Weaning and Fishing

Crossing back to the home place

 It's been a bit of a challenge keeping the cattle where they are supposed to be. About once a week they cross the river below Packsaddle where the fences have been cut to provide easy access to fishing on the neighbor's property upriver. I've heard the neighbor eventually wants to build a pole fence, but for now it seems having cattle wander over is less of a concern than needing to open a gate to get to the fishing hole. So when the cattle wander, we gather them up and head them down river and back across to the east side.

It would definitely be easier for us if the fence were up, but we try to be flexible. Last week when Mike crossed the herd he saw fresh beaver sign. I wonder where the beavers are building. I'm going to keep an eye out for the new lodge. I'd love to be able to watch them doing their handy work.

Beaver sign

Beaver balancing act

Gabe lands a steelhead

While climbing around a rim on his trek back home, Mike caught sight of Gabe and Luke, with Dawson and James in tow, fishing at one of the holes above the house. Gabe was just landing a steelhead.

A few days later when the weather warmed up again, Mike and Gabe gathered the herd and sorted off the 2010 calves. It's weaning time and Mike will be staying on the river feeding the calves for the next month. While the herd was in the corral, he put small bunches into the alley and "groomed" them by pulling burrs and cutting off wads of cockle burr with his pocket knife. Not only does this remove the irritating seeds, it helps prevent the spread of weeds.

Weaning day  - a nice afternoon in January 

Steers ready for grooming

A few of the 2010 calves at weaning

Mike's not big on fishing, but while he's down there feeding the calves, I hope Gabe gets him out for a few lessons. Those fresh steelhead are pretty darn tasty. 

From Sara at Magpie Ranch, home of Bunchgrass Beef

Evidence

Dropping salt on the way to Magpie

It’s definitely a good feeling, knowing the cows are on the home place. Yes we still have to herd and fix fence, but everything is within a day’s reach and the days are getting longer.

Down fence above Magpie

Balancing act

The herd is scattered along the bench and grading up towards the rims above the river. When we first brought them down from Pumpkin Creek, a few head trailed to the south end of the range and found a hole in the fence. Mike and Gabe packed material and spent a day repairing one of the steepest fences on the ranch, a place where it’s hard to stand up, let alone build a rock jack.

I had the cushy job of babysitting and spent the first warm day of 2011 along the river with Dawson, digging in the sand bars, collecting muck and rocks and bones, and riding the “horse tree” in the big Box Elder grove.

Over a decade since the flood, it all comes back when I see places where the river changed course, islands of alders, abandoned meanders, rafts of debris, and the enormous piles of rock and gravel sorted and left behind on the wide bar.  Recently I saw images from the terrible floods in Australia, fierce soil-thick water clawing and sucking a path across the land. I knew what that would be like, the sound alone pushing against you in a deafening roar that threatened to pull you away to your death.

Four foot deep debris raft

Infill in the old eddy, a "20 ton" bridge beam 

New Year’s Eve storm, New Year’s day flood. The only one in my lifetime, I hope. Being at the mercy of the elements gives our lives immediacy, forces us to be resourceful, a part of the place where we live and work.

At the "beach"

The rewards are great, a lazy day in January, water riffling over the shallows and smoothing out across the summer swimming hole, a green shimmer of chervil germinating under the locust trees, sap rising in the willows. 

From Sara at Magpie Ranch, home of Bunchgrass Beef

Home Economy

Roasted prime rib and steak

A couple days ago, I took the leftover prime rib and steak bones out of the fridge and put them in a kettle of water  to make stock. The bones had the rich smell of the dry rub from the roasted meat. As the stock simmered on the wood cookstove, that rich smell pervaded the kitchen along with the radiant heat of the stove. 

Ready to freeze

After the stock cooled, I poured it into jars and put them on the back porch to "prefreeze" overnight before wedging it into the freezer. Beautiful stock. It will make a delectable meal some night, probably when I need a quick nourishing soup after a long cold day. 


Before Christmas, I went through the pumpkins, looking for one to bake for pie, and I was amazed that not a single pumpkin had started to rot. They were all pristine. Perfect rinds, perfect stems. It consistently amazes me that a vegetable harvested months ago, can sit around in a cardboard box all those months and still be edible. 

Perfect flesh

I know the apples in the cellar are getting softer. By the end of February, they'll be more fit for cooking than eating. But they will still be edible. 


Making stock, sorting the winter squash, eating tons of beets and carrots as they get rubberier each week,  I never thought of this as home economics.  Sometime before I started public school, home economics had morphed from the science of food preservation - like how to can venison, to the consumption of preserved food - how to make desserts out of Jell-O and Cool Whip.  I avoided home-ec.

Trio

Kentucky farmer and author, Wendell Berry got me thinking differently about the economics of maintaining a household. He writes about what it feels like to be responsible from start to finish, for something made, something important and satisfying, like food. He says that when I grow pumpkins for pies, I am practicing a science and an art. He says that a home economy has spiritual value, that it provides the means of life and the longevity of nature and culture.  Count me in.


From Sara at Magpie Ranch, home of Bunchgrass Beef

Ending the Year at Pumpkin Creek

Above the Rye Bench, looking north

The three of us, Mike, Zeke and I, gathered the last of the herd out of Pumpkin Creek this week and trailed them to the river.

Old rock flume at Pumpkin Creek

We gathered on foot, crossing Horse Creek on a slippery downed alder tree just below the cabin, and climbing high into Pile-Up where I’d spotted about nine head on a narrow strip of grass between the north rims.

The norths were thawed in places, with steep patches of greasy mud that stuck to my boots. I was glad for my staff. We threaded a little bunch of cattle off the narrow end of the ridge between rock outcrops and switchbacked down to the drift fence. They wanted to grade out but we managed to hold them. 

Once through the gate, they took off in a wild run crossing back into the draw and through the brush before galloping downslope all the way to the creek.

Down the Pumpkin Creek road

The next day Mike and I rode and Zeke shuttled the truck over to pick us up at the river place. Our neighbor had driven up the creek that morning to tell us where he’d spotted some cattle, and to let us know he’d already cut a few of our stragglers out of his cows and put them through the gate. Nice.

We picked up another fifteen head trailing to the river. The weather held off for the five-mile ride and the cattle trailed willingly across the bench. Almost to gate on the Rye Bench, we reached the funky drift fence at Walking Cane, with its long weak stretches, rotted material and awkward corner gates.

Trailing north

A bunch of the neighbor’s cows were scattered below on a finger of bench ground. Mike suspected our cows would go running over there as soon as they could get through the fence, so he rode ahead, off the slick side hill and onto the flat. Sure enough as soon as a big red steer found a hole, he high tailed it toward the flat with a string of cows behind him. Mike’s determination and some fancy footwork by Zip finally got the best of the steer and turned him back. When an old cow took the lead towards home, the rest of the bunch soon followed. 

Mike brings west-side stragglers across the river

Past the home place

We reached the river, met up with Zeke, unloaded supplies and turned the horses out. Mike and Zeke drove up the road to Crazy Man to gather a few steers and heifers who climbed out of the river pasture earlier in the week. They trailed the tail end of the stragglers through the driveway gate just as the snow started to fall. The temperature was dropping fast and the wind was picking up. We ate the last of the pies, swallowed some hot coffee and headed for the valley.  

Zeke drove us out to town, over the ice and snow and into a blizzard squall.  We were wedged into the front seat with the heater cranked and the familiar smell of wet dogs wafting up behind us. Mike took a swig of water and summed it up, “Well, we accomplished everything.”  It was a good way to end the year.

From Sara at Magpie Ranch, home of Bunchgrass Beef

Cow Camp at Pumpkin Creek

Pumpkin Creek cow camp

We've lived in cow camps ranging from a place to pitch a tent to a two-story house. At the Steen Place on the edge of the Zumwalt Prairie we summered in a 100 year old log house with walls that bore testament to some of the previous residents via initials carved into  the front porch. There was also a barn, extensive corrals, and out behind the kitchen, an enormous multi-chambered root cellar in a state of collapse. The cellar had a log front and thick stone walls that birthed boulder-sized rocks, pushed out by the settling hillside. Even though it was our summer place, we stayed there into December while the cows were in the breaks of the canyon, and we were thankful for the enormous barrel stove and the thick logs insulating us from the cold. 

At Pumpkin Creek, the accommodations are simple. A roof overhead and all the basics you appreciate at the end of a long day and a steep trail. 

"Fully equipped" kitchen

A "real" bed

Last weekend, Mike installed an old cast-iron dry sink for the kitchen, an improvement I'm looking forward to using. While he built the sink stand, I hiked the steep norths above the narrow bench to gather cattle and move them up Pumpkin Creek. I had to work two good dogs while keeping a pup and a big slobbering Labrador out of the way, which proved interesting at times. 

Mike builds stand for the dry sink

Narrow trail on a steep north

Frozen spring shedding ice in the sun

The sun was brilliant and the ground still frozen as I side-hilled along, gathering up little bunches of cows and heading them south. At one point, I came upon a spring flowing out of the ground above a rock outcrop. The rock face dripped with moss and a few stalwart icicles clung to the basalt, while the ground below was strewn with chunks of ice fall, collapsed in the sun after the night's frozen temperatures. 

Looking north toward the Imnaha

It was nice to have most of the snow melted off after the last storm, to have open ground for the cattle to travel in. Looking  back toward the Imnaha River, I saw the high snowy rims of Haas Ridge, and was reminded that winter has a long way to go yet. 

From Sara at Magpie Ranch, home of Bunchgrass Beef 

Poets and Storytellers

Last night was poetry and story-telling at the neighbors. "Come back any time," the old-timers called as we left, and I felt like I could.

Somebody read a family story of the hired gun "range detective" who simply shot people when they went out to chop a load of wood or saddle a horse, because their neighbors asked them to quit the country and they didn't.

And we heard the brand-new story of two sheepherders at Christmas on Pony Bar and I laughed so hard my belly hurt at the part where the sheepherder's hat flew off and stuck on her face when she was getting bucked off her mule in the middle of a race. And funniest of all, the old timer reciting the one about the girl who found herself dating a cowboy and his dog and ended up liking the hairy kisses of both.

We did talk a little politics, a little craziness we see going on right here, with people not wanting to share, with people not having to work a place to own it, not needing their neighbors. And we pulled ourselves in with a soft-feel, like horse-whisperers, as one cowboy reminded us, "What would Tom Dorrance do?"

Ice along the Imnaha

I didn't share the poem I wrote, but I like it better since I heard the poetry and stories last night. The questions  and emotions about where we live and how we can talk to others when we hear them out in the world saying, this is what the local folks think and do, and it's not.

There is so much that we learn from the places we live in. And often not with words. And we have to learn to tell it, to look at the other animals in the room and ask ourselves: Where is the life energy? Where is the fear? How much pressure should we give? When to release?

Here is the poem.

December, Dug Bar

What matters

is not the time or date, but the light and wind and chill,

the snow clouds blotting out the trail.

After dark, I hear your packstring

clump in on the frozen ground,

and I go to the barn so I can see you alive, unsaddling the beasts, their breath fogging the air.

It feels like we are in the bible,

flood and famine, whatever God writes.

I’m saying I think I understand this grass

this water, these gates and trails.

I’m saying I can see the locust grove

swinging in the basin high above us,

the place we rest sometimes, as if our graves lay there.

SI Miller 12 10 2010

Mike headed home ahead of the storm

From Sara at Mapgie Ranch, home of Bunchgrass Beef

Christmas Missive

Winter finds us here on Prairie Creek, east of the stubble field, beside the ancient row of lilacs hugging the ditch-bank. The farmhouse has enriched our lives not only with shelter, work and gaiety, but kinship.

The farm is a life shared with us. It holds not our mothers’ childhood. Nor did our grandparents, uncles, aunts, make these fields or carve these waterings, raise these barns and sheds, corrals and bunkhouses. This is another family, now interwoven with ours, far flung, and rich in their own lives.

I see their summer photographs, the stubbly lawn bathed in full sun, the meager slips of lilac either side of the footbridge, new and ornamented white with gated archways. And in the yard, beside a tall slim woman, a toddler in bloomerish attire, toddling as my own have done in this very place.

Only now, the elms are tall and the lilacs overgrown. The buildings, once stark and construct, are settled and aged among a scattering of fattened cottonwoods and tall windbreak conifers. I am thankful for this sharing.

This winter morning, the fields and pastures, still farmed, are licked with fog. I wait for the sun to break through, to light the ice and set the fields with crops of tiny rainbow prisms.

There are other houses that have grown out of these farms, and left aside the farmers. There are houses whose people have lives elsewhere, with other professions and means. I would like to know them, I tell myself, and feel the urge to knock on their door, bearing jam and potatoes. I think I want to hear their stories, to tell my own, but then I remember times when the story is unanswered, and I doubt.

Sometimes it takes getting past, like wading through hawthorn thickets in the bottom of a draw. Last week moving cattle, I drug my horse into the middle of a thicket, thinking I’d find a hole and ended up clawed from every side. My horse’s head against my back, I wrestled spiny branches, wishing for a machete, until I found the fire-killed sumac that I could break, and we pushed through.

Mike said he cut the trail out once. But it will take cutting out again, for as long as someone is bringing cattle up that creek on foot or horseback. And I think of all the trails that have felt the arc of his machete. And I think of the hands before us who knew and wanted to keep open the way to that range and to the cabin at the forks.

Sometimes our stories can be told, even miles apart, to people we rarely see, and they might remember this same trail, even if they have never set foot there. I will knock on the neighbor’s door again this Christmas.

From Sara at Magpie Ranch, home of Bunchgrass Beef