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The summer before my first semester of college, I took a job as a cashier at a mountain resort convenience store. Nestled in the Utah mountains, the winding roads and mountain air attracted cyclists like mosquitoes to a stagnant water trough.

It is fall and most of us are getting pretty excited for a paycheck. Come November, we'll be selling calves and putting money in the bank for the rest of the year. We budget, like most ranchers do, but then the skid steer broke, our main truck died and one of the kids needed her wisdom teeth out.

One of the most underappreciated tools of the cattle business is a pair of gloves. Even a worn-out pair of gloves will help keep your fingers from being cut, burned, sliced, shredded (hoof rasp anyone?) and stepped on.

It’s fall on the cow outfit.

Time to get out the WD-40 and grease up the handles on the squeeze chute. Maybe find the three or four syringes that work, buy some new gaskets and barrels along with a box of needles.

As if from the staccato blast of a Gatling gun, I felt three sharp, painful smacks to my head just under my hat and directly behind my right ear. Except for the occasional Red Ryder BB gunfight with my cousins when I was a kid and the time my back was peppered by some shotgun pellets from an idiot pheasant hunter as I was fixing a fence, I’ve never really been shot.

If all the cars in the world were placed end to end ... they’d probably be behind a slow-moving cattle truck.