Column: Savagemama

Rural Life with Baby and My Neighbor’s Cows

By Jennifer Savage, 4-09-07

In a few months, when my daughter looks through picture books of animals and I say “What does a cow say?” She may very well return my question with a string of slurred explitives. Not because cows necessarily make these sounds but I do when I see them in our yard. She’ll associate these slow-munching, pastoral-to-those-who-don’t-live-near-them farm animals with four-letter words that will surely get her in trouble in pre-school.

We live on five acres south of Arlee, five acres of postcard mountain views, swaying yellow grass and, more often than not, a handful of our neighbor’s 200 or so head of cattle. These creatures have 155 other acres on which to roam and poop and make baby cows but where do they really want to do all of these activities? You guessed it. Our five-acre island.

On a recent morning Eliza and I awoke to a moody spring day with low hanging clouds and spitting rain. It was beautiful from our bedroom window until I saw an old familiar grazer walk by our front door. I sighed, got dressed, strapped on a baby carrier and tucked Eliza inside it. We ventured out into the cold, rainy morning to chase the cows off our property. This isn’t the first time my just-sitting-up daughter has participated in such shooing.

The week she was born my husband spent his time tending to us, then running out into the field to usher cows – sometimes 50 to 100 cows—out of our pasture. I have a picture of Seth fixing fence with Eliza, just three days in this world, snuggled into a sling across his chest.

As we rounded the house the other morning, the cow spotted us and started to run the other way. Our trusty yellow lab, Imogene, who normally shows few signs of brain activity, helped us corner the old girl and run her down the fence line, across the driveway and into her own pasture. Then I saw three more cows in our back pasture so again with the help of Imogene, we sent them off over the bared wire fence from whence they came. While Imogene barked and nipped, I ran and cursed and Eliza calmly hung out in the pack as though we do this every morning, which is almost true.

Since we bought our place five years ago, I have moved enough cattle to call myself a real-life cowgirl. I’ve chased in them in a foot of snow, in the middle of the night and while I was eight months pregnant. When we moved there we knew we were buying a piece of rural life. We knew this place was surrounded on all sides by a cattle ranch. We knew there would be the occasional stray on our land. But I naively thought our rancher –that’s what I like to call our neighbor—would also be slightly accountable for his cows. I was wrong. His girls are in our pasture, our garden, our hay.

And why should these reckless bovine stop at the fence between our properties when they can walk right through it and keep eating. The fence dates back to at least the Ford administration with so many makeshift attempts at repair that it isn’t keeping much out.

Our rancher once told my husband, “Oh, these cows aren’t dumb, they know where the feed is.” Whether they are dumb or not is still up for interpretation but I think they might respond to a little well-placed barbed wire on his part.

He doesn’t see it this way. He does just enough to keep his cows alive (he fixes the fence that separates his pasture from Highway 93) but little else. In the beginning I was patient. I thought our rancher must not realize his cows were straying, his fence was falling down. Not true. He knows, he just doesn’t care.

This is one of those situations where being an easterner come West doesn’t help matters.

We have these crazy ideas back East (like keep your animals on your own land) that seem to rub our western rancher the wrong way. I know he probably sees these things a little differently. 

Evidently there’s this thing called open range. My take on it is, long ago, when ranchers were the only ones making laws, they decided that in an area with an open range, the people who did not own the cows had to build the fences to keep the cows out. Coming from the land of private property this is so unbelievably counterintuitive and makes absolutely no sense. We’re not even sure our little valley in an open range (fuzzy legal speak I also attribute to ranchers who made the rules) but our rancher clearly thinks it is.

Since we can’t get a black and white answer on the question of who actually owns the fence and whether we live in the middle of a cattle free-for-all, we patch and string wire and the cows keep breaking through.

I threaten nearly every other week to call our rancher and ask him if he ever plans on fixing the fence, if he believes we are zoned open range and, while I have him on the phone, ask him just how many old tractors can one man park in the equipment graveyard he’s created just on the other side of our fence.

Usually Seth calms me down, reminds me that we are neighbors, that our rancher isn’t a spring chicken and that we don’t want to make an enemy of him. As always, Seth takes the long view.

“He’s a land rich, cash poor rancher. He probably doesn’t have the money to fix the fence, if it’s even his responsibility,” he says.

“If it’s his responsibility? They’re his cows!” I say.

And then I remember our rancher did park his tractor in the middle of haying the day of our wedding to walk across he pasture and attend, he’s plowed our driveway on more than one occasion when we’ve had two feet of snow and he fed our dogs when I was once in the hospital.

We’ll probably never figure out who owns the fence and I’ll continue to curse our rancher’s cows back into their own field. Eliza will come along, strapped to me in the early morning. The wet grass on her feet, the mist curling her hair, the sound of barbed wire moving on metal fence posts all reminders of this rural life we live. 

Jennifer Savage writes about being a new mom on her own blog here on NewWest.Net. Read more from “Savagemama” at www.newwest.net/savagemama.

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