PART II

JULY 28

I drove the side-by-side back up to camp to relieve the boys for their break. Meredith and I spent the day riding through the cattle and scouting the pathway ahead. Grasses are mostly seeded out. Cattle are now spreading out into the higher reaches of the pasture on their own. It's why I love our cattle–they don’t sit around in the bottoms like most other cattle. Geese and sandhill cranes are quiet now with young stuck to their sides like little shadows. Now the days are full of cricket noises, instead of birds screaming. The season of summer smells and sounds is opening like a door into a hallway of green meadows, streams, and tall mountain peaks. The water will soon be warmer for taking dips!

AUGUST 3

Camp is great. Myles and Rob are enjoying it, having made it their home for the summer. We got up in the dark and started the fire; the air was cool. Hot coffee tastes so good in the open air. No matter how far it is, I can hear the constant sound of water rushing down the Paint Rock stream bed, as if coming from where life began, rushing into the future beyond where I will never know. I get the same feeling when I see the clouds crossing the space above me between the high ridges. Or the sway of the grasses and trees, hands of life always moving. It’s what is special about living in camp–I am in it, not looking in from somewhere else. I can see it, smell it, feel it, touch it. I am a part of it and it makes me feel like nothing else.

AUGUST 6

We’ve moved the cattle into Trout Creek and Anthony Park, the last two pastures before North High, the highest we will go. We’ve moved camp already so we can be closer to the cattle in these pastures. It’s my favorite camp of all the camps we will have this summer. Our neighbor Tyler and his son helped us because the trail up to Trout Creek is so steep and the herd is not familiar with the terrain. Basically we had to push them all the way up to where the trail leveled out across to Trout Creek. It was hard trying to keep the cattle going straight up. I looked down at it and thought of an appropriate name: Fly Below Trail. All the cattle wanted was to go sideways, and there were a lot more of them than us. Meredith saw one of the bulls go into the trees just in time to be able to go get him before he got away and found a whole bunch of other cattle we didn’t know were there, headed deeper into the trees and away from us! I could hear her hollering in the trees but none of us could go help her because we had our share of problems too, and to leave would be taking the chance to lose all the cattle back down the mountain. I asked her what went wrong in the trees when I ran across her next and got the dirtiest look ever. What a day. 

When the last of the herd was moving down the trail, we all sat there again, dead tired from the ordeal; we’d spent more time on foot than on horseback. My feet were blistered from all the running around. Our horses were soaking wet with sweat. We parted with Tyler and company and headed to camp for the night.

AUGUST 9

Now the cattle are settled. Rob and Myles are riding daily keeping the cattle together in draws so that they don’t spread out over the entire mountain. Every day after the cattle come down to water, they push stragglers off the riparian areas, preserving the rich, sensitive plant community in the bottom. Horses are in a small trap made from a single electric strand of poly wire. Well, not the whole group, but the dominant mares are kept in, with the majority of the horses free outside the trap, never straying too far. The small spring creek runs through the corner for their water.

AUGUST 12

The boys are back at HDQ taking a rest, making a grocery run, doing laundry, catching up with life beyond. Meredith and I rode all day. We followed the trail and stood at the rim looking down the steep trail down into Willow Swamp, where we’ll be moving the herd soon. We explored Sheep Creek which flows from North High, our highest pasture, following it up the mountain through a thick forest. We had lunch beside it in a grassy, sunny spot next to where it formed a crystal clear pool. We built a little fire and made tea. These little streams are everywhere, like the small veins in our bodies, cold pure water flowing downward into the Paint Rock. We found sign of many cattle moving up, a place where they should not be, unbeknownst to Rob and Myles. Growing late, we returned to camp, lit our fire, ate, and sat feeding it into the dark of night. Up above us was a ceiling of brilliant stars.

AUGUST 16

We rode all day again. Pushing cattle up the next draw away from Trout Creek bottom. Then riding up another creek into North High that the trail followed. It was meadow after meadow until we broke free of timberline into the open, high above. Standing on a small knoll, Meredith looked at me and said, “We’re standing on top of the world.” We could see Cloud Peak, the highest mountain in the Bighorns. We found a trail that took us along the shoulder of the mountain alongside the deep canyon that fed Willow Swamp far below. We saw a really cool meadow littered with boulders and the tiniest stream. We agreed that we will return when we take our pack trip up into the lakes and meadows around Cloud Peak, later this summer. Plenty of feed there for the horses, water and protection. Its allure was the sense of privacy it contained, like a small room hidden within a maze of walls, boulders, water and sky, way up above earth on the shoulder of the mountain. When we got back to camp, we caught the boys up, explaining where the cattle were and jumped in our 4Runner and headed back to HDQ.

AUGUST 18

 We awoke to a loud banging on the door at 2 am. A voice from the bottom of the stairs (turned out to be Ava) called up that Myles did not come into camp last night. She’d gotten a call from a neighbor who had been reached by Rob; with my phone being off, he’d called her. Meredith and I left immediately on the two hour trip up to camp. I asked Amber, our neighbor, to call Search and Rescue at 8 am if she did not hear from me. Arriving at camp just at pre-dawn, we grabbed our horses, telling Rob to stay at camp in case Myles arrived so he could communicate to Search and Rescue and everyone else. We left at a good trot. By early morning we’d reached where we assumed Myles had gone and followed the trail up toward Cloud Peak, the only place that he could have gone. It was rocky, so we could not for sure determine fresh tracks leading ahead. We went for hours until we decided to turn back. 

On the way back down, we ran into our neighbor Tyler and his kids who were also out looking and rode back to camp together, where we discovered that Myles had arrived and then left again to go check on the herd. He’d gotten caught by nightfall and spent the night on the mountain by the trail by a fire he’d built. Instead of coming home on the trail he knew, he’d decided to take another unfamiliar route that he didn’t realize was so far. He felt bad and apologized for the commotion he’d created when I saw him later. Another lesson learned.

AUGUST 19

Waking in our bed at home is kind of startling after we’ve been in camp, and after yesterday, I feel restrained, enclosed. I lay in bed thinking in the dark of what could have happened in the mountain. So easy for one person alone riding in the mountains to have an accident, fall off a steep side of the trail, be bitten by something–any number of things. The walls felt impermeable, shutting off the thrashing morning movement of life growing bigger outside as the day grew.

I got up, unable to shake the thoughts, and headed out in the dark to spend time with the cattle in the Medicine Lodge. I couldn’t see them, but I could hear them grunting and farting here and there where they were laying down chewing their cud. They let me come close, even in the dark, and I sat down and looked up at the sky at the immense starscape. Man, there were so many up there. I watched the light come into the sky and gradually I could see the cattle. They were spread out across the entire field, some grazing, others laying upright, still chewing their cud. I got up and walked through them and found a place to sit with them by a big tree. They slowly came up to me, curious, and formed a semicircle around me. What a contrast. Not a care in the world.

Sitting quiet with them washed the haunting thoughts away as I focused on them instead. How they’ve grown round and fat, their hair shiny and smooth now that winter is far behind. I pictured the ranches from where they’d come from–New Mexico, Texas, Colorado. Going even further back, I thought about their ancestors where the Beefmaster breed first started, in south Texas when Tom Lasater closed his herd to outside bulls in favor of developing his own breed from within his herd–using his own bulls.

Neighbors here who have never been around Beefmaster cattle before, while pointing out how they had fewer flies than their own, wonder why we leave horns on our cattle. And why they are not consistent in color. Old questions that I’ve heard many times before. Questions with simple answers, for me anyway. Perhaps too simple? Reminds me yet again–why is it so hard to leave nature alone? And instead work within it. Horns are there for a reason. Treating an entire herd for parasites like flies makes them more vulnerable, weaker. Isn’t that obvious? Leaving them alone empowers them to find ways of living with the array of the forces of nature; it gives them power to grow and be part of Mother Earth and be what they are meant to be. We humans are so presumptuous. We think we can overcome nature, that we can move faster, better by taking shortcuts, breeding cattle to be polled, giving them insecticides and hormones. In the end what we do is create a sterile environment that props up our animals, instead of evolving with nature as all living creatures have through adaptation. Our problem is that we think in short terms. We don’t understand that time, and lots of it, is part of the movement of life.

I got up after what seemed a long time, feeling renewed and ready for the next episode of life on the ranch.