blog: ON RIVERS AND RANCHING

The Cow and the Calf

By Bryce Andrews, 7-14-08

Week 1 | Week 2 | Week 3 | Week 4 | Week 5 | Week 6

I. In the Pen:

She stands up when I slip the chain and open the gate. Shaking with effort, she lifts her bad hind leg off the ground and sways on the other three. She is gaunt and sprinkled all over with fly powder that looks like talc. Pale and shrunken, she looks more like a cow’s ghost or a desert carcass than something alive.

I keep my eyes on her as I shut the gate. She lowers her head, stares at me and scrapes the ground with a front hoof. She drools. An abscess distorts the line of her jaw, making her look like a squirrel hoarding nuts.

The pen is small—20 paces across. A month ago our bulls were in here during a rain and their hooves pocked the dirt deeply, leaving topographies that have set like concrete in the summer sun. Thrown off balance by a five-gallon bucket, I stumble toward the cow with water sloshing onto my pant legs.

She shakes her head, snorts and rushes three steps toward me. I drop the bucket and spring back a pace. She stops. We take each other’s measure at ten feet, listening to water slap against the black plastic of the bucket. I want to get that water into the low rubber tub just behind her. She has decided to run me off or over.

I am determined that the tub stay full of cold, clear water, and I check it more often than is necessary. She refuses to drink, but even so I bait her away from the tub, dump the old water out and fill it again. I stock oats for her, too, and have forked in a pile of hay. My hope is that fresh, endless water and good feed might edge her toward survival, and that her recovery will somehow balance out what happened to the calf.

II. Putting it Down:

The calf was not born to this cow. He had nothing in common with her except that both of them were lame in the hind end and that it fell to me to deal with them. Unlike this cow, which was sound when we turned her out to graze in the forest, the calf was born twisted and doomed. His left hind leg ended in a callused stump, and his right one was black, hairless, shrunken and bent forward at a 90-degree angle a few inches above the hoof. When he stood, which was rare, it looked like he was resting on a cane turned upside down. I asked about him and someone said: “Should have knocked him in the head when he was born.”

He could barely walk, and doing so must have become more painful with each pound he gained. Mostly he lay hidden in tall grass and moved when necessary. I don’t usually try to judge the quality of bovine lives, but his seemed unmistakably full of agony.

When I shot the calf in the head he dropped like a stone. I walked to him and shot once more to be absolutely sure. Feeling numb, I decided to pull him into the shade of a scrawny juniper. His cow watched me. She began walking when I leaned down and gripped the calf, and was close by the time I got him under the tree. She stepped forward and I stepped away.

I walked the quarter mile back to the rise where I had parked my truck, then sat on the ground. Mostly I looked across the clear-aired expanse of our pasture toward the red-brown dot in the juniper’s shadow, and the cow beside it in bright afternoon sunshine.

III. Afterward:

Whether he knows it or not, when a person shoots something like a calf, he loses a measure of something irreplaceable and necessary. No matter the circumstances, a young and growing presence is missing from the world, leaving a hole for which the shooter is to blame. It does not matter that the calf was doomed, that his bent foot was rotten to the bone, that I did not want to shoot him, or that it was supposed to be an act of mercy.

At the truck I let Tick out and sat with him on the ground. When my legs fell asleep I moved to the driver’s seat. I watched until the cow gave up and grazed away.

I spent about an hour thinking about the calf. Sometimes I feel guilty about stealing that time. I could have been working, setting out salt, or checking again to make sure the holding tank was brim full of water. I might have ridden my motorcycle up to Orofino, where our forest cattle graze, to look for sick and lame cows.

A week has passed since the calf—enough time to blur the image of a cow waiting beside a juniper tree and dull my sense of transgression. I worked hard today, pouring concrete, moving water, chasing out the neighbor’s goats and fixing fence. I checked on the lame cow twice and found that she had not touched the water, oats or hay that I set out. Though I poured new, cold water for her each time, I didn’t hope for much. Convinced that she was dying if not already dead, I vacillated about checking her again in the evening.

The calf decided things: He was dead, but the cow might live. It was enough to get me to the pen and through the gate.

IV. Steps:

Now we stand regarding each other across ten feet and a black plastic bucket. I can see the rubber water tub behind her. Surprisingly, she has drunk it dry. Balanced on three good legs she hop-steps forward. She exhales loudly, lowers her muzzle, and drinks greedily from the bucket with a sucking sound. The water level drops. She takes a gallon as I take a breath. 

She lifts her head and walks toward me, still on the fight. It’s intimidating, but not too dangerous. I know her lunges won’t last more than a few steps.

She seems a little stronger now that she’s watered, and I decide to move her to an adjacent pen. Some grass is left there, and she can drink her fill from an irrigation ditch that crosses through one corner. Since she won’t be herded, I let her chase me from one pen to the other by increments.

Standing directly in front of her I walk forward, closing the distance between us. When she drops her head I crouch like a baseball player leading off. She charges and I leap back. When she stops, I edge forward and repeat the motions—advance, charge, retreat.

She lets me get a little closer each time, and soon I am stretching out my arm, brushing my fingers across the flat spot between her eyes. I feel the tremors in her muscles as she tenses to surge forward. To drivers passing on the Eastside Road it must look like we are partnered in a slow, bizarre tango. We go through the gate together, dancing toward water.

Week 7

“On Rivers and Ranching” is a blog by a ranch hand working on the Clark Fork Coalition’s Cottonwood Creek Ranch to unite conservation and ranching practices in the middle of the nation’s largest Superfund complex—the upper Clark Fork River. Click here for more.

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