Guest Blog

A few weeks ago my husband spotted a couple of bull elk in our cornfield, and since then, he has been plotting his ambush. Today is the appointed day of attack – they are chopping our corn.

As an older Nevada gentleman thumbed through a dusty stack of faded photographs from yesteryears, he asked me what I noticed about the photos.

“Is it the lack of fences in the backgrounds?”

“Nope.”

Normally I try to keep things on the lighter side, but we’ve got some serious stuff going on in cow country.

Having grown up on a ranch, I never gave much thought about what ranch life looks like to a kid. To me, it was just life – I didn’t go to daycare as a kid, and my parents both worked on the ranch.

My cattle wintered well, and I had a nice calf crop this spring, but the heat and humidity of summer here in south Texas makes me anxious for a nice rain.

Recently I was reading a novel set in Great Britain during the time of the Viking invasions. At one point, a peasant was trying to hoist his pregnant cow out of a mud bog. When the cow emerged, with a broken leg, the devastated peasant went into his hut, retrieved a knife and cut a live calf out of the cow. The loss of the cow – representative of his family’s worldly wealth – was bad enough, and the man would save the calf if at all possible.