The continued procession of subzero nights have us locked in the frigid, hard reality that winter has arrived. I flipped my calendar to December on Tuesday, and the 21st caught my eye. First of day of winter, it said. Really? At least we humans and our four legged charges will be acclimated by then–by enjoying the polar breezes of what the calendar calls autumn.
The cattle, horses, dogs, chickens and even cats show some real interest in groceries with the onset of cold. Our outdoor wood furnace gets hungry too, doubling its consumption when mercury dips into the subzero range. After all, it heats two houses: one, our old home and former bunkhouse, and our larger log home. It even provides us hot water (fairly important in a home full of females). We plumbed it with insulated underground water lines that run to both structures, heating them via in-floor heat and radiators with 180 degree water. It saves a ton on petroleum or electricity, and there is unlimited insect killed timber cloaking our nearby mountains. It tends to burn in summer lightning generated forest wildfire anyway, so we might as well burn it before God does.
I usually stoke it at night before hitting the hay. A few nights ago, in the pre-moon black of wintry night, the stars shone like a glittering canopy of diamonds as I loaded the stove with 4 foot lodgepole pine logs. The air was crisp and thick with cold and the snow brittle as I opened the big furnace door to a roaring fire within. I stood for a minute as I basked in the glow of the radiant fire-heat because my heavily layered body was still a little chilled through buttonhole leaks in my duck-canvas chore coat. As I enjoyed the warmth, I was transported in my mind’s eye to the shores of Lake LeBarge in the arctic north, and half expected to see Sam sitting there in the furnace as Robert Service described in his poem “The Cremation of Sam McGee”:
And there sat Sam, looking cool and calm, in the heart of the furnace roar;
And he wore a smile you could see a mile, and he said: “Please close that door.
It’s fine in here, but I greatly fear you’ll let in the cold and storm—
Since I left Plumtree, down in Tennessee, it’s the first time I’ve been warm.”
Unfortunately, smiling Sam was not in there. No hanging out with him. Just lodgepole pine logs ablaze, popping away on an otherwise silent night. I could hear bubbles of water about to boil in the 300 gallon water jacket around the firebox. I hucked another 5 or 6 logs in there, and latched the door, off to the next chore.
We thin skinned and furless humans are not really set up for the cold. I watch as bulky bovines make their way across frozen Alderspring”¦with nary a care. They drink icy water from our tanks, creeks and springs when I crave a hot cup of cowboy joe. In fact, until it gets 15 degrees, they don’t have to eat any extra to keep their interior furnace going. In other words, their appetite will not increase with the cold until below that temp. Their salt boxy frames are quite thermally efficient.
They almost don’t need us. That lesson was driven home hard when we corralled a heifer (young first time pregnant cow) about to calve last spring. She had some wild about her”¦and was not OK being penned up, even if we did grab one of her buds to hang out with. We have done it this way for years—let the cows calve out in the big open on their own, but heifers were a different story. Because they are a little smaller and inexperienced, they’ll run away after dropping a calf on the ground behind them, thinking something probably along the lines of this: “What the blank was that?!?!? What just happened? Something just fell on the ground right behind me! RUN!”
And off they can go, never to come back and claim Junior. So rancher Glenn is left holding the bag, so to speak, and has to raise Junior. We weren’t going to let Wild Blackie do that. So, we put her in the corral with a buddy so we could keep an eye on her. In a few days she had her calf”¦but got so stressed out in the corral about the whole birth experience that she ended up stepping on her baby. And that was the sad end of that.
I try to learn from each of these experiences. Was it just an anomaly? Was there more to this than her just being a batso cow?
I traced her genetic: Black Angus, Black Galloway cross. Both are bloodlines from the highlands of Scotland. Harsh, and often brutal landscapes, particularly in the winter. Those ancient kilt-clad Scotsman selected for the hardiest, and wildest of cattle that could thrive on their own in the harsh subarctic conditions typical of the Cairngorms—the highest mountains of Scotland. These windswept peaks, plateaus and fells were too extreme for even a tree to survive as they more resembled tundra than the farmed pastures in the southern part of ancient Britannia.
Such was the origin of the body and mind of wild Highland Blackie. She didn’t like people meddling with her and would have nothing to do with confining fences. In fact, I was even tendering the idea that the reason they often cut and run from their new baby was because of us and the stress we induce on them by confining them in this foreign and unfamiliar environment. After all, they spend over 99.9% of their lives in the big open. Why do we get surprised when they lose it?
I spoke to a friend of mine from Oregon at a grazing conference last June. They had already learned the same lesson. They now turn their heifers out on the wild Eastern Oregon desert to calve. On their own. They gather them on horseback in a few months, and find that young Bessie the cow knows best-even if she is a heifer, if she has the ancient and wild genetics intact to pull it off.
Cowboy Josh was out feeding on one of our subzero mornings last week, and noted that Blackie was far away from the herd”¦way out by herself”¦staring back at him over a quarter mile. He worked his way over there, and found that Blackie had done a “do over” on her terms. It had been exactly 9 months since her calving debacle, and here it was, a lovely subzero day, and she had perfectly calved and cared for her measure of redemption: a healthy looking, robust little black Angus/Galloway baby, placed in a tiny depression out of the subzero breeze. I went out and checked her as well. As I cruised by many yards distant, Blackie gave me the stare, seeming to say “If you touch him”¦I’ll have to kill you.”
Many other bovine moms with ancient instincts bred out of them would have had a frozen baby by now. But centuries of instinct brought on by living, breeding and dying on a brutal Scots landscape left their mark on this girl. And she knew better than I. Now I know that Blackie knows best.
It’s a long story to tell. And I wish there was a pat answer I could give to those many well-meaning folks who ask us where the barn is to put all our beeves in for the winter. They believe that cruelty is having them outside, when it’s the converse that’s the truth. Confining, emotionally trying, psychologically confounding, disease abounding, close quarters is cruel in my book. Our beeves wouldn’t have it any other way. I just smile and tell them they wouldn’t go in a barn if I had one. Wild protein means more than nutrition for us, the eaters. Wild is a way of life. Thanks for being part of it.
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