Badluck Way: A Year on the Ragged Edge of the West

by Andrews, Bryce

  Misanthropic cows and human error aren’t the only variables in herding. Terrain matters, too. The past experiences of the herd carry weight. The temperature and the barometer can make or break a day’s work.

  Nobody wants a stampede, humans or cattle. Controlled, sustained motion was our goal, so we tried to be judicious with the way we applied pressure. Generally, James, Jeremy, and I worked together to move herds, staying in an even line behind the animals, angling back and forth to nudge along any stragglers. The herding dogs, when James or Jeremy brought them, zipped back and forth along that line, filling any gaps between riders. Older, more experienced dogs understand the whole business perfectly. One of Jeremy’s collies, Bonnie, had a particular talent for the work. She was calm and patient with most cattle and had an intense, focused stare that curbed bad behavior. Quick, vicious bites to the nose and hind legs—Bonnie’s harshest punishments—were reserved for repeat offenders and egregious insubordination.

  Younger dogs, like Jeremy’s new pup or James’s heeler, Tick, made more mistakes. When one of them pushed too hard or nipped the wrong hoof, agitation rippled like a wave through the heifers and steers.

  When we wanted to turn our herds, we simply shifted our line—and the pressure we exerted—to one side or the other. If we did it right, the effect was striking: without anyone out in front to guide them, the cattle found a new trajectory. There always seemed to be something magical about the way they swung around like a compass needle finding north.

  A cattle drive has to stay calm. It also has to be comprehensive—every member of the herd must arrive at the intended destination. Failing at this task even once or twice leaves stock scattered across the ranch, creates unnecessary work down the line, and gives the neighbors something to talk about. On a landscape as wild as the Sun Ranch, there were also spots in which leaving a heifer behind amounted to offering her up as a sacrifice.

  Fortunately, the majority of the cattle despised being left as much as we hated to leave them. Their herd instinct runs deep, though not quite as strong as it does in elk or bison, which will tear apart the world to get back with their fellows. In cattle, the desire to stay close exerts a subtle but undeniable magnetism. Move one animal, and the cow alongside her will almost always follow. Trail a small bunch through a pasture of scattered, grazing yearlings, and a herd will fall in line and pile up like snow in front of a plow.

  When everything was working well, it was possible to gently steer a herd across the land, ford creeks, pass in an orderly fashion through gates, and settle the cattle on new pasture with a minimum of stress. An outcome like that depended on a lot of things going right, some beyond our control and some within it. Above all else, success, safety, and the welfare of the cattle were contingent on our ability to remain calm and relaxed. When we lost our tempers, or tried to hurry, a wreck followed in short order.

  One morning we were pushing cows down Highway 287 and wanted to have it done before nine, when tourists started heading for Yellowstone. It wasn’t an especially big herd or a long move. The heifers gathered up easily enough and spilled through an open gate onto the asphalt. As the greenest of the crew, I rode behind the herd. Engulfed in the smell of fresh shit, I clattered my horse back and forth across the highway, pressuring stragglers. As I rode, I watched James work one of the roadside ditches and marveled at his knack with cattle. James knew precisely when to press ahead, and when to rein his horse. He stayed calm, and the animals in his care did the same.

  Mostly, when the right-of-way fences were in good repair and nothing too exciting happened on either side of the road, we did well. The traffic was manageable: Locals waved and pushed their way through the herd. Tourists stopped, gawked, hung out their windows, and took photographs. I smiled for them. It thrilled me to be somebody’s cowboy.

  One Black Angus heifer in a herd of the same distinguished herself by turning and sprinting full tilt past me. She didn’t look like much. I backtracked and double-timed her to the herd. She did it again. Cursing, I dropped to collect her. The second time, I chased at a hard lope and lodged her solidly in the middle of the bawling, jostling crowd. Her ear tag was blue, number 512.

  Ahead, Jeremy had turned the leaders off the road and was counting the herd into their new pasture, moving his horse forward and back in the gate to keep their flow to a steady trickle. He ticked off numbers with his outstretched index finger.

  Our heifers went through beautifully, with the exception of 512. Where the others turned left, she bolted right, crossing the highway and crashing headlong through a five-wire fence to take shelter in an overgrown willow thicket on the bank of the Madison River. When the rest of the herd was safely put away, we went after her.

  At first 512 moved well, and I thought: Three riders, one animal—piece of cake. Getting her onto the highway was no problem, but as we neared the pasture gate, she veered, tore through the gap between James and me, and smashed her way back to the river.

  For the next two hours we played cat and mouse with her, growing more frustrated with each failed attempt at getting her across the road. Finally, 512 snapped. Spraddle-legged and bug-eyed, she pawed, snorted, and rushed us, coming close enough to clip my stirrup leather.

  We talked it over, and decided that she couldn’t be left alone. The year before he came to the Sun, James had worked on another big cattle operation. Once, the owner of that ranch left a recalcitrant cow behind while moving his stock across the highway. The rancher went home for dinner, leaving the cow to her own devices. Later, when the sirens of police cars and ambulances split the night, he knew that his cow had tired of solitude, crawled through the right-of-way fence, and tried to cross the blacktop in search of a way back to her herd. The resulting wreck took an unsuspecting driver’s life, splattered the cow across fifty yards of pavement, and left the rancher brokenhearted.

  Jeremy sent me trotting back to fetch the truck and horse trailer, so we could rope and load 512, haul her across the highway, and turn her loose with the rest of the herd. I bounced the rig out through the pasture, parked as close as I could, unloaded my horse, and climbed back into the saddle. James built a loop and threw it, catching 512 back of the neck. She spun and charged hard down the length of the rope, nearly catching him broadside. Jeremy got another rope around her neck, and the two of them began dragging her toward the trailer. She dug in with all four hooves. The horses strained, the ropes snapped tight, and she choked herself down. Wheezing, she tottered, buckled, and lay in the grass with her legs folded neatly beneath her.

  I tried to shout her up. I spurred my horse against her but she would not move. James and Jeremy slacked their ropes and 512 gasped for air. She lay there regarding us, and for some reason she was infuriating. In spite of our wit, strategy, and perseverance, she was winning on sheer bulk and stubbornness. Her implacable resistance rendered us helpless. It shattered the image we held of ourselves as expert stockmen. Her posture said, I’ll die right here, before you move me. Being new to the work, I did not know what to do.

  James did, and as he tied off and dismounted, I saw a cold purpose in his eyes that knotted my stomach. He asked to borrow my lariat. I slid from the saddle, handed it over, and watched as he uncoiled four feet, starting from the knotted back end. With this, he delivered the most savage beating I had ever witnessed. Leaning back, James swung the knot in circles, fast enough to make it hiss. After three revolutions, he hunched down, striking the prostrate heifer about the eye and ear. Again. But 512 did not rise or bawl or move. She lay still and was beaten.

  I don’t know how long it lasted, only that it was long enough for me to wonder if James would ever stop. “Fuck it,” Jeremy called down the rope. “We’ll drag her.”

  Panting, James looked at me and said, “Get her up or she’s dead.”

  He handed back my rope and walked to his horse. When James and Jeremy put their mounts forward, it was in unison and earnest. The ropes tightened and groaned against saddle leather. The heifer began to drag along with
her neck stretched grotesquely and her eyes bulging. It was a moment before I remembered to kick her in the ass with all my strength. Nothing. I yelled and kicked again.

  Miraculously, she stirred, struggled to her feet, and walked haltingly after the horses. She fell again. Violently, viciously, we got her up. It took another hour to load her, drive across the road, and cut her loose. Walking away, she was just a black shape between the high green grass of early summer and a postcard sky. It was easy to forget that she was bleeding.

  Not long after that day, James, Jeremy, and I woke early, caught our horses in the willow thickets along Moose Creek, and saddled in the barn. Jeremy walked over while I was checking the cinch on TJ and trying to decide whether or not to bring a slicker.

  “Put this on,” he said, and handed me a stained fishing vest. The vest had two big pockets, both of which were full of heavy, bulky items that clinked against each other as I worked the zipper.

  “Try not to break those bottles. And watch out for the syringes, too. They sometimes come uncapped while you’re riding.”

  Jeremy slid the barn door open and led his horse into the bright morning light. James and I followed him out through the pens to the road, where we checked our cinches and mounted. We trotted west, staying off the gravel for the sake of the horses’ feet. I bounced along with a lariat slapping against my right leg and medicine bottles beating against my ribs.

  We went through a wire gate and climbed to the top of the first small hill. Ahead of us, Orville’s heifers were scattered like bits of salt and pepper across a panorama of grass and sage. Jeremy pulled out his notebook and read a handful of tag numbers. He described the heifers we were looking for and outlined his plan for the day. We’d ride the herd thoroughly, he said, beginning at the bottom of the pasture and working toward the top.

  The pasture was shaped like a fat-ended banana. It enclosed a long, shallow draw that started at Badluck Way and then bent slightly north as it climbed toward the mountains. We rode in a rough line: I followed the north-side fence, James took the south side, and Jeremy zigzagged up the middle of the draw. I scanned each bunch of cattle carefully, and sometimes doubled back if one looked lame.

  James found the first heifer. He eased her down the slope into the bottom, and then followed at a walk. Jeremy took down his rope, organized it in his hand, and began to build a loop. His practiced hands made the process look easy: Jeremy added two coils, flipping the loop each time he did to keep the line from twisting. The honda zipped down the rope until it sagged almost to the ground. Jeremy rode up alongside the heifer, swung through two slow circles, and dropped the rope lightly around her neck. He kept his horse even with the heifer, took up the slack, and dallied to his horn. Horse and cow moved in tandem for a while, and then Jeremy reined to a stop.

  The rope snapped tight. The heifer wheezed against her noose and turned to face Jeremy. James swung his rope as she moved, laying a loop against her hind legs. When the heifer stepped through it, he jerked the slack. His horse braced against the rope, yanking both of the heifer’s hind feet backward.

  She teetered with her head stretched out grotesquely. Jeremy looked at me. “You pounce on her as soon as she falls.”

  The heifer groaned and toppled sideways. I slid off my horse, ran to her, and sank my knee into the side of her neck the way I had been told to. Then I reached out to grab her foreleg and folded it toward me.

  “Good,” Jeremy said. “She’ll stay like that.” He tied off, got down from his horse, and walked along the rope. The heifer struggled a couple of times as he approached, but I kept her pinned.

  Jeremy unzipped one of the vest pockets and removed a bottle of liquid antibiotic and a massive syringe, which he filled to the “45 cc” mark. He tapped the plastic reservoir and shot a bit of medicine through the needle.

  “Watch this part,” he said. He took a fold of the heifer’s neck skin between his fingers, slid the needle in, and injected a third of the medicine. Jeremy repeated the process in two other spots.

  “This LA-200 is meant to be subcutaneous. Don’t shoot it in a vein or you can mess the animal up. Try not to get it on your skin, either.”

  He pulled the needle out, wiped it clean, and rubbed the injection sites. I handed him a fluorescent-orange grease marker, and he used it to write the date in large numbers across the heifer’s rib cage.

  Jeremy walked back to his horse, mounted, and stepped forward so the neck rope went slack. Still holding the front leg, I reached forward and slid the loop off her head. I expected the heifer to move when I stood up, but she didn’t. For an agonizing moment she lay dead still. I swung into my saddle and began to worry that we had treated her wrong. Too deep, I thought—Jeremy must have hit a vein. It was not until James took the pressure off his heel loop that she struggled up and took off running.

  We rode uphill, repeating the vaccination drill as we came across more heifers and scouring the herd for signs of lameness and disease. Foot rot was the easiest, since a bad limp clued you in and a swollen, pus-spewing hoof confirmed the diagnosis. Pneumonia was harder to detect, because you had to look for general malaise. Number 512 emerged from a group of heifers, took one look at us, and loped off toward the pasture’s far corner. Jeremy said she must have learned her lesson. I breathed easier knowing she was alive and well.

  We doctored a handful of animals before reaching the top end of the pasture, all the ones on Jeremy’s list and then some. One of the heifers was particularly hard to catch, probably because she had already seen the end of a few ropes. She knew how to dodge sideways at the last minute, and refused to run in a straight line. She kept far away from us and tried her utmost to stay in a tightly bunched herd.

  Trying to catch her got dangerous in a hurry. Our slow, methodical operation went haywire and I found myself riding flat-out across a pasture riddled with badger holes, leaping sagebrush and old irrigation ditches, and trying hard to keep the heifer from turning. Working together, we took twenty minutes to wear her out. I stayed even with her hindquarters and tried to haze her toward ground that favored us. When my horse got tired, James took up the chase. He and Jeremy threw a dozen loops before they finally got her down.

  I tried throwing a few heel shots that first day, but never caught anything. James and Jeremy did the roping, while I learned to pounce like a wildcat when the brisket hit the dirt. I practiced filling the needle, clearing it of air, and piercing through thick hide. It became second nature to drop knee-first on a thrashing heifer’s neck, yank her front hoof back like a chicken wing, and get to work.

  As July ripened, each pasture move brought us closer to the mountains. The grass matured and we followed it into the high country, moving our animals from the lowest lands along the river to the flat, open benches at the center of the ranch, and finally on toward the rolling hills at the base of the Madison Range.

  James and I preceded the herds. We checked fences, set out salt and minerals in tubs made from old tires, and activated water lines and tanks that had lain dormant through the long months of winter. Crisscrossing the upper pastures, we rode four-wheelers in open country and we explored on horseback all the timbered nooks and crannies of Squaw Creek. When we passed bunches of cattle on our rounds, James showed me how to look for the most subtle signs of disease or lameness. From the way he studied a drooping ear or listless eye, James revealed how seriously he took the responsibility of keeping them from harm.

  As we worked, we looked for wolves and found their sign with disconcerting regularity. One place, a pasture gate that wasn’t far below the mouth of Bad Luck Canyon, nearly always held tracks and excrement in various stages of decay. Although wolf shit has a heinous stink and can carry a nasty parasite called Echinococcus, I always picked apart the fresher piles with a stick to make sure the hair inside belonged to elk instead of cattle.

  Every day in early July led me on some type of great or little expedition. Each morning I set out with a long list of tasks that were scattered across the ranch:
I might begin by setting out salt for the steers, roll east to check fence at the base of the mountains, swing north to fix a broken gate, then finish up by cleaning leaves and detritus from the spring box on Bad Luck Creek. On the way home, I would always loop back through some little hollow or drainage that I’d never seen before.

  I made huge circles across the ranch, and surprised a great variety of animals with my presence. On the North End, small bunches of antelope broke and ran across the empty expanse of the Flats, trailing wisps of dust until they disappeared into some gentle swale or across the horizon. Deer leaped from grassy hides and took off running with the white flags of their tails held high. On more than a couple of tense occasions, I jumped moose in the willow thickets along the creeks. Their massive heads and dark, hulking shoulders were visible for a moment before receding into the brush. Hawks and eagles overflew my circumambulations. Jackrabbits tore pell-mell through the sage. Blue grouse burst from dark patches of timber, raising a racket loud enough to make my heart skip.

  As I ranged higher and higher, I began to see more elk, both alive and dead. The vast herds of the early season had been scattered by the summer, strewn across the foothills below the Lee Metcalf Wilderness. A day rarely passed without my spooking a dozen or so of them from their day beds. They always headed for the high ground, and I watched group after group disappear into the mountains. I got the feeling that I was clearing the country of elk, displacing the natives to make room for our vast, bawling herds of steers and heifers.