Flying Time



Clayton, his wife Kristine, and Kyle, heading out on a miserable, slippery
November day to search for missing cattle.



You'll find a lot of ranchers up-in-the-air about this time of year. Sometimes finding all your cattle for fall round-up can be a bit of a challenge. One of our old neighbors came up short 30 calves this fall. Most of those though, spend summer in an area that's become infested with wolves, and since most of the mother cows are accounted for, it's a pretty good chance that their babies fell victim to the local wolf packs. Pretty pricey dogfood considering the price of calves this fall.

Sometimes, especially with yearlings, there will be little bunches that have found themselves a nice pocket of trees somewhere, or are up on a higher, steeper place than the mountain goats. Those can be a bugger to get even if you find them by flying. Footing can be scary in the summer, but downright treacherous this time of year. Usually it's best to ride to the top of the ridge above them, then bother them until they start moving. (i.e: scream and holler until you're hoarse, and roll and throw rocks down the side of the mountain.) At least they're in the pasture where they belong.

Then you have the case of gates left open by inconsiderate people-- or sometimes torn down by game, or even cattle. The stolen gate I talked about last week, resulted in a case of twenty-some missing cattle. The rancher ended up having to hire a plane to try and find them. Sure enough, they'd all gone through the missing gate to the other side of the mountain. Today Ray and another cowboy drove to our old place-- about 100 miles each way, then rode up the mountain from that side, bringing the missing cattle down to those corrals, and hauling them home from there. A lot of extra time and expense.

On another “flying time” note, I sent out our first batch of invitations for a housewarming we're planning. Scary thought. Can't change the date now. Time to kick in my “work under pressure routine”. I only have one piece of furniture left to refinish, and I want to get that done. Anything else that's not done will just have to wait, or I won't have a clean house or enough appetizers.

Of course I may not anyway since we're flying by the seat of our pants. I don't know if we'll need enough for 50, or 200! Besides the invitations, we're doing an open invitation in our new neighborhood.

I could probably count the parties I've planned, on three fingers. It ranks right below cooking for a crew on the anxiety scale. But, I'm also excited since this is the first time in our married life we've lived in an actual neighborhood, in our very own house.

I've never been scared of flying, so guess it's not time to choke up now!