Don’t ever want to see a tweet that mentions the name Kardashian? No problem. The K people no longer exist in my online universe.

But then there’s Facebook. Yikes. The stuff people post on there. Over and over and over again. I’m still looking for the “remove all People of Wal-Mart posts” button because ouch, my eyes.

Occasionally I do run across something that gives me a genuine belly laugh. Or an idea for a column, which is even better. This week it was a video of a couple of cowboys trying to ear-tag a calf while Mama Cow tries to eat their collective lunches. Luckily for the guy on the ground, there was a big tree between her and him. Unluckily, the branches of that same tree made it tough for his buddy to ride up close enough to rope the cow and hold her off while he made his escape.

Yep, been there, done that, minus the tree. Forget live oaks; out here on the windswept plains, we get excited about waist-high buck brush. Luckily, most of our cows are all bellow and no stomp, but we have a few man-eaters. We know who they are. Mostly. Once in a while, one catches us by surprise, usually after we’ve got her kid on the end of a rope and have no choice but to finish the job. Or at least hang on long enough to get the rope off.

As we get older and wiser – but mostly older – we do less and less doctoring and tagging on horseback, and we’ve come to the conclusion that some calves can just wait until branding for an eartag. Mean cows hardly ever lose track of their calves, even in a raging blizzard. But once in a while, the dang calf gets sick, and then it’s game on.

Our favored approach is the “snatch and slam” using the chore pickup. I drive. My husband rides shotgun. We try to catch the calf sleeping. I ease up alongside; Greg throws open the door, grabs the calf by the ears, hauls it up into the cab and slams the door, leaving Mama outside to smear snot on the window.

This works exceptionally well on three conditions. First, the calf is small enough to be hauled up by the ears. Second, you have no particular use for that side view mirror the cow will mangle. And third, you get the door shut before the cow joins you inside the pickup.

My parents were doing a snatch and slam once, and my dad got cocky, figuring he could both drive and snatch. Unfortunately, when he yanked the calf up onto his lap, its nose got caught in the steering wheel while its hind legs were still dangling, making it impossible to shut the door.

Mad Cow took the opportunity to climb right on up into the cab. Suddenly, Dad was at the epicenter of an explosion of flailing calf and pawing, head-slinging cow. He scrambled for the passenger’s side, attempting to avoid impalement on the gear shift while Mom fumbled with the stupid door handle that had a bad habit of jamming at the worst possible moments.

The door popped open, and they tumbled out in a heap. They barely had time to get untangled before the cow gave up trying to come straight through the cab, backed out and roared around the hood. They flung themselves under the pickup and hunkered there in the slushy snow while she circled, pausing occasionally to fling mud and give the side of the pickup a solid shot or two with her head.

Finally, she settled down enough to nudge her baby to its feet and hustle him away. Far, far away before my parents got up the nerve to belly crawl from under the pickup, which was looking decidedly worse for wear. As were they.

“So now what?” my mom asked.

Not one to concede defeat, Dad got out a rope, climbed in the back and said, “You drive.”

And that’s how we learned that a properly motivated cow actually can jump into the bed of a pickup.  FG

Kari Lynn Dell is a third-generation cowgirl, horse trainer and rodeo competitor. She writes from her family ranch on the Montana Blackfeet Reservation. Read more of her scribblings, novels and short stories on the northern frontier here.

PHOTO
Tagging calves can be a rodeo with no barrel to hide behind on the windswept prairies. Depending on Momma Cow's attitude, sometimes it's just more prudent to wait for branding time. Photo by Kari Lynn Dell.