Going Out To Pasture

Moving cows to summer range is my favorite day of the year. It’s better than Thanksgiving, Christmas, Valentine’s Day and Mother’s Day.

I don’t go to bed regretting eating too much like I do with the other holidays and moving cows onto Forest Service takes place in the summer not in the middle of winter. Every year on June 1^st we turn our herd out on Forest Service.  We run our cows on a permit until mid fall.

The day is a family event and I love that it’s the one day a year we all get to ride. Well, except this year. We were short a good saddle horse so my husband offered to take the four-wheeler so everyone else could ride. On cow-moving day summer’s just begun, kids are out of school, and it’s not super hot out yet so the day is typically a pleasant one for riding.

Picnics are a rarity for us more than I’d like them to be, but I look forward to packing a big lunch on cow-moving day. Oftentimes it’s well past lunch by the time we get the cows to their destination and kids are usually hungry.

Every year we switch from two different locations on the permit when we turn cows out. We always push them right to the water tanks but they’ve done the route enough times they pretty much know where they’re going.

This year we also fought with the bull for domination. He was insistent on herding the lead cows back into the bunch once we got them moving again and instead of heading straight, cows zigzagged as the bull tried to herd them and we tried to turn and push them straight ahead. My husband did a lot of the work getting after the bull and eventually the bull relented and trailed ahead like a good boy.

There’s always one calf that lags behind on every cow moving day and this year it was a brand new calf born that day or the day before who lagged behind. At one point he tried to double back and my husband and son went after the little bugger with a rope, four-wheeler and horse (it was undetermined yet which cow was his mother). Once he was caught, my husband loaded him onto our handy calf packer that telescopes out of the back of our four-wheeler.

The little snipe rode the rest of the way since it was unlikely he would’ve been able to keep up the rest of the trip. Eventually his mother realized she’d walked off without him and showed looking for him and we get her number in the calf-record book.

 

Once we got to Callon spring we all tried to find ourselves the least rock covered spots among the grass to park ourselves for lunch to give the herd time to settle down and pair up.  In between bites we recapped the trip out and discussed what a pain the bull was being. Overall, everyone was content with the way the trailing went. After about an hour it got a lot quieter.

 

 

Since the boss was on a four-wheeler, he boogied home after lunch to button up the pasture where we’d kept the cows since branding. The ride back home for the kids and I was long but the conversations we had helped shorten the distance from home.

Once we got back, unsaddled, and turned the horses out, all of a sudden I felt sleepy. I landed my weary bones on the couch and settled in for a late afternoon nap. It felt like Christmas. All the activity and excitement of the day caught up with me.