Baby On Board!!!

Daisy is pregnant!

The vet came by yesterday morning to preg test her for the third time ~ attempts one and two via artificial insemination didn’t take and when the second try came up empty, I brought Sir Baby home and let nature handle it. It was getting too expensive and too late in the year to risk another unsuccessful go. (Daisy and Sir Baby are NOT related. She is his adopted mom. Just don’t think about it in human terms.)

After Daisy’s first round with AI, I called the vet and asked, quite seriously, “can I just buy a pregnancy test and hold it under her pee?” It’s a method that would make no sense for ranchers who run hundreds of cows that aren’t pets like Daisy, but it would be ideal for me. Oh, the laughter that came through the phone. No, a pregnancy stick just won’t work on a cow.

Instead, to determine if a cow is pregnant, the vet pays a visit at least 40 days after conception (or hope of conception). He puts on a long long long plastic glove that reaches all the way up to his shoulder. Then he sticks his hand…. oh, there’s no dainty way to describe this. He sticks his hand into her butt, scoops out any poop that might be in the way, and then reaches his whole arm in. From there, he can feel the uterus and can determine if the cow is pregnant and how far along she is. We’re going to have a May baby!

The last time the vet was here to preg test Daisy, he whipped out plastic gloves in a bright flourish ~ they were hot pink and he handed one to me. I immediately put it on. Neon pink plastic slid all the way up my arm, with the excess length forming a ruffle around my shoulder. Mike was with us at the corrals and he looked at me incredulously and said, “Are you gonna try it??”
“No,” I said, “it’s an accessory.”
“Ah,” Mike said, “like Lady Gaga.”

Summer 2010

Yesterday, I went to court. I was there for the sentencing of the man who spent this summer stalking me.

It began in June, became very intense throughout July, and, the first weekend of August, he was arrested at the motel in my town. He had a loaded .44 Magnum with him. For those who don’t know guns, a .44 Magnum is a handgun that will stop a 1,000 pound grizzly bear.

He’s been in the county jail since then, held on a bond that was too high for him to post. Today, he is being released. He was found guilty of stalking, given the maximum sentence of six months in jail, but with “time served” deducted from the sentence and the rest waived on terms of probation, he is being released today.

When I woke up this morning, I felt sad, depressed, and disillusioned by the court’s decision. Those feelings quickly morphed into anger. I am not scared. I am ANGRY.

The sentencing drove home a point with which I have become more and more intimate over the summer: when it comes right down to it, there is only one person who can keep you safe. And that is you. The only person who can keep me safe is me.

This is why I found such a profound connection in Lisbeth Salander – she is an example of what I have been learning and living and becoming. I’m not necessarily promoting her methods, but I am promoting her underlying truth: The System failed her and she learned to be self reliant. And she excelled at it.

This is also why I will be writing more about this in the coming weeks – though this man found me and became obsessed with me through my websites, attacks on women happen every day, and the vast majority are women who have “normal” lives and no “public” persona.

Also, I’m not pregnant. If I had a penny for every person who emailed me this summer asking if I was pregnant, I’d probably be able to afford a ranch. New policy: All personal questions must be accompanyed by a penny! {just kidding} But, to those of you who sensed something major was happening and assumed I was pregnant, let it be known that I am not pregnant, nor was I at any point this summer (praise the IUD!). This is what was going on.

Next post in this series is HERE

My Baby

Sir Baby.

I love this bull.

He has remained gentle and sweet and so very dear, even when he was in with the heifers and everyone said he would turn mean for a spell. He always came to me when I would visit him, and lean against me ever so gently as I leaned against him.

He’s huge. He’s huge for a yearling and he still has a year or two of growing yet to do. His hooves are heavy and jet black, his shoulders are massive, his hair is thick and curly…. he belongs on the cover of a romance novel.

I get so filled with pride when I look at him, at how he’s grown into such a perfect expression of what he’s meant to be.

I’m so glad he’s home again.

feathers, found & photographed

eagle, turkey, owl
postcard sets available in the shop!

The Cattle In My Yard

I took this photo in early July and began writing this post back then, but then This Summer happened and I never finished! So now I shall. These are the cattle that spent the summer with me here at home. Sir Baby has since joined them, as of about a month ago. More on him, soon!

Here we have Daisy, of course, the matriarch, ring leader, cow princess. Frisco, her calf, is beside her; he melts me. And Ricardo the goose still thinks he’s a cow.

TR, the steer on the left, is a Farmily member I’ve not yet mentioned. He was born last summer to one of Mike’s very old cows that has since gone off to cow heaven after a very long and lovely life. Since he was born midsummer, much later than the rest of the calves who were born in March, he was not branded nor banded (castrated).

When all the cows and calves came home for the winter, this male calf had to be separated from the bunch as he would have bred all the heifer calves by spring, which would have been a disaster. We did castrate TR eventually, but in the meantime, he and Sir Baby hung out together with Houdini and Sunshine away from the girls.

He was Sir Baby’s first bovine friend (Baby was an only child with Daisy, his adopted mom, for the first summer and fall of his life), and I was so happy to have TR help socialize Baby in the ways of cattle. Playing, headbutting, all that normal stuff that Baby had never had opportunity to do. TR was much bolder yet much smaller than Sir Baby so I felt they were evenly matched. TR, I suppose I should mention, stands for The Runt.

After Sir Baby left to go spend the summer impregnating heifers, TR bonded with Frisco, who, at 5 months, had grown to about the same size as TR. And TR, after befriending Frisco and spending all his time with him and Daisy, BEGAN SUCKING DAISY!!! Even now, she is content to nurse two very large steers. It’s a truly ridiculous sight – Frisco and TR are nearly as tall as she but she stands patiently as they flank her, one on each side, suckling every drop of milk she has to offer. (I separate her from the boys at night so that I may get milk each morning; then they drink from her throughout the day.)

TR was meant to be sold to a neighbor for them to fatten and dine on but since my emotions govern my checkbook I bought TR from Mike instead and told the neighbors they had to find another steer to eat, this one was family. He can be a pain sometimes, he manages to get his head stuck everywhere and he’s still so runty and quite pathetic looking, but he’s a good little steer. He’s smart, he’s sweet, he is a friend to Sir Baby and Frisco, and he showed me when Daisy was cycling this summer – though he can no longer get the job done, he still has The Urge when a cow comes into heat. He’s important around here.

The other adult cow in this picture is 16. She was with the herd on the day we trailed to the mountain. There’s a short stretch of BLM from Mike’s back gate to the dirt road that goes up the mountain which should have taken us about 20 minutes to cross with the cows. They’d been that way before, and there’s a trail through the sagebrush and the yucca.

The blasted YUCCA.

Cows LOVE yucca flowers. It’s like dessert to them. And so, instead of trickling towards the mountain in a smooth, easy line, the cows scattered across the BLM, hiding in draws, running every which way to munch on yucca.

This is not what trailin’ cows are supposed to look like. They are supposed to look like THIS. But thanks to the yucca buffet, they were milling around, headed every direction, and were nearly impossible to move once they had latched onto stalk bursting with delicious blossoms.

Mike and I – it was just the two of us, which would have been fine if not for the yucca being in bloom – were going insane. We’d circle the scattered cattle from the back and, by the time we got them herded into the bunch, the cows in front had scattered. We raced around trying to gather the cows and get them moving forward, screaming at eachother, sweating, frustrated… it was not pretty. That 20-minute stretch took us three hours. Once we hit the dirt road and the yucca plants were behind us, the cows strung out in a perfect line and ambled straight up the mountain like angels.

The next day was 100 degrees by 10am. And there was a lone black cow standing at the back fence. I jogged up to her and opened the gate, knowing she’d be wanting water and hoping to get her locked in the corrals. She belonged on the mountain. I opened the gate and then circled around her on foot to run her in but she went crazy and ran back out into the BLM. Very odd behaviour. I chased her a bit, to no avail; it was too hot to try to herd a crazy cow on foot by myself, so I left the gate open for her and went home. I knew she’d come in eventually to get water. When Mike got home I had her held in the corral.

Her bag was very tight (ie, her udder was very, very full), which meant her calf was up on the mountain without her. We figured she was hiding in a draw eating yucca during the morning madness of the day before and we missed her, and meanwhile, her calf had traveled up the mountain with the herd. So we loaded her in the horse trailer and drove her up the mountain and dropped her off at the very top. That way, she’d have to walk through all the other cows and calves to get to the mountain spring for water, our hopes being that in doing so, she’d find her calf and all would be well.

The next morning, she was standing at the back gate again.

I couldn’t believe it. She’d walked all the way down the mountain, by herself, in the dark, and come back home. I went out to try to herd her in and again, she ran off like a crazed beast whenever I circled around her. So again, I left the gate open and left her. When Mike got back, she was still standing out beyond the fence so he went out on his 4-wheeler to bring her in, and we planned to load her in the trailer again and drive her up the mountain again to try to unite her with her missing calf again.

As Mike circled through the sagebrush just beyond the fenceline, he saw a tiny black baby calf nestled beneath a bush! The mystery explained! This cow had not lost her calf; she had HAD her calf the morning we trailed to the mountain. She had left the group when all the cows scattered for yucca, had gone off by herself to have her baby, and had stayed behind. Her udder was so full because her baby was a newborn and not drinking as much as she was producing.

When we drove her up the mountain, we were unknowingly taking her away from her baby. And this is one of the reasons I love cows so much. Generally speaking, they are incredible mothers. A cow will do anything for her baby. This cow hoofed it, quite literally, down a mountainside in the dark to get back to her hidden calf.

Ever since then, she and her calf have been here at the homestead with Daisy and Frisco and TR. And from that first day when we brought the new little calf in, Frisco has been IN LOVE with her. He dotes on her and sleeps next to her and she’s now a feisty little tomboy, with both Frisco and TR wrapped around her tiny hoof.