The Calves I Raised Alone

Every man in the county with a strong back was calving his own cows that month, and the two high school boys who sometimes helped were in basketball season.

So it came down to me. I set three alarms on my phone and an old wind-up clock on the dresser, because I did not trust the phone, and I went to sleep in my clothes.

Here is what a day looked like that February, because I think people who have never done it imagine something softer than it is.

At six I got up and checked the heifers in the shed and the lot. At seven I started the tractor, which took two tries most mornings, and loaded the bale bed on the pickup.

Our feed setup is an old flatbed pickup with hydraulic arms that lift a round bale off the stack and unroll it across the pasture. Pell can feed in forty minutes.

It took me an hour and a half the first week, and I cut the strings by hand with a knife on a lanyard around my neck.

Five bales most days. Six when it was colder. Each one weighs about twelve hundred pounds, and I rolled them out in long lines on clean snow so the boss cows could not crowd the young ones off.

Then I chopped ice on the creek crossing, checked the tank heater, and walked the heifer lot again. By ten I would come in, eat something standing up, and call Pell.

At noon, at three, at six, at nine, at midnight and at three in the morning, I checked heifers.

Every three hours, the way my grandfather taught me, because a heifer in trouble can lose a calf in less time than that.

I kept a spiral notebook on the shelf in the shed and wrote down every cow that calved, the time, and whether I had to help.

Grandpa always did that. It was not for anybody else. It was so I would know, at three in the morning, which ones I had already checked.

The first calf I pulled was on February fifth, a little after one in the afternoon, a heifer I had named Socks, after a barn cat I had as a girl.

She had been straining for an hour with nothing to show but two front feet and the tip of a nose.

I brought her into the shed, put her in the head catch, washed up in a bucket of warm water, and reached in to see what I had.

The calf was big. Not backwards, not twisted, just big.

I put the calving chains on above and below the fetlocks the way you are supposed to, a double loop so you do not break a leg, and I waited for her to push before I pulled.

You never pull against a cow. You pull with her, and you pull down toward her hocks once the head is out, in an arc, the way the calf would come on its own if it could.

It took me twenty minutes. When the calf came, it came all at once, and I sat down hard in the straw with a wet, steaming bull calf across my lap and my breath going up in clouds.

He did not breathe right away. I cleared his nose with my fingers and rubbed him hard with a handful of straw, and I said, out loud, “Come on, buddy, come on,” and then he coughed and shook his head and I started to cry.