Visiting Baby

I went to visit Sir Baby. He’s with the cows and the other bulls on their spring pasture. It’s gorgeous.

This is the road going in. Mike calls this a road. I call it a truck trail.
It only goes so far, then it’s time to travel a’foot.

This pasture is a couple thousand acres, which we lease from another rancher.
It’s all natural rangeland, untouched by human cultivation methods, no chemical fertilizers, no genetically modified seeds. Just wild Wyoming grass.

Hidden Edens, each more beautiful than the last, lay thick with grass, trees sheltering the creek.

The creek meanders through the land, roiled brown from mountain snowmelt.
This is where they drink!

Another of those ‘I’m-not-from-Wyoming’ bits: I say “creek” and everyone else says “crik.” I once asked Mike how to spell “crik” and he looked at me like you’re not that dumb and said “C-R-E-E-K.” Okaaaay, then.

The cows roam free. Here, there’s no sign of human interference ~ no road noise, no telephone poles, no buildings for as far as the eye can see, in all directions.

I wasn’t sure if I would even see Baby ~ 2000 acres is a lot of land to canvass. But I spotted him easily from afar; it’s not hard to distinguish a bull from a cow even at a distance thanks to the way they posture this time of year, sniffing the air for love.

I saw a hint of pink in his ear and knew it was Baby. He was with a group of cows across the creek, obviously courting one of them. He’s the one on the left.

She likes him!

Comic Relief : Frisco Finds A Hose

Final Ride

Houdini died yesterday.

He was Mike’s horse. These men and their horses…. it’s something to behold.
The relationship is so intimate.

Mike raised Houdini from birth; I can only imagine how many thousands of miles those two traveled together over the course of three decades, breaking trails through true wilderness, through youth and love and birth and death and new wildernesses, new challenges, new loves, more death.

Words don’t solve the pain of loss, but the words I heard myself saying to Mike – words I didn’t know until I heard myself speaking them – were words I knew I would need to remember:

It would be worse if they lived longer than we did. If they did, we would never know – and never be able to control – how they were treated when we were gone. That would be harder to bear.