spend a little more time with Dad during his final week, and that several other family members were able to visit with him; he had a really good day, the day before he died. It was like God granted him that extra week to say good-by, and to do some things he needed to do. There were some wondrous family healings that took place in those last days--and in the following days as family came together and planned the funeral. Some bridges were made and I think Dad accomplished, in his death, some things that he couldn't do in life (such as getting my sister and my son and kids speaking to one another again and hoping to go on from there with the past behind them).
The funeral was Friday, May 4. All of Dad's grandchildren were there, even my brother's son who was living in Australia. It was a wonderful get-together and celebration of Dad's life. A fitting touch was his old saddle, next to the coffin, surrounded by wildflowers from the hills of our ranch—the lupine and balsom-root blossoms that he loved so much—that Lynn and I picked that morning in a very wet snowstorm. At the memorial service we laughed, we cried, we sang, we prayed, we rejoiced, we grieved. It was a very, very special time. We knew we would miss him, but we also knew it was time for him to go.
Family is precious and special, and we are grateful to have our kids and grandkids living nearby. Because of some of the tough times our family has experienced in relationships, Lynn and I try even harder to make sure that communication glitches don't occur in our immediate family. I guess that's the up-side of bad experiences; you realize how precious the good things are, and work harder to maintain them.
Lynn hurt his back that spring and I was grateful for the help of family. For several days Grandson Nick (who had just turned 14) and I loaded the hay bales after school and fed the cows, and Nick split our firewood. After about a week Lynn was doing better and was able to feeding hay again, but we still had a little help from Nick when loading the heaviest bales--which we saved until weekends. We (and the cows) were very glad when there was finally enough grass to quit feeding hay!

Late Winter--January-February 2007

2011-04-07T08:22:00.000-07:00

Calving season started for Michael and Carolyn in late January 2007 and the weather was cold. Ice on the creek built up dramatically and it was a challenge to chop down through it to create drinking holes for the cows. They often had trouble with slippery footing, so Lynn hauled some old straw to the water hole on Heifer Hill to create better traction for the cows.
During January we were trying to finish up the "Fall" projects we never quite got done--tagging and vaccinating our heifers, hauling hay, etc. We helped Michael and Carolyn work their cattle and ours--running them all through the chute for their pre-calving vaccinations, and branding/tagging the new heifers they bought. Young Heather and Nick helped, too.
]

Lynn was driving to town every day to check on his Mom, who had a bad fall and was in the hospital for several days and then in the care center. My parents were still managing to live by themselves at age 88, though Dad was becoming more frail and forgetful.
Our little herd wasn’t scheduled to start calving until March, but Michael and Carolyn had their first calf on January 16. They had a set of twins a week later, but the first one born did not survive because the amnion sac around the calf didn't break and the calf suffocated. The other calf was ok but it got very cold by daylight (nighttime temperature was down to zero) and when they found it in the morning they had to help it nurse.
One night about midnight we heard a wolf howling on the hill above our house, near where a couple calves were being born, but Lynn aimed a spotlight at the hill and it left. The year before, wolves killed one of Michael and Carolyn's newborn calves so we’re a little nervous when wolves come around. A few nights later 3 wolves ran across the highway in front one of our neighbors and he struck one with his pickup. We are getting too many wolves! Michael got a shot at a wolf that was right in the middle of the cowherd one night, but missed.
Coyotes are always a problem, too. Michael and Carolyn lost several calves during that calving season to coyotes; the cows get upset when coyotes are trying to kill a calf, and run around bellowing and chasing the coyotes, and newborn calves sometimes got trampled.
One morning in early February three coyotes were trying to kill a newborn calf when Michael drove into the field to feed the cows, and he was able to shoot one of them. He took the carcass up to the haystack where dozens of whitetail deer had been eating the alfalfa bales at night. The smell of the coyote deterred them for a few nights, but then they got used to it and came boldly back into the haystack to eat.
Another group of deer were eating hay every morning and evening with our weaned heifers, chasing the 25 heifers away from the feed. In spite of the coyotes and our increasing wolf population, we still seem to have plenty of deer!
One of Michael’s heifers stepped on her newborn calf’s hind leg, breaking the bone midway between stifle and hock. A cast wouldn’t work, that high on the leg, because it’s impossible to completely immobilize the leg between those two joints. So our vet put a dog splint on the leg, held in place with wraps of adhesive tape. Within a few hours the calf learned how to get up and down, and walk with the splint. The fracture healed.
]

In February I got a long letter from one of the people Lynn and Andrea met at the Burn Center, the summer of 2000. Fay was there that summer, with her brother, who had been severely burned. He did not survive, and that was a really tough situation for Fay. We’ve kept in touch with her ever since and keep sharing ideas and thoughts about life, and death.
I sent her a copy of an article that appeared in the Burn Support News, and told her, “Whoever goes through a life-changing event like cancer, a severe burn, serious injury, or loss of someone you love, can understand what this man is writing about. Indeed, these "tragedies" and trials are what carve and shape us and make us more fully aware of God and His love, and the need for loving one another. Most of us do not truly understand nor appreciate life until we run into the rough spots. The blessings and beauty that can eventually evolve from pain or tragedy take us so much farther in our journey than an "unscarred" life can take us. We are truly blessed by things that happen to us, especially the "bad" things. What a paradox. But it's really the only way that God can touch us, transform us, get through to us. We have such a thick veneer of unawareness otherwise... it has to be deeply scratched or broken to open up our view (to really see other people, and God) and let Love pour in.”
We also got a letter from Liz—whose son was burned that same summer. She had recently lost her mom, and she sent us a copy of the obituary (what a wonderful, kind, loving, exceptional, strong person her mom was!) and a copy of a letter she had earlier written to her mom. Liz said that slipping out of this life was a blessing for her mom--to slip free of the bonds that tied her to a narrowing and increasingly unacceptable existence.
Lynn and I could understand. There comes a time, as we age and our bodies fail us, that we are very ready for the next stage--moving on into an expanded unknown, just as a baby is full term and ready to be expelled from the womb into a bigger but totally unknown phase of life. The "birth" from one phase to the next is painful, and some transitions take longer and are more painful than others (we all hope for a quick and easy "birth" and not have to spend too much time in the painful prelude of getting there!!) but I am sure that what awaits us at our emerging is wonderful beyond our imagining. We get a glimpse of Love, here in this life, but I am sure that we can experience it more fully when we shed these rusty old clunker vehicles we travel around in and our spirits are free.
Lynn and I very much appreciated the letter Liz wrote to her mom--observations and reflections on their relationship. It's hard to capture in words the emotions we feel when saying good-by to someone so special in our lives, but Liz did it so well.
Life is fleeting, so frail, yet so wondrously strong and enduring at the same time. The people who make such differences in our lives are ever with us, in life or afterward. The human spirit is a miracle, and we are so loved--to be able to share our journeys with other spirits like mothers and fathers, sisters and brothers and special friends who make a lasting impact on our lives and our perceptions of life and love.
The hardest part is letting go. We all expect to lose our parents, but it is not "real" until we do. Liz was ahead of me on this road, since I had not yet lost mine. Lynn lost his real mom when he was a small child, and that loss had a harsh impact on his young life at that time; we seem to need our parents for security for quite awhile in our lives. He lost his dad in 1997, but he'd lived a long and fruitful life, dying just before his 91st birthday. The toughest thing is losing someone long before we can even begin to imagine such a thing--like Lynn losing his mom as a little boy, or a parent losing a child. I am so grateful that Liz and I did not lose our burned children. Even though we went through a long and terrifying minefield of anxiety, we were ultimately blessed. I cannot imagine the pain that Laurel went through, but I am happy that she is coping with it and moving on with her life. By 2007 her letters were so much more open and flowing--a definite difference. Even though she will never "get over" her loss, she was getting past it and moving on.
Loss is devastating, and only Love can carry us through it--Love and trust, trusting that we are all part of something greater. Love is a great blessing, because it is so simple (yet so all-encompassing and profound). It can take us by surprise, full bloom, or slowly grow from a tiny seed (that we didn't even know was there) until we suddenly become aware of it being there.
I am continually amazed at how fundamental Love is. Love needs no words, no explanation, no wisdom, no logic. We don't need to be intelligent or wise to understand and comprehend it. Love just IS, and I think it's God's greatest gift to us, and certainly the only thing that can sustain us at certain times of our lives. It's the only thing strong enough to begin to compete with the devastation that engulfs us after a loss. And then, as it grows, it starts to filter through into our everyday lives, to change and color our perception so that we can appreciate the many small things that bless us--and experience Love in more ways than just the necessary comfort that holds our souls and sanity together when we thought we couldn't go on.
And so, in those weeks just before we started calving, I corresponded with several of our very special friends that we encountered in the Burn ICU. Laurel wondered how I managed to write so many letters, and I told her: “The letters I write in my "spare" time are accomplished only because I neglect other things. You said you were amazed that I want to write in my "spare" time, but I accomplish it only because I feel it's one way I CAN connect with other people (and I do so in gratitude for the help other people have given me in my own journey) and also because I let other things slide. I have energy for extra writing only because some things in my life (like housekeeping) have very low priority. I "cheat" by channeling whatever energy I have into writing (whether articles, books, or letters to people I care about) and leaving none for keeping the house in order or even clean--and Lynn, bless him, is very understanding and doesn't mind the chaos we live in. There, you know my nasty little secret! World's worst housekeeper. In fact, I won a messy desk contest years ago (sponsored by a regional newspaper). All it took was photos of what used to be our living room, totally buried in an avalanche of papers that had overflowed from my desk. The desk was so buried you could hardly see it.”
In early February 2007 our granddaughter Heather (age 15) had surgery on her knee. She tore some ligaments playing basketball that winter. She had her leg in a brace for several weeks and was on crutches for while. Lynn drove to town daily to take her from school to physical therapy and home again, since Michael and Carolyn were busy calving.
Andrea's kids were keeping her busy; Emily and Charlie had been ice-skating since December and Em was on the grade school hockey team. Lynn and I went to one of their tournaments and it was great to how well Em was skating, being so new to this sport. It's fun watching our grandkids grow up. ]

Andrea's youngest (Danielle, 2 years old) gave us a scare Feb 19 when she tumbled out the door of their pickup. They'd stopped at a friend's place in town and the kids were getting out, and little Dani fell out the door onto the sidewalk, on her head. She lost consciousness, and Andrea rushed her to the emergency room at the hospital, where they did a CT scan. She had a concussion, and cracked the bone over her eyebrow, but there was no bleeding on the brain, so they let her go home. She seemed ok, so we were very thankful. Even though she fell several feet (from a tall, 4-wheel-drive pickup), her fall may have been broken a little by the blanket she was holding, and a can of pop (in her other hand) that was totally flattened underneath her. Life can certainly change in a heartbeat, so we were thankful that she was ok.
By late February Michael and Carolyn had less than 50 cows left to calve (out of 280). But they were wearing out, after more than a month of being up nights and taking care of all the calving and feeding chores. They camped here in an old trailer house during calving. The bull they bred their heifers to was supposed to sire small, easy-born calves, but his calves were all big and they had to pull most of them (and lost a couple that were malpresented because they were too big to fit easily through the birth canal).
]

One Sunday Lynn and I helped them move some of the cows and calves to a different field. The cows readily followed Michael’s tractor and bale of hay, but the young calves were running around, confused. With 4 of us in the field herding them, to help funnel the calves through the gate, we finally got them out on the road. One calf kept running back and forth along the fence, trying to go back. Nick finally tackled the calf just as it was about to crash through the fence, and held onto it while Carolyn made a halter from baling twine. Three of us dragged and pushed the calf back up the bank to the road. By that time the herd was gone, up around the corner—following the tractor and hay. Carolyn put the calf across her lap on the 4-wheeler and hauled him up the road a mile to catch up with the herd as the cattle were going into the next field.
]

Lynn and I brought our little herd into the "maternity ward" March 5. Even though they were not officially due to start calving that spring until March 14, a few cows always calve ahead of their due dates. We wanted them close to the house so we could check on them easier at nights (with spotlight and binoculars from our window). We never want them calving up in the fields, or we'd risk losing the newborn calves to coyotes or wolves.

Early Winter 2006

2011-03-14T19:53:00.000-07:00

In November we had several inches of snow and then the weather turned cold. Andrea drew an elk tag for the hunt in our area, and Lynn went hunting with her, making a 7-mile hike in Mulkey Creek, which is very steep terrain. They saw lots of elk tracks, but no elk. The tracks were all heading down out of the high country. One of our neighbors had more than 100 elk grazing on his ranch and eating in his haystacks.
Andrea finally got her elk on one of the last days of hunting season, after hiking all day on our cattle range and catching up with the elk just before dark. This was the most hiking she’d done since her burn injuries 6 years earlier. Lynn helped her cut up the meat to put in the freezer. After getting a deer earlier in the fall—that she shot from her back porch one morning—she and Mark had a good supply of winter’s meat.
Also in November Andrea took Emily to her team’s wrestling meet it Rexburg, a 4 hour drive. We kept the younger children here for 2 days. They “helped” grandma. While I worked on the book I was writing, they did lots of games and artwork, drawing about 30 pictures—some to take home and some to put up on our walls.
Lynn and Michael (and 13-year-old Nick) made numerous trips up the creek to get firewood, salvaging some of the burned trees in the burned area on our cattle range, from the fire in 2003. We finally had enough wood to get through the winter. The-fire killed trees make good firewood; they are dry and well seasoned--but very black and charred on the outside. The guys came home looking like coal-miners after handling the charred wood. Sawing up the burned trees created a fine dust of soot in the air from the chain saw. This irritated their lungs and made them cough, and they got respiratory infections. Lynn's respiratory problem turned into pneumonia, so he had to go to the doctor for antibiotics.
The cold weather and snow made it impossible for the cows to continue grazing, so we began feeding hay.
The sub-zero weather also created a lot of ice in the creek and it was overflowing and making ice flows down across several of our fields. Michael used our backhoe for a couple days to work on some of the frozen ditch heads to stop the flooding. With the cold weather, deer came into our haystacks to eat. They also started coming onto our feed grounds and chasing the heifers away from the hay we fed.
One of our “fall projects” that we were slow to accomplish was to dig up a water line and replace the leaking hydrant by our calving barn. The previous winter, it froze up during calving season. The “fall list” of projects is always too long, but we finally started working on the water line. Michael dug it up with the backhoe and we replaced the leaky hydrant. They had to bury the water line very carefully so frozen chunks of dirt wouldn’t crush the plastic pipe.
In mid-December Lynn and I helped Michael and Carolyn try to save a cow that had a serious problem after losing her 7-month fetus to a very unusual condition. She had too much fluid in the uterus, distending it grossly and putting pressure on the digestive tract, which shut down her gut. We had to give her massive doses of mineral oil and castor oil to get her gut working again.

Then we had to pull the dead fetus, which was a tough job because it was abnormal and monstrous for its stage of development, and this was an additional stress for the cow. She went into shock, but we turned that around with several gallons of IV fluids and medication to try to reverse the shock and restore circulating blood volume. Her hind legs were paralyzed from the difficult birth, and she was unable to get up or to eat very much, but we kept her going for 3 weeks, feeding her alfalfa pellets soaked in water. We fed this to her in a slurry mixed with 7 gallons of water, feeding her twice daily by stomach tube.

We gave her the mineral oil/castor oil on Dec. 10, and kept up the twice-daily feedings, morning and evening, until after New Years, with one of the grandkids holding the flashlight for us in the evening feedings. The cow was out in the corral at the beginning (and could not get up) and we made a windbreak of hay bales and put tarps over her to protect her from the cold wind and snow.

A few days later we moved her into the barn with the tractor and loader. We put plywood on the loader's hay tines and rolled her onto that and strapped her on, then carried her to the barn and rolled her off.
In the barn, we situated her comfortably in some deep bedding, with bales of straw helping prop her upright

We were able to get her back on her feet using a hip hoist for her hind end and a sling made from a wide lash cinch (from a pack saddle) for her front end. It was quite a challenge!

Her gut finally started working normally and she began nibbling hay and chewing her cud. But she never ate enough and we had to keep feeding her additional food via stomach tube twice daily. The most frustrating thing, however, was her inability to use her legs. Even though we hoisted her up for awhile each day, and she took some of the weight on her hind legs, she would never use her front legs.

They couldn’t straighten out because the tendons had contracted so much from being bent under her so long. The leg joints were swollen, and it was like she’d developed joint infection--perhaps from septicemia due to toxins that circulated through her body when she was in shock.
Finally, after much frustration, we regretfully made the decision to end her life. We’d jerked her back from the brink of death, and she wanted to live, but her inability to stand up on her own ultimately defeated us. We didn’t regret the time and effort spent trying to save her (that’s what raising cattle is all about) but as calving season approached we knew that none of us would have time to continue giving her this much intensive care. And a cow that can’t stand up cannot survive. We reluctantly admitted defeat on saving that cow, and moved on, trying to make up for lost time on our many other tasks.
Michael needed to haul a load of calves to the sale—the calves that were too young and small to sell with the big group in the fall. We also needed to tag, vaccinate and delouse our heifers, and give all the cows their pre-calving vaccinations, but the weather was bitterly cold (30 below zero) and we postponed those projects until early January. Michael helped us vaccinate the cows.
When we finally vaccinated our heifers on a Sunday afternoon during the warmest part of the day, the needle on my syringe kept freezing up—but I had a jar of hot water in an insulated picnic cooler, and I could stick the needle into the hot water to thaw it out.
For several days Carolyn had a very sore, stiff neck with some vertebrae out of place, so that weekend when the kids were home from school they helped Michael do their feeding. Young Heather (age 15) drove the big truck—chained up and loaded with 5 big round bales. She did a good job, and was able to drive up our steep, slippery lane without spinning out; she was becoming a very good truck driver!
I finally got my calving book manuscript (500 pages) finished, and the illustrations and photos for it, by the January 1 deadline, so that was a big relief. I hoped to catch up on some article deadlines before plunging into the next book project (cattle health handbook), which I had to finish by September. I kept biting off big projects, but it helped pay the bills! I don't think we can ever afford to "retire". Our work is too much fun and too necessary, especially since we are still trying to help our kids. Andrea was doing very well but still had a lot of expenses that we were trying to help her with.

Fall 2006

2011-03-01T08:00:00.000-08:00

We had no appreciable rain in late summer and fall that year, and the dry conditions resulted in many forest and range fires. It was almost as smoky that summer as it was in 2000. The range grass became so dry (and short on protein) that the cows were trying to come home early. Some crawled through the fence into our upper pastures, so Michael and kids took them several miles back up the creek to the high range. He bought a ton of protein supplement to haul out to the range, to try to encourage the cows to stay on the mountain and not come home. There was still a lot of dry grass, but without protein it was like straw and the cows wouldn’t eat it; they need protein for proper rumen function to digest the roughage.
In late August young Emily came to the ranch to stay a couple days and rode with me to Baker Creek on the high range.
Together we fixed a trough, where the cows had knocked the pipe out and the water was running onto the ground instead of into the trough. Baker Creek had dried up except for a few small puddles, so we had to make sure the little springs kept running into our troughs, piped from the springboxes.
Emily progressed swiftly in her riding abilities that summer, and was quite proud of her accomplishment. She was also delighted to find 3 elk antlers on various rides, and we had to lug those antlers home on our horses, of course. She held the antler for me each time I had to get off my horse to open and close a gate.
On one ride she and I gathered some cows that had come down the creek and were standing around by the gate, wanting to come home. We took them up the creek a couple miles to the protein tubs that Michael put at the top of that range pasture.
This was the first time 8-year-old Em actually helped me move cattle. She and old Veggie did very well. She had come a long way in her riding skills since early summer when I was still leading her horse from mine.
By fall Emily was a confident enough "cowgirl" to be able to go with us (Michael, Carolyn and kids and me) to help move cows on the range and look for missing cattle, so she was very proud of herself, being able to ride with the big kids.
On one of those rides we all split up to cover more territory. Nick (age 13) went with me and Emily and we were lucky; we found 6 of the missing cows and 4 of the calves, and brought them around a mountain toward Baker Creek. As we came around the mountain we were hit with strong gusts of wind that nearly blew us off the mountain, and we had to hold onto our hats to keep from losing them. I held my hat in my hand as we struggled against the wind, and my hair blew wildly in all directions, which made Nick laugh; he said I looked like an “electric grandma!”
There was still another area to check, so Nick took the cattle to a water trough to hold them there while Em and I picked our way down the steep ridge, in the wind, to a hidden saddle where we hoped to find the missing calves. They were there, along with another pair, so we brought them to join the little herd. I was very proud of my “crew” and happy to be able to ride with my grandchildren. It was a long, hard ride in steep and treacherous country, but Emily and the old horse managed just fine, and young Nick was very good help with the cattle.
The next week, all the kids were back in school, and Michael and Carolyn gathered more cattle by themselves. They had a big herd and not enough riders to keep the lead cows from going up the canyon instead of staying on the main trail. Ever since our range burned in 2003, that area is treacherous, with down logs and areas of serious erosion along the creek. One cow got her leg stuck in the fork of a log trying to climb over it, and Michael had to get off his horse and literally pry her foot out. Another cow nearly fell off a 45-foot cliff along the edge of the canyon. Three calves fell into a deep hole along the bank, but were able to scramble out.
After Emily was back in school again (3rd grade), she only had a chance to ride once, on a weekend, looking for one of Michael and Carolyn's missing cows (and calf) after we'd rounded up all the other cattle. Em and I didn't find that pair (they were on the wrong range and came home with the neighbor's cattle a few days later) but we did gather 4 pairs and a bull of our neighbors' that had strayed onto our range.
It was a tough job, and would have been hard to do with only one horse (those critters are a bit wild) so I was glad I had my little cowgirl partner along. She and Veggie waited quietly at the edge of the timber, to keep the cows from going the wrong way when I brought them toward the gate. I was afraid Veggie might fuss and whinny, being separated from my horse, but Emily petted his neck and talked to him and calmed him, and he behaved nicely for her—and she was able to head the cows through the gate for me.
We finally had rain in October, with snow on the mountains, easing into winter. We still needed to get our winter firewood, so we were hoping it wouldn’t come early and snow under our fall pasture (and make it difficult to cut and bring the wood home, having to put chains on the trucks). We were grateful for cooler weather, after all the heat we had that summer. Lynn's tomato plants and squash in his "water trough" gardens in the back yard (old rusted out water troughs for cattle, that he hauled into the back yard and filled with dirt) nearly "cooked" in the hot weather.
In early November we celebrated Danielle’s 2nd birthday, at Andrea and Mark’s place. The grandkids were certainly growing fast. Charlie was 5, Samantha almost 4, and Emily soon to be 9. She was on the 3rd grade wrestling team (the only girl, that year) and won 2 of her matches at a regional wrestling meet. Our older grandkids were busy with sports, also, with Nick doing well in cross country track, and Heather (age 15) on the track, volleyball, and basketball teams.
Lynn spent some time that Fall hauling hay; we had to buy a lot of hay because of the summer drought and being short on hay and pasture. Michael helped Lynn haul the hay we bought, but still needed to locate some hay for himself to buy and haul. We’d also been busy getting our cattle pregnancy checked and vaccinated and the calves weaned and sold, and I was also doing as much writing as possible. We were still helping our kids financially (on Andrea's house project at Twelve-Mile and Michael and Carolyn's cattle herd-building), so I was grateful for all the work that came my way that summer and fall, for article assignments and books to write. I ask the Lord to provide, and He does, and so I ask Him for strength to do the work He provides.
That fall I was also trying to find time to send a few books (BEYOND THE FLAMES) to some of the burn centers around the country to be given to burn patients and their families, in hopes it might be a source of hope and encouragement for others who are suddenly thrust into this terrifying unknown. Lynn and I had been helped by many people who had already gone through this ordeal, and by the many others we joined hands with while groping our way through that awesome detour in our lives. We wanted to help others who might be just starting this jourhey.
We hadn't been able to keep track of everyone we bonded with that summer of 2000, but I still keep in touch with Liz and Laurel and a few of the others. By 2006 Laurel was slowly healing in spirit after the loss of her daughter; she’d come a long way in that traumatic journey. The difference in her letters, compared with several years earlier when she could not handle it very well, was like night and day. And Liz had a lot of things to bear; that fall she had her hands full with very ill elderly parents and father-in-law (her dear mother-in-law passed away the previous winter after a long illness), and other ongoing challenges, but the bright spot was that her son Ty was doing so well. Her joy in watching him graduate from college that spring was incredibly wonderful for her. She and I continuously shared our mutual journey of nursing our burned and hurting children through the darkest hours of our own fears and despair and watching them take life by the horns again and eventually soar, letting none of their impairments hold them back.
Lynn spent quite a bit of time during the summer and fall of 2006 locating wells for people. He uses welding rods and a green willow, to determine location of the water, the width of the underground stream, and often can determine depth. He tries to find a spot where one underground stream crosses another (at different depths) so when the well is drilled, it hits them both. This gives more chance for a good water supply. There might be one stream 120 feet down that produces 3 gallons a minute, for instance, and maybe another stream going a different direction 100 feet below that, giving 5 gallons a minute. By hitting them both you get a well that produces 8 gallons a minute, which is adequate for a home. And sometimes those streams produce a lot more. He's found some wells that produced 60 to 75 gallons a minute, which is phenomenal for this part of the country. He's probably located more than 300 wells by now, and really enjoys doing it.
That fall my father (who had just turned 88) went to Missoula, Montana once a week all through October for more chemo drips. The doctors thought 4 treatments would be enough this time (he had 6 the year before) but after checking his blood values afterward they said he needed 2 more. Hopefully the extra treatments will bring his blood levels close enough to normal that he can go without treatments for a while again. He has a rare sort of blood disorder (Waldenstrom's macroblogulinemia). It's a cancer of the B-lymphocytes (a certain type of white blood cell), infiltrating the bone marrow, spleen, lymph nodes, etc. It occurs mostly in older people and progresses slowly. He had it several years but only within the last year needed treatment for it. The 6 chemo treatments he had in 2005 really helped him; his platelet levels came back up to normal and he had more energy again, so we were hoping this round of treatments will help again for awhile.
There's so much to deal with as life takes us farther down the road. My cousin's wife (who had surgery, chemo and radiation for breast cancer) had a summer of remission and then was back on chemo again, but she has such a good attitude about it, such trusting faith. I struggle along with lesser problems and wonder if I could do so well. We are all in this boat together, grabbing hands and lending one another support and courage and care. It's always easier when you know someone else is there beside you. The love that connects us is stronger than the difficulties that beset us, and there is much to rejoice in and wonder at. It's all about choice. We can choose to see the blessings and be grateful for them, and the wondrous things that evolve out of "bad" things, or we can be grumpy about our "fate". I keep needing to learn and relearn many lessons, but there are some wonderful moments of peace and understanding along the way. I just wish I wasn't such a wimp regarding the frailties of growing older!

Summer 2006

2011-02-15T07:24:00.000-08:00

In mid-May 2006 Lynn and I helped Michael and Carolyn round up their cows and calves (100 pairs) from the field below our lane, to haul them to rented pasture on a ranch/range 10 miles up the valley. Some of their friends came to help. With 6 stock trailers, they only had to make 2 trips.
The next day Lynn and I went to town to join Andrea and young Emily on the annual MS Walk to raise money for multiple sclerosis research. We’d lost several good friends to MS in the last few years, so this is a cause we always support. While we were in town we bought more grain and milk replacer for the 5 bottle babies.
Michael and Carolyn had grafted several "spare" calves onto cows that lost theirs that spring (calves lost at birth or to coyotes). But after having 5 sets of twins and a few other orphans (a couple heifers didn't want to be mamas and no one wanted to take the time and effort right then to make them change their minds) and some other freak things, we still had spare calves. In early May one of their young cows died eating poison plants, so that left another orphan. So we had some pets that summer. Andrea's kids always enjoyed coming out to the ranch and helping feed the bottle babies.
In late May Michael and Carolyn turned more cows out onto our range, from our upper pastures. Later we put 17-year-old Rhiney (our baby-sitter cow) and her calf with all the orphan calves in a small pasture. We put up an electric wire to keep Rhiney from eating the calves’ grain. The calves were small enough to walk under the wire and come to their grain tubs. Eight-year-old Emily stayed with us several times and helped feed the calves their bottles and grain.

I finally got Andrea out here a couple times to ride, that summer. Emily had been learning to ride Veggie (a 20-year-old grandson of the old mare my kids learned to ride on, more than 30 years earlier).

Emily started going with me on some fairly long rides to check and fix water troughs on the range.

In late June Andrea came out to ride with us. I'd been telling Emily how her mom used to ride range with me all day when she was little, and how we'd take our lunch and a canteen full of frozen lemon-aid. It would thaw out but still be cold by late afternoon after riding in the hot sun. Emily wanted to have a "picnic" ride, so we did. Andrea got a babysitter for her 3 younger kids and rode with us. This was Emily’s longest ride so far, and only her third ride solo on Veggie, without me leading him from my own horse.
For me, having Andrea out here riding again was a joyous "milestone" in our journey since her accident 6 years before. This was the first time Andrea had REALLY ridden range with me since her burns. She made a few short rides with me the spring and summer of 2001 (the year after her injury), just to prove to herself that she could still do it, but she was still very, very fragile and impaired. And since then, she'd been so busy with all those little kids that kept arriving. She only rode her horse once in 2003, for some family photos when a photographer was here taking pictures for an article about our ranch for SUCCESSFUL FARMING magazine.
So, that summer's ride in early July was a special occasion--3 generations of us, riding together.
We were able to give Emily her "picnic" up in the mountains, with our horses grazing in the grassy, shady meadow while we ate our peanut butter sandwiches beside a stream. It was great to see Andrea back up to strength again, riding her fractious mare Breezy, who hadn't been ridden for 3 years (and was snorty and silly after such a long "vacation”). It was gratifying to see Andrea riding again with all her former confidence and skill, and getting on and off to open and shut all the difficult gates. She also cleaned out one of the springboxes where the pipe had quit running and one of the water troughs was empty. It was almost like old times.
I realized that the last time she rode with me doing routine range work was on July 4, 2000, the day before she was burned. On that ride she helped me round up several pairs to bring home (bull calves and their mothers) to wean the calves. Those cows gave us a real challenge and we were glad for good horses--to outrun and outmaneuver those devious cows as they tried to run down the steep hills or into the brush to get away from us. Our cows love their mountain pasture and hate to come home!
We had a really good ride that day rounding up the young bulls, with great teamwork, great companionship. I always loved riding with my daughter because we were such a good team, whether training young horses or gathering or sorting cattle. We shared many thoughts and feelings on those daily range rides--while we were checking cattle, fences, gates, water troughs, making repairs to fences or water sources, or bringing home an occasional animal to doctor for some problem or another, or the young bulls to wean. But that wild, good roundup ride on July 4, 2000 was our last one; it was the very next evening that she was burned. So, riding with her again, 6 years later, was like a special gift.
We 3 rode again a few weeks later--an even longer ride--to check water troughs, and we spent time fixing several problems. We found 4 little frogs at one spring, which Emily wanted to catch, so we brought them home in a plastic bag. We'd taken our lunch along, in a plastic bread sack tied in my coat behind my saddle. When we found the frogs, Em just HAD to have them, so we emptied our lunch sack (by eating the last muffin) and put the frogs in it, along with some water from the spring. Emily had wanted to find some frogs all summer. Andrea carried the frog bag home on her horse (5 miles) for Emily. So it was a fun, wonderful day.

Life is certainly different now (after the burn) but oh, so sweet, in ways I never envisioned before. Early on, I grieved for the loss of what we'd had before, and the fact that our lives were changed and I might never be able to ride range and train horses again with my daughter. Then I finally resigned myself to never having it again. I was just so utterly GRATEFUL that Andrea survived and could have a LIFE, and kids, and pursue some of the dreams that had kept her fighting for life when she so nearly died. She told us later that she couldn't give up, because there were still so many, many things she wanted to do.
So, a tiny gift like being able to ride again with her, was almost like old times, but even more special because we had Emily along with us and we were doing it for Emily. It was a wonderful thing--one of those special milestones that I will always keep close to my heart. It will lift my spirits and serve to remind me (in future) when I need to remember that all the plusses outweigh the tough challenges that come along on some of the turns in the road. I keep thanking God for his many gifts along the way.
Meanwhile, we got our haying finished that summer while the weather was hot and dry. The creek was low and our irrigation water very limited. Afternoon storms often brought lightning, but very little rain. The lightning started several fires, including one at Twelve Mile, close to Andrea’s and Mark’s house and the fire department worked for 2 days to protect the homes along the river. BLM crews dumped water on the fire with several helicopters scooping water from the river.

During July we had extremely hot weather, up to 100 degrees, lasting longer than usual. We can usually cool our house off a little at night by opening windows, but several nights were too hot or smoky to do that. There were several big forest fires in eastern Idaho and the smoke drifted into our valley.
In early August Michael was still busy doing custom haying so I helped Carolyn and their kids for several days gathering cattle off the middle range pasture, to move to the high range. It was great to be able to ride with those grandkids, too. They were becoming excellent cowboys!

All through that summer I was busy writing articles and books and then signed a contract to do two more cattle books for Storey Publishing--a calving handbook and a cattle health care handbook. I started first on the calving book, working at it every morning in the wee hours before chores. But it was a fun one to write, since this is a topic dear to my heart. That summer I tried to do at least 5 to 8 pages on it a day, sandwiched in amongst working on articles for various horse and cattle magazines. With fewer cattle, Lynn and I depend more on my writing to help make ends meet, so my writing became become a full-time job.

Spring 2006

2011-02-01T08:35:00.000-08:00

The final week of March 2006 was cold, so we had to put calving cows in the barn.
Rodennia calved out in the maternity pen at 2 a.m. one morning so we brought that calf to the barn. He was too big to carry so we put him in the wheelbarrow—since the sled was over by the kid’s trailer house on the other side of the creek and we didn’t take time to go find it. It was a challenge getting the wheelbarrow over the frozen manure piles with the calf trying to flop out.
Zimbobbee calved later that morning, but by then the sun was up and it wasn’t so cold. We put that cow in one of the small side pens to calve and she didn’t have to go in the barn. It was an exciting day, however, as one of Michael’s cows, Alvira, was having a backward calf down in the field. In order to save the calf they would have to pull it, but the cow didn’t want to come to the gate. She ran past 13-year-old Nick and nearly ran over Carolyn (driving the 4-wheeler). Then Alvira ran out the wrong gate and up the driveway instead of going to the barn. She headed up the horse trail, but Nick (who loves to run, and was on the 8th grade track team) ran up the main road and got ahead of the cow. He slid down the steep bank to the horse trail and cut her off, then chased her back down to the barnyard. They finally got Alvira to the corral by the barn, where they restrained her in the head-catch and pulled the calf. He was still alive, but barely.
A few days later we put Buffalo Girl (Emily’s cow) and her young calf up in the swamp pasture with the other first-calf heifers and their calves. Emily named Buffalo Girl’s calf Curlie Sue because the calf loved to run with her tail straight up in the air and curled over her back.
Eight-year-old Emily came out to the ranch to stay overnight and went with Lynn and me to feed the cows. She enjoyed seeing Buffalo Girl again. Even though this young cow (2-year-old) with her first baby hadn’t seen Emily for half a year, she remembered her friendship/bond with the child, and allowed Emily to pet her. Emily also enjoyed seeing all the cows and calves, and the yearling heifers—and several cottontail rabbits that lived in our barnyard.

By April the weather had warmed up and we had rain. The snow disappeared from the low hills and grass started to grow. The corrals were very muddy and we had to put chains on the feed truck to get around in the boggy fields without getting stuck. Fifteen-year-old granddaughter Heather got stuck on one of our upper fields while taking salt and mineral to that group of cows, and Lynn pulled her pickup out of the mud with our feed truck.
Our last heifer calved. We put her in the barn to calve because it was raining so hard that morning. She calved without help, but soon afterward we heard some loud bellowing, so I went back outside to make sure the heifer wasn’t pushing the new calf around—as some confused first-time mamas will do at first.
I realized the bellowing wasn’t coming from the barn, but from the little corral where Michael and Carolyn’s last 3 heifers were penned. I ran over there and saw one heifer standing by the fence, but no calf. She’d calved next to the fence and the newborn calf had slid underneath the poles, and was sliding down toward the creek. With every wiggle it was moving farther down the bank toward the rushing water. I climbed over the fence and pulled the calf back up the hill to where I could stick its hind legs back under the fence—where I could reach them from the proper side and pull the calf back into the pen. I pulled him to safety in the middle of the pen where the new mama could lick him. We called Michael and Carolyn and they drove down from their house to put that pair in the barn, out of the rain.
Our white cow, Lilly, calved in late April.
Zimmeric calved the next day while we were branding and vaccinating, and Cubby, the last cow to calve, had her calf on May 1st. We had a belated birthday dinner for Michael and Carolyn and their kids; they all have birthdays in April but it’s such a busy time of year that we usually just have one big celebration.
With all the snow we had that winter, and the spring rain, the creek was higher than usual and flooding its banks. There was water over most of the lower fields and very few dry places to drive the feed truck to feed the cows. Michael and Carolyn had been doctoring a lot of calves for scours and a few for pneumonia; many were sick because of the wet conditions. The creek was dangerously high, and whenever the calves had to cross it they’d go clear under water. Due to the risk to the calves for drowning, Michael and Carolyn moved that herd, putting them in the field below our lane where it was drier an only one small access to the creek for drinking. Then the cows wouldn’t be continually crossing the creek and putting their calves in danger.
Two cows couldn’t find their calves on the day the cattle were gathered and moved, and we suspected those calves had drowned. Michael left those two cows there, in hopes they might find their calves, but they didn’t, so 5 days later they rounded them up and sold them. Ironically, the day after Michael hauled the 2 cows to the sale, one of the calves showed up in the lower field. He’d been sick, hiding deep in the brush, and his mother had not found him. He had not responded to her bawling because he was so sick. Carolyn found him when she drove the tractor down to that field to get our harrow (to start brushing the fields); the calf had staggered out of the thick bushes and was lying along the edge of the trees, in the shade.
She and Michael brought the calf up to the barn and put him with their bottle orphans. They treated him with antibiotics and fed him by stomach tube--and gave him castor oil to get his gut moving gain. He was weak and wobbly from the intestinal infection and ulcers, but he eventually recovered and was raised with their other orphans.

Meanwhile, as we finished calving season and prepared for taking the cattle to summer pasture, we struggled with a few family problems, such as the declining health of my parents and the rift that could not seem to be mended with my sister. She kept shutting out the rest of us, and hindering any relationship we might have with my parents. I kept praying for resolution to that challenge.
But with heartache come blessings to counterbalance the pain. I realized I was very blessed by the friendship of many people who had crossed our path since our daughter’s burn accident 6 years previous. I was discovering that God's blessings are all around us.
We only need to open our eyes and our hearts to His love, His forgiveness. And if He can forgive us, surely we can forgive one another. This is what I constantly prayed for, as we humans so often act like selfish children and can't seem to get past the me-first or you-did-me-wrong or I'm-better-than-you phase of growing up, like a bunch of 3-year-old kids throwing sand at one another in the sandbox.
How we must amuse and exasperate our Father at times! I am certain God must have a sense of humor--which seems to be a necessity for loving parenthood--and He probably smiles as He gathers His wayward children into his arms, scolding and forgiving and loving us. If HE can love us, with all our imperfections and mistakes, we surely can strive to love one another, and be more tolerant, understanding and compassionate.
We all have our own timeline, and enter into a broader understanding of our life's purpose at different spots along our journey. I wish I had been more open (and less timid and afraid) earlier in my life, but we can only go on from here-- from where "we're at". Each day is the first actual day of our lives. God can use us wherever and whenever He finds us (or to be more accurate, whenever we open the shutters and "see", and let Him into our lives).
We are all learning and becoming—all in the process of trying to make a little progress toward what we are supposed to be. I am grateful whenever I encounter those loving people who are farther along on the path, reaching out to give me a hand and help me along in my own journey.
It's so awe-inspiring, how we all can help one another, to make the journey easier and so full of joy! Loving others is such a strange mix of sorrow/compassion for the trials they go through (empathizing with the hurts and tragic losses they suffer) yet also filled with the joy/gratitude for God's love and comfort that can bring us all through whatever tragedies we have to face. Life is such a paradox, but oh, so wonderful. I am ever grateful for the people that God continues to put in my path.

For anyone interested in reading more about our “adventures” on the ranch and with our animals, check out my bi-weekly column “Notes from Sky Range Ranch” at http://insidestorey.blogspot.com This is the publisher who does my horse and cattle books.

Calving Season 2006

2011-01-15T20:00:00.000-08:00

We had a birthday party dinner out at Andrea and Mark’s place in January for Sammy, who had just turned 3, and Emily, who was celebrating her 8th birthday. Little Danielle, 14 months old, was eager to help them unwrap all their presents.

In mid-January Michael and Carolyn sorted their big group of cows, putting the earliest calving cows in the field below our lane, near our main calving barn. They spread straw along the fence in that field, for bedding, and also in the 2 big corrals where the 90 heifers will be calving. They had 80 first-calf heifers and would be helping us with our 10 heifers.
Michael and Carolyn started camping here at nights in our old trailer house, so they could check on the calving cows and heifers. We had a blizzard a few nights after they started calving, and one calf nearly froze to death. His mom calved in a snow bank then went into some brush to get out of the wind, and left her new calf out in the snow and wind. Michael and Carolyn found him a couple hours later, barely alive. They took their calf sled and 4-wheeler to get the calf, but the 4-wheeler couldn’t make it up the hill through the deep snow. So they pulled the sled up the hill by hand, put the calf in it, and the sled started sliding down the hill. Michael jumped in the sled with the calf. They whizzed down the hill at high speed, until the sled hit the feed trail at the bottom—which was covered with frozen cow pies. Michael had to crouch in the sled rather than sit, to keep from breaking his tailbone as they rattled over those bumps. Then they took the frozen calf to their trailer and thawed him out by the wood stove.
Another cow had twins the next night, and only mothered one of them. The neglected twin nearly froze, but Michael and Carolyn found it in time, and thawed it out in the trailer. Later they grafted it onto a heifer that lost her own calf at birth. A few days later they had another set of twins, from a cow that had twins the year before. After warming and drying them in the trailer, they were both just fine.

We had 10 days of severely cold weather, and lots of new babies. Just before the worst cold weather, Michael had acute pain from a kidney stone. He spent most of the day lying on the bed in the little trailer house, trying to keep warm, and drinking lots of water to try to pass the stone—but he was vomiting a lot because of the pain. Lynn and I helped Carolyn do all the feeding, and I helped her tag and vaccinate calves that needed shuttled out of second-day pens to the fields. We moved other pairs out of the barns, and brought in cows with newborn calves. Young Heather helped after school, and we finally got finished with all the chores after dark. Lynn drove to town to pick up Nick after basketball practice.
By 8 p.m. Michael’s pain was so bad that Lynn took him to the Emergency Room at the hospital. The doctor gave him a shot of morphine and some medication to relax the urinary tract, and several liters of IV fluid to increase his kidney output—to try to flush the stone that was caught between the kidney and bladder. The stone finally moved into the bladder at 10:30 and the doctor let Michael come home. He passed the stone at midnight, and then insisted on helping Carolyn with the calving through the rest of the night.
The next day was severely cold and all of us worked around the clock to keep from losing any newborn calves. Michael had to pull a set of twins; one was positioned upside down and he had to rotate it, and the other twin was backward. He and Carolyn managed to save them both.

That week they also had one premature calf and a blind one with some skeletal problems. Those 2 "handicapped kids" lived for a while in the trailer house, and had the run of the place like a couple of pet dogs. They also had a couple calves the mothers either didn't want (one heifer tried to kill her new baby) or couldn't raise (an old cow with cancer) and they grafted those babies onto the mothers of the "special needs" calves.
In late February we had a serious coyote problem. Coyotes killed a newborn calf in the maternity field, and then killed a week-old calf in the lower field. Michael started carrying a gun in the tractor while feeding cows, and managed to shoot a couple of the coyotes but there were still at least 6 harassing the cows. One night a group of young cows with new calves were bellowing and stampeding, and when Michael and Carolyn drove down to that pasture with their 4-wheeler and a spotlight, they found that the cows had trampled one calf to death in their efforts to defend their calves from the coyotes.
By early March Michael and Carolyn had more than 200 calves, and our own small herd started calving. One of our heifers had twins, so we grafted the extra calf onto Michael’s young cow whose calf got trampled. Buffalo Girl (Emily’s pet heifer that was raised on a bottle) had a nice heifer calf, named Curly Sue. Several of our first-calf heifers have now calves.
So, the cows were keeping us busy checking them at nights, since our weather wasn’t very nice for calving outside. Lynn and I would stagger out of bed periodically and peer out the window with spotlight and binoculars to see if anyone was calving and needed to be put in the barn. Our "maternity ward" for the ladies in waiting is near the house, with a good view from the windows, so unless it's snowing so hard we can't see (or foggy) we can generally check them in our nightgowns without having to go outside in the cold. The kids' cows, by contrast, being a larger herd, were in a bigger field farther from the house and trailer house, so they took turns trudging through the field at night to check on them, and bring any cows with new babies to the barn.

We continue to name all our calves, like Ursala (daughter of Cub Cake, who's a daughter of Cubby, who's a daughter of Cinnebear, who's a sister to Polar Bear and Bear Claw), Leena (daughter of Shirleen, who's a daughter of Rishira), Curly Sue, Dinglebelle (daughter of Dingaling, who's a daughter of Ringa, who's a daughter of Syringa), Rosalee (daughter of Rosie, named by our granddaughter Emily), and other crazy names. Over the years we've had fun thinking up thousands of names--drawing upon everything from Shakespeare and Greek plays (Ophelia, Antigone) to the Bible (Absolem, Shadrack), and Beowulf (Grendel, Hrothgar, etc.) and nonsensical made-up names the kids came up with when they were little.

On another subject, I received a letter in March from a friend who had recently undergone cancer treatments and was hopefully recovered. He was studying to become a tutor to teach English as a second language, and to teach basic English skills, and was also becoming involved in cancer outreach. Those of us who have been through one kind of hell or another and have come out on the other side (in awe and gratitude!!) seem to have this urge (maybe even a fanatic obsession!) to help other people who are struggling through the bad stuff.
Our cancer-survivor friend agreed with us that a support group, an understanding listener, or a no-nonsense lecturer ("You WILL NOT give up!!) can make all the difference in someone’s future. When someone cares, you do try a whole lot harder. On her trips back to Salt Lake for checkups, Andrea has sat in the ICU with burn patients who wanted to die and told them in no uncertain terms that they could not give up...that they still had too much to live for. And they listen because she's one who has been there.
The real challenges of life (potentially life ending challenges) do get our attention and get our priorities straight and take the blinders off. They open our eyes to realities about ourselves, and about the Love that is there waiting to find us when we do lift our eyes.
Connecting with that Love and becoming (albeit in fits and starts and imperfectly) a part of it in helping others is the most awesome and blessed experience one can have. Bad things can always evolve into wonderful blessings if a person lets it happen. Wake-up calls.
I guess that's why Lynn and I felt compelled to tell our story and to hope it will help other burn survivors and their families (or anyone else going through a tough road), and why we are now more apt to try to connect with and help someone who crosses our path rather than just pass by on the other side of the road and feel sorry for them. Amazing how these wake up experiences strip away the protective layers we so carefully (yet unknowingly) put around ourselves through the years. We don't hide behind them anymore. We gladly bare our souls to someone else if we think it might help, or go out of our way to give encouragement or brighten their day. We are all in this life together.
That winter, one of our friends who was more at-home with the internet than I am located a list of burn centers around the country. I started going through the list and calling them, trying to connect with people who might be interested in having me send sample copies of my book BEYOND THE FLAMES. Often I just got transferred to someone's answering machine, and only a few of those people called me back. But once in awhile I got lucky and spoke with a "real" person, and many of them were receptive to having me send them a book.
I was glad for this breakthrough--being able to connect with the various burn centers--because this is where my book may make a difference in a person's life. Lynn and I were so devastated by our daughter's injuries, not knowing if she would survive, or what life would be like if she did survive. One of the things that gave us the most encouragement was a little book that someone gave us, about a burn survivor, and his physical/spiritual journey through the valley of death--and through it. This gave us hope, and that little ray of hope was what we desperately needed at that time. So after we began our own pilgrimage (the detour in our lives that began at the burn center) we knew we had to write our story, in case it might also give hope to someone else facing a dark night of the soul. One of my goals has been to connect with other burn units. If we can donate books to some of them, we’ll feel like we're starting to accomplish our mission!
My parents were becoming more frail that winter. Mom was ill for several days, and spent a day in the hospital to get a spiking high blood pressure episode under control. She’d been wearing herself out too much taking care of Dad, and worried about his having to go to Missoula, Montana (145 miles away) once a week for a chemo drip—something the doctor put him on to slow down a rare type of blood disorder. The trips over the mountain were hard on him, since it was an all-day ordeal.
I wrote to my brother after Dad’s 2nd weekly drip treatment in Missoula, and said that Dad was very tired, but perky. “Not so giddy this time. Maybe they didn't put the steroids in the concoction or maybe they changed the dosage. Mom is still tired after her high blood pressure episode, but her blood pressure is more under control now, since the doctor changed her medications. She goes to see the heart doctor today (the one that comes over here periodically from Missoula). I think she's been wearing herself out too much taking care of Dad, and she's probably worried about his having to go over to Missoula every week for the chemo drip.” I kept worrying about my parents, and the fact that it wasn’t easy watching them grow older and more feeble, and having to carefully ease into the role of caregiver to those who took care of us when we were young.