The Branding I Ran Myself

The calf bawled and the cow followed along the fence and bawled back. Then the ground crew took over.

Two people to a calf, one to flank it down and hold the front, one to sit back on the hind legs with a boot against the hock.

The calf stretched out flat and still on the grass for the ninety seconds the work takes.

My girls were ground crew. Jo and Mae wrestled calves all morning, dusty to the eyebrows.

I watched my fourteen-year-old set her boot on a hock and lean back against a bawling calf like she had done it her whole life.

She nearly had. There was a moment I will keep. Mae went down hard with a big heifer calf, got rolled, came up spitting dirt.

Delbert, from his horse, called out, “You all right down there, boss.” He said it to a fourteen-year-old girl, boss, like she was running the ground.

And she grinned up at him through the mud and said she was fine and grabbed the next one. That is how you raise them.

Not by sheltering them from the hard day. By letting them stand in the middle of it and find out they can.

I gave the shots. Blackleg, the seven-way, in the neck, and a squirt of pour-on down the back for the flies that were coming.

A neighbor woman named Darla notched the ears.

I did the knife on the bull calves, quick and clean the way Wayne taught me, and we dropped them in the bucket for the cook.

And I branded. That was mine, and I would not give it to anybody.

You lay the hot iron on the hip and you count. You watch the smoke and you lift it clean.

Not too long or you blotch it, not too short or it will not take. You do it the same every single time, so every calf wears the same mark.

It is loud, a branding. The calves bawl and the cows bellow and the dust hangs and the irons hiss.

People call the count across the fire.

It is the best sound I know, and I had not heard it on my own place in four years, and it about tore my heart out of me to hear it again.

There is a rhythm to a good crew you cannot teach and cannot fake. The ropers do not crowd.

They ease in, take their calf, and come out, one at a time.

The ground crew is up and ready before the calf hits the end of the rope. Nobody has to say much of anything.

It runs like a clock that winds itself. I had forgotten we knew how to be a clock like that.

For four years it had been Gil and a kid and me grabbing a calf when I could get away from the house.

It had never once felt like this. This easy turning thing, where ten hands do the work of thirty.

Darla kept the vaccine cool and loaded my syringe between calves so I never had to stop.

Delbert’s loop fell the same way every throw, soft, right at the hocks, so the calves came in gentle and nobody got stepped on.

A branding is dangerous when it is ragged and safe when it is smooth. We were smooth by seven in the morning.