The Tally Book At The Pen Gate

A bad heeler wears out his horse, wears out the ground crew, and makes the whole day an hour longer than it should be.

I am a good heeler. I do not say that to brag. I say it because I counted, and the counting is how all of this came out.

I have carried a pocket tally book since I was twelve years old.

It is a little green notebook that fits in a shirt pocket or a vest pocket, with a pencil stub held to the spine with a rubber band. Cowboys have carried them forever.

My grandpa carried one every day of his life. He counted cows through gates, calves at the fire, bales on a stack, and money he owed and money he was owed.

When I was a boy he told me a man’s tally book was the one place he could not afford to lie.

“You don’t jerk rawhide,” Grandpa used to say, “and you don’t lie in a tally book. Either one will come back and cost you.”

The rawhide part was about the reata. When Grandpa died, he left me his rawhide reata, sixty-five feet of four-strand braided rawhide he had roped with for close to fifty years. It is the rope I heel with to this day.

Most men rope with nylon now, and I understand why. Nylon is strong and cheap and forgiving. Rawhide is none of those things.

If you jerk a calf hard on rawhide, or let your slack go and then hit the end of it, you can break a reata that took somebody a whole winter to braid.

So a rawhide man learns to rope smooth. You catch, you dally soft, you ease the calf to the fire like you are leading him to supper.

People notice it, and the ground crew loves it, because a calf that comes in easy goes down easy.

That was the work I was doing that spring. I was doing it well.

And every calf I dragged went into the tally book in pencil, a mark for each one, bundled in fives, with the date and the ranch’s brand drawn at the top of the page.

Chad Ziegler is my wife’s older brother. He was forty that spring.

He runs about a hundred and thirty cows on his own place and some leased ground south of town, and for years he has booked the day crew for a lot of the brandings in our country.

That is how it works out here. A rancher has a branding to put on, he calls Chad, Chad brings two or three good hands, and the rancher pays Chad for the crew. Neighbors trade help too, but every outfit pays its day hands.

I married into that country seven years ago. I grew up in eastern Montana and worked on a ranch payroll up there until the place sold.

When Jenna and I came back to be near her folks, I did not know a single rancher, and none of them knew me.

So when Chad said he could keep me busy roping all spring, I was grateful. I mean that. I shook his hand in his mother’s kitchen and thanked him.

“Day hands get ninety,” he told me that winter. “That’s what the outfits pay around here. It’s not Montana money, but it’s steady, and I can get you twenty-five, thirty brandings if you want them.”