MAY 10 – Last week we put out more straw in and around the
calf houses, to give the calves clean bedding.
The cows are also eating some of it.
This is probably the last straw we’ll have to put out for them this
spring, we hope.
Dani was
sick for several days with a high fever and cough. She missed school but is doing better
now. Andrea took her to the doctor, who
prescribed an antibiotic.
Some
friends from Oregon, Jerry and Silvia Wilcox, who run a carriage business
(doing weddings and funerals with their horses and carriages/wagons, and using
their draft teams on wagon train adventures) brought a horse to our Amish
neighbors to be trained, and stopped to visit.
They’ll pick up the horse this fall after a summer’s work as part of a
team, and it will be ready to join their other driving horses.
Granddaughter
Heather has been working with the 2-year-old filly (Willow), doing more ground
work, and is starting to ride her. She’s
been taking her around to the back corral and riding her around in it.
Young Heather also rode Dottie a
few times for me, to get that young mare going again after a winter
vacation. She’s doing well, picking up
where we left off in December. Only one
negative episode: Heather was cantering
Dottie in circles and figure eights up on heifer hill on their 4th
ride, and Dottie slipped on a slick spot and fell flat. Young Heather rolled clear and the mare
didn’t fall on her, but when she got up she took off and ran home. Heather hiked down from the field and got on
her again and rode back up and finished the session with a good ride.
That
afternoon we had another calf, leaving only 3 (one cow and two heifers) left to
calve. The next day Andrea and I rode
Breezy and Ed, and Andrea gently washed the dust and dirt out of Breezy’s eye
socket. It has healed very well after
the eye removal in late December.
Andrea helped Lynn clean some debris out of
the ditch above the house, then took Emily to the doctor for a check-up and
x-rays to see if her leg has healed enough for her to start putting weight on
it.
Last Friday
Andrea and I made a long but fast ride on Ed and Sprout, for Sprout’s first
ride this year. She only tried a couple
of times to buck a little, but not nearly as hard and nasty as she did last
spring. Andrea rode her several more
days in a row, and the mare settled back into work quite nicely. All the riding and cow-chasing they did last
year paid off; Sprout is a bit more dependable now.
Andrea
harrowed the field above the house, where the cows and calves are, and harrowed
the horse pasture and orchard. That
finishes it up until we take the cows out of that little field to go to
pasture—and then we’ll probably harrow that field again.
On Saturday
Carolyn and Heather took their truck and trailer up to Mulkey’s place to help
haul cattle to the range—an all-day project.
Andrea and Lynn brought their flatbed feed truck down here to load a
couple more big bales of alfalfa for them.
Sammy helped me trim Veggie’s feet, holding him for me and letting him
eat a little grass while I trimmed them.
The 28-year-old gelding hadn’t been trimmed since last fall, so his feet
were getting pretty long. Charlie went
with Lynn on the 4-wheeler to irrigate.
Nick drove
home from college in Iowa (a 2-day drive) and made it home day before yesterday
evening. His little pickup was having
problems toward the end of his trip, as he came up the creek road. Yesterday morning when he started to move the
pickup to a flat spot by their house so he could jack it up and look underneath
it, the tie rod fell off! He was very
lucky that it didn’t happen on the trip home; his guardian angel must have been
looking after him!
Yesterday
it rained off and on all day and last night it changed to snow. We had 5 inches of new snow this
morning. Carolyn, Nick and Heather left
at 4 a.m. this morning, in the dark, just before the rain changed to snow, to
drive to Pocatello to go to Carolyn’s brother’s graduation (receiving his
Master’s degree). About 40 miles up the
Lemhi River a bunch of deer ran across the road right in front of them and they
hit one, breaking out a headlight and damaging the front of the car. It was still drivable, so they just turned
around and came home. We were scheduled
to do their chores for a couple of days, and feed their cows, but Carolyn
called me at 6 a.m. when they got home, to let us know they weren’t going to be
gone, after all.
In this
crazy weather we are still getting up at nights to check the last 3 pregnant
cows. The older cow has had a big udder
for more than a month and will hopefully calve soon. The two heifers look like they’ll be a bit
later.
MAY 20 – Last Sunday Andrea took the kids fishing. That evening our last cow finally started
calving. By midnight there was a nasty
wind blowing, and a bit of rain, so we put her in the barn right after she
calved, pulling the calf to the barn in the calf sled. Nice to have a calving barn even for bad
weather in mid-May! The next day we
were able to put them back outside.
We decided
we didn’t want to keep getting up at nights to check on the two heifers (one of
them will calve fairly soon but the other one probably won’t calve for another
couple weeks), so we sent them to the sale at Butte, Montana, along with a
young bull we don’t need this year. We had
kept an extra bull in case Michael and Carolyn needed one, but they don’t need
him so we sent him to the sale. Prices
are fairly good right now. Carolyn and
Nick brought their trailer down on Monday and we loaded the 2 heifers and the
bull and hauled them to the community corral and scales at Carmen (the other
side of town) to load on the semi. Rusty
Hamilton put a load together from ranchers around the valley, to go to the
sale. They sold fairly well. Our bull weighed 1500 pounds and brought $1
per pound. The two pregnant heifers
brought $1775 apiece. Now we can sleep
again at night and not have to get up to check those heifers!
On Tuesday Andrea and I made a fast
ride to check range gates and shut a couple that had been left open all
winter. The next day young Heather
brought one of her horses down here and used him to give Willow her first
ponying lesson, leading her around in the orchard
Then Andrea and I rode with Heather
back up the creek as she headed home, then made a loop over the range again—on
Dottie and Breezy. Our range neighbor Alfonzo
hasn’t fixed the broken gate post yet on the jeep road into the middle
range. He had a lot people help him
brand, and turned his cows out on the range, but didn’t fix the gate—so Andrea
and I tied it up with baling twines. We
don’t want his cows going into the middle range 3 weeks early, before the grass
up there has a chance to grow.
On Saturday I trimmed Rubbie’s long
feet, then Andrea, Dani and I rode (Dani’s first ride this year, on Ed) with
Heather on a ponying/training ride for willow.
Heather has ponied Willow a few times around home, and this was a longer
ride—leading her on a 2 mile loop around the low range. We went along to open and shut the gates for
her, and Dani enjoyed seeing how young Willow is coming along in her training. We’ll keep ponying her a few times so she
learns how to lead nicely from another horse, and learn how to navigate through
the gullies and around the sagebrush and hillsides before she has to do it carrying
a rider.
Yesterday morning when Andrea and I
fed the cows we noticed a calf lying off by herself. She didn’t get up and come with the
others. It was Rocket, named by Dani
after she and I watched her birth, a month ago (she was born quickly and Dani
said she “came out like a rocket”).
When Andrea walked over to check on
her, we saw that she had diarrhea and didn’t want to get up. She needed treatment immediately. We went back to the barnyard and moved all
the stored objects out of the “sick barn” including Andrea’s jeep—and had to
use her car and jumper cables to get it started.
Then Lynn helped us bring the cow
and calf in from the field. The calf was
so weak and wobbly that it took two of us to get her up, and she could barely
stand, let alone walk. Lynn went to get
the calf sled while Andrea and I fended off the other cows (who all came
running, thinking it might be their calf) and helped get the staggering calf to
the gate. Then we put the calf in the
sled and pulled her to the barn, with mama following.
It is very unusual to have a
month-old calf this weak, so suddenly.
She wasn’t dehydrated, even though she was scouring. She was slipping into toxic shock, probably
due to toxins released by a bacterial gut infection. Her gums were purple instead of healthy pink
color. We realized she needed IV fluids;
the metabolic changes in her body from shock were shutting down her organs,
including gut function, and she wouldn’t be able to absorb oral fluids very
well. We called Michael, who had just
gotten home from North Dakota the night before, to come help give Rocket IV
fluids. While we waited for him, we gave
Rocket an injection of Banamine (to help ease the gut pain and reduce any inflammation)
and tubed her with fluids, electrolytes, and castor oil (to help stimulate the
gut if it was shutting down, and to absorb the toxins).
Michael, Carolyn and Nick arrived
soon after, and Michael was able to stick a needle into the jugular vein first
try, without having to shave the calf’s neck.
We put 3 liters of IV fluids into her, and added some baking soda
(bicarbonate—to reverse the acidosis) and dexamethasone (to help reverse the
shock and keep her from leaking fluid out through the capillaries and losing
blood pressure). As we were finishing
the 3rd liter, she finally urinated, which was what we were hoping
to see. This meant we had restored her
fluid levels enough to prevent kidney damage, and her kidneys were still
working—she could flush some of the toxins from her system that way.
We continued treatment through the
day, giving her more fluids and electrolytes, and a kaolin-pectin mixture via
stomach tube every 3 to 5 hours. She was
still too weak to stand, but by late evening she was stronger and gave more
protest when we tubed her. When we got
up at 1 a.m. to tube her again, she was a lot stronger. This morning when I went out at 5:30 a.m. to
check on her, she had actually nursed her mother on one side, so we didn’t give
her fluids at that time—just more kaolin-pectin via dose syringe.
She continues to improve and we
didn’t need to tube her at all today.
Andrea and I simply treated her a few times with the kaolin-pectin by
dose syringe—into the corner of her mouth to the back of her throat, a little
at a time so she can swallow it without choking. Her bowel movements are starting to firm up,
so we may not need to continue treatment much longer.
This week I started working on my
next book—a collection of stories about some of our favorite horses over the
years. It will be called Horse Tales:
True Stories from an Idaho Ranch. My
publisher, A.J. Mangum (The Frontier Project) hopes to have it published by mid-October. At that point it can be ordered through any
book seller, or autographed copies can be purchased directly from me.
Meanwhile, a young doe has been
coming into our yard every day to nibble the grass and I took photos of her
through the window.
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