When you take cattle on a new trail…
they usually don’t like it.
It’s new.
They don’t know if there’s a mountain lion around that rock, or they get the whoops!-where’d -my-calf-go-to-now? syndrome, and the ever popular whine of BUTHOMEISTHATWAY!
But the alternative was to trail through two other pastures full of cows, so we thought we’d try the county road. It’s a ROAD for heaven’s sake, not a cow path, so we hoped that’d help.
Dally and Boomer got a workout, keeping laggards up in the bunch and trying to keep the corners tucked in nice and neat.
I managed quite a few successful shots of Dally at work…
It was HOT today too… you couldn’t even tell we were at 8000’… so that didn’t help the cows’ attitudes. The wind did blow all day, which did help keep it a smidge cooler… but I was windblown and sandblasted with trail dust. There were plenty of little springs for the dogs to get a drink from, which was a blessing… they would have quit on me pretty soon if they had been dry!
When you eat lunch at 5 pm, you know you’ve had a long day.
The clouds rolled in about supper time/lunch time and soon we had thunder cracking around us. That makes us pretty nervous as we have had a horse killed by lightning in the pasture we’ve just entered. We hung out in the truck for a bit, then tried to make a mad dash to finish up retagging 2 cows and then turning the bunch out into the main pasture.
Hopefully, <fingers and toes crossed!>, no fires start with the storm’s lightning… There’s an amazing amount of dry grass this year!
Though it was not fast, nor easy, nor cool, nor particularly pleasant… the job is finished and a hot shower and bed are next for this cowgirl!
Find me here!