Spring calving

April is calving time for lots of ranches along the Front, and one April, I drove up for a day and "helped" with calving at the Bill and Marie Mosher ranch. I put helped in quotes because I was a carpenter, as I told Bill on the phone, and I knew how to open and close gates and stay out of the way of machinery, but that was about all I knew of ranch life. But if he would put up with me for a day, I could hear his point of view as a third generation rancher living in bear country.

I started to the Front as the Blackfoot River was getting light, covering the brake pedal with my foot when deer crossed in front of me in the canyon. Roger's Pass was nearly dry, and along the Front Bean Lake road was dusty. Cow elk grazed near Skunk Creek, and when I pulled in to Bill and Marie's at nine, I was shamefully late, at least in ranching country.

Bill waved from the cab of the bale spreader as I got a gate, and then climbed down and we talked for a minute in the wind. He had a few more bales to spread to finish the morning feeding, then we'd get started. It was sunny and some clouds sat over the mountains, but the wind blew steady and cold enough from the west for me to get my full coveralls out of my truck.

I got the last gates, and then Bill got me on an ATV (the first time I had ever been on a four wheeler) and we meandered across the pastures for the morning. We stopped to check cows and new calves, and to talk about bears, the land and nature of ranching on the Front. I was glad I left my cameras in the truck - I wanted to concentrate on the day and not stop to look for photos.

Early on, we both got a good laugh when I guessed out-loud that his cows were were Holsteins, and Bill corrected me and said they were Black Angus. I laughed and told him that was like a carpenter not knowing the difference between a sheet of plywood and a 2x4.

I had sat down with Bill in November the year before, and listened to his stories about the Falls Creek bear. That day, there was a foot of snow outside, whipped into crusty waves by the wind and stretching all the way to the Front, where the sun was already low in mid-afternoon. We talked about how he first learned the Falls Creek bear was active, when he first started missing calves, and how the bear might have learned so quickly to be wary of people and smart enough to stay out of snares. The first research trapping of grizzlies took place in the early 1980's near his ranch, and soon after evidence - tracks, and a few times a year, a few dead calves - of the Falls Creek grizzly began to appear.

Bill is quiet and thoughtful and measured with his words. He and his wife Marie work along with their son Jason and their daughter-in-law Heidi, both of whom had just started working full time on the ranch that April. Bill told me that from his viewpoint, he feels that the land is to be both used by people and taken care of by those same people. I said I respected that, and said that I was working without an agenda, and simply wanted to learn what he thought and how he worked. I got a sense of his care for his land and way of life from the year before, and working with him for part of a day confirmed it in a tangible way.

(A Montana Fish, Wildlife and Parks employee who knows very well the land issues on the Front told me to look closely at Bill's land the next time I drove to his ranch. He said I'd see that there were few weeds on his acreage, and none was overgrazed. He was right - when it comes to grazing and weed management, Bill is one of the best land stewards on the Front.)

As we rode around that morning, Bill pointed out familiar cows, how some had an easy time during calving, how others didn't, and how, when a cow is getting ready to give birth, the first foot or so of her tail will stick out before it crooks down. He showed me one small calf he had had to nurse along, and it tottered up to him, recognizing him from his hands-on care, while the mother cow stood back and bellowed at us. He looked at how each cow and calf stood and moved, if the calves were energetic, if the cows were ignoring their calves, because once in awhile, a mother had to be convinced to take care of her calf. I could tell he knew his cows, his land, and

Before lunch, Marie showed me a bottle feeder calf she was taking care of, a twin that was too much burden for the cow. She zipped back to the barn to drop it off before heading back to the house. On ranches, ATV's are like some sort of extra pair of motorized legs, and work would take much longer without them, though the Moshers still move and cut cattle on horseback.

Lunch was pot roast, potatoes, corn, salad, juice and pie for dessert; good food for outdoor work. In retrospect, I ran my mouth too much at lunch. Ranch work is pretty much 24/7/365, and the Moshers are used to working quickly and quietly with a minimum of talk, dividing up the work and taking their shifts. I hope they forgive me for talking too much!

That afternoon I rode with Heidi up to a pasture higher up on the ranch and checked cows. There were hundreds left to calve, she said; they were about halfway through. She tallied ear tag numbers of cows and colors of their new born calves in a notebook, while I took my own notes. Red-tailed hawks rode close to the ground in the steady wind and clouds built on the Front. In the upper pastures was a big old house where no one lived anymore, and you could turn and look down a wide green draw peppered with cows and calves west to the peaks, the strong and steady wind in your face like the current of a river.

Heidi spotted two cows that might be having problems giving birth, so we herded them into the barn. We hazed and worked them back through stalls and got one into a head gate, a big metal fence-like device that immobilizes a cow, or reasonably so, by loosely locking its head in two halves of a gate. Heidi swung in the fence sections on both side and locked them in place. She worked the cow's udders, getting milk to flow for the calf, and then cut her loose to her calf waiting outside. We encouraged the other cow into the rack, shouting and waving our arms to move 1500 pounds or more of angry animal, and after we closed the metal gates the cow threw herself back and forth against the rack.

She might need a caesarian, Heidi told me. She slipped on a long plastic glove and waited. When the cow quieted down after a minute, Heidi reached in and examined the calf. She stared off into space while she felt and moved her arm. She said it seemed OK, that maybe this birth was just moving slow. The calf was turned the right way, and this cow didn't have a history of difficult births. She offered me a long plastic glove, and told me what to feel for. She pulled the cow's tail off to the side, and I reached in the birth canal.

The calf was right there. I could feel its nose, the outline of its lower jaw, and the points of its front hooves, nestled under its chin. Its jaw moved against my hand, as if it was reaching out for milk. Here was something alive inside something else alive, waiting to be born. I didn't know what to think, but I did think it was amazing. I said to Heidi it was amazing to think any of us are alive.

Calving sounds like something that has little to do with bears, but in the big picture, it's life on the Front, life up close, part of all of the cycles. The operative word in all of this is care, and it is an idea and a calling that I have been discovering all along the Front.

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April ≈ May ≈ June