A Year in His Boots

A cowboy doesn’t have a time card to punch, and he is always on call. Holidays are limited and the hours are long. It’s like an old-timer once told me, “A cow don’t own a calendar and don’t know anything about days off!”

Our busy time of year kicks off during what’s called the “spring works,” which, depending on geographical location, can start as early as February or as late as June. It’s a time made up of long days, short nights, and many an hour in the saddle. The purpose of spring works is to gather up the cattle that have been out grazing and brand, vaccinate, and tag them. Grazing pastures can vary greatly in size, and some of the bigger outfits have a single pasture the size of one feller’s entire ranch. The smallest ranch I’ve ever cooked for was 20,000 acres and the largest nearly 300,000. It’s safe to say you don’t see much of this cowboy’s work from the interstate.

The cowboy’s morning starts early. He usually crawls out of his bedroll around 4 or 5 a.m. He has breakfast at the wagon, saddles up, and bounces his backside into the early morning light, helping to spread a line across the pasture to push the cattle toward a set of pens.

The calves are separated from their mamas by cowboys on the ground and on horseback and left in the pen. Then it’s time to build a branding fire and get those irons hot! At least one mounted cowboy begins roping the calves and dragging them near the fire, where the ground crew vaccinates and fly-tags them to prevent disease, notches their ears, and brands them to identify which ranch they belong to. In addition, the male calves are castrated. When the calf is small there is minimal bleeding, and within a matter of minutes, it is up and back to the herd.

After the calves have been worked, all the cattle are released. The cowboys form a circle, called “holding the herd,” to let cattle settle and the mamas to pair back up with their calves. This ritual takes place in each pasture throughout the ranch until the entire herd has been gathered and worked.

Summer brings a somewhat slower pace for the cowboy, but there are still fences to fix, windmills to check, dietary supplements to administer, and the occasional sick or crippled yearling to doctor.

Before you know it, the season is changing again, and it’s time for fall works, which can stretch from August to December. The cowboys gather the herd in again and give fall inoculations, pull fly tags (the fly-repellant tags), and check the cows for pregnancy. The calves are weaned from their mamas and usually trucked or pushed on horseback to another part of the ranch and turned out to graze in fall pastures. The cowboy checks this herd frequently because the stress of being weaned can cause sickness in yearlings. When this herd is ready, they are loaded up on trucks and shipped to a feedlot or auction barn.

Winter is just around the corner, which means the cowboy or rancher begins to feed the cattle more, due to colder conditions and the lack of grass. The feeding schedule is weekly, and chopping ice off of frozen ponds or tanks so the cattle can drink is a daily chore. There are no snow days or calling in sick.

“A cow don’t own a calendar and don’t know anything about days off.”

Next comes calving time, which can begin as early as December or as late as May. First-time mothers, called “springing heifers,” may have to be assisted at birthing time. Just like an on-call doctor at the hospital, the cowboy gets little sleep. By the time all the cows have calved, it’s spring again and time to start the whole process over.