Guest Blog

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.

Spelling was not my strongest subject in elementary school (to be honest, it still isn’t), but thankfully spell check is as common as the cold nowadays. Whether it was your forte or not, some schools had an annual spelling bee to determine who the queen (or king) bee was.