It was a real bad winter to begin with. Then on New Year’s Day, my ex-wife and I were on our way to town, enjoying the Montana scenery and listening to the radio. Par usual for New Year’s Day, the disc jockey was describing different superstitions pertaining to New Year’s Day. Then he said, “According to Chinese legend, your luck for the year is determined by how high the first bird you see flies on New Year’s Day.” Now we had a pretty health eagle population and began looking high in the sky, looking for a soaring eagle. Sure enough, we saw not one, but three eagles . . . sitting alongside the road eating on a dead deer. Three days later the house burned down. Luckily, it happened on a Sunday morning. I had already fed and was enjoying a book. The wife kept making comments about how bad her cooking was and how she was smoking up the house. Typical man, I kept just replying “Yes, dear,” and kept on reading. Beginning to cough and choke, she asked, “Good God, can’t you see the smoke?” At that I looked up and sure enough, the smoke was pretty thick, and it sure didn’t smell like chicken, so I decided to check out the woodstove. The stove was sitting in a corner next to the phone. I opened up the stove, and things seemed to look OK, but the walls sure seemed hot. I touched the wall and sure enough, it was really hot. Grabbing the phone off the hook, I called a neighbor, told them I thought we were on fire, and then the phone went dead as the wires melted. Grabbing an ax, I knocked a hole in the wall and sure enough, the inside of the walls were burning. Because it was obvious that I wasn’t going to do much with our little fire extinguisher, we started grabbing what we could and hauling it out into the snow. Within a few minutes, neighbors were showing up on snowmobiles and trying to help. As the fire department showed up, I made one last trip into the house and emerged with the pot of coffee and the chicken my wife was cooking. In a short time, all that was left of the house was a heap of smoldering ashes. But it could get worse. The only other place on the ranch to move into was the boss’s summer home. Of course the main word here is “summer.” The oil stove didn’t work, and leaving on the burners on the stove didn’t throw out enough heat to keep the sink pipes from freezing. Luckily there was a kerosene heater that we put in the bathroom so that we would have running water. Because we were in the middle of a six-week cold spell with a high temperature of minus fifteen, about the warmest we could get was either sitting in the bathroom or barbecuing. Temperatures IN the house were dropping to as low as minus thirty. But it could get worse . . . The newly purchased replacement heifers were supposed to start calving on the twentieth of February. Nobody told them, though, so the first one dropped a month early, and they kept coming at the rate of a couple a day. While this may not seem like a big deal, in sub-zero weather, you have to keep an eye on anything calving around the clock. This means it is impossible to get more than four hours of sleep at one time. It also meant that I had already been calving for a month before I started calving. They had purchased the heifers to start calving when the cows did to cut down on the calving season. But things could get worse. For some reason the boss, who lived in town, decided that I shouldn’t be set up in a way that would allow one person to easily handle calving cows at night. The way into the barn was around a small hill, then up the middle of it Both sides had snowdrifts I could lose my horse in, and the boss figured the cows wouldn’t go into the deep snow. Old cow number twenty-eight was one of these cows that would crawl through the fence to have her calf. She would ditch it in the morning to come and have breakfast, then crawl back through the fence to get back to her calf. I had wanted to cull her the fall before because she had pulled that trick the previous spring, and the coyotes had their breakfast as she was having hers. When does she decide to start calving? At the eight p.m. check, when I just wanted to do a quick check and then grab a few hours sleep. I decided the easiest thing to do would be to try and run her to the barn to keep her from getting out and go have a cup of coffee. At least the house was only around thirty below rather than the forty-eight below outside. The old hide went around the hill and upon seeing the gate to the barn, bailed off into the snowdrift with me right behind her. After the third pass, I figured I had no choice other than to stay out and keep her from crawling through the fence until after she had calved. Three hours later, a leg appeared. Of course this meant I had to pull the calf. Because she kept bailing off into the snow bank rather than going into the pens, I heeled her and tied her down in four feet of snow. I passed up the barn to get Lucinda to help me as I was going to need someone to hold the light for me. Now it was worse. “This calf better need to be pulled,” she growled in warning as she crawled out of the only warm spot on the ranch. By this time it was only one in the morning, and a brisk forty-eight degrees below zero. But it was also one of those romantic nights with a full moon and a sky full of stars. All of the moisture in the air was frozen, and it was hanging like silver glitter in the still air. Heck, I probably could have pulled the calf by the light of the moon reflected off the snow, but I didn’t want my wife missing the “romance” of it all. Once she saw the “poor” cow tied down in the snow with a rather large leg protruding from where there should have been a head and two legs she seemed to settle down from being rousted out of a warm bed. Now came the fun part. Removing the top half of my coveralls, my coat, and my vest, I rolled up my sleeves and proceeded to push the calf back inside its mother so that I could get its legs straightened out. Of course the cow wasn’t helping any and was pushing against me so that before long I was lying in back of the cow, in the snow and a warm puddle of amniotic fluid. Twenty minutes later, the big bull calf was lying at its mother’s nose. Before untying the cow, I told my wife that this cow was going to be mad when she got up, and that she’d better get in back of a tree. In true wifely fashion, she informed me that the cow would be too tired and also worried about her calf to chase her. I untied the cow and tailed her up.

The cow instantly focused on the light emanating from my wife’s hand and decided to take out her aggressions on it. Luckily, my wife threw the light at the cow as she ducked around an aspen tree. The flashlight was a little trashed, but at least the cow got to take out her aggressions before abandoning her calf. I took the calf to the barn, put it under the heat lamp, and got a bottle in it. Then I headed for bed. I was so tired I hadn’t realized that my pants had become soaked through to the skin while I was pulling the calf. I did know that my pants were a little stiff. I was, however, unaware that they had become frozen to my legs, until I tried peeling them off, that is I had been trying to undress on the porch in order to keep the house a little cleaner, but that plan was now changing. Other than waiting for spring, my only other option was to go into the bathroom and stand next to the kerosene heater and wait to thaw out. The winter drug on for what seemed like an eternity. Some of the “boss-induced” calving problems, caused by lack of proper nutrition and/or medicine, meant there were times that I would be up and on duty forty-eight to seventy-two hours straight. I was running on the “Ine” brothers, Caf and Nic. I’d go through two tins of Copenhagen and several pots of coffee a day. Why I didn’t quit I can only guess. I figure it had to be either concern for the cows, or the fact I’m too ignorant to quit in the middle of the wreck. In the middle of April, the boss finally got us a “new, used” mobile home. Wasn’t fancy but, it actually had heat! By now it was a little warmer. When a neighbor kid came home on spring break, I asked him how much he’d charge me to fill in for a twenty-four hour period. His parents had filled him in on how my winter had been going, and he volunteered to do it for free. I went to the boss and told him that I’d like a day off and wanted to OK the neighbor kid watching things for me. He gave his approval if I could get the kid to do it. Grinning, I told him the kid would start at four that afternoon. The wife didn’t think it was much of a day off. We went out to dinner and got a room at the hot springs. After a few minutes soaking in the hot water, I went to bed and slept for just over fourteen hours, leaving her to fend for her own entertainment. That weekend must have gotten my brain to thawing out because I was now at least wondering about the sanity of working for this outfit. Before the fire, we had been told that our things were covered on the ranch’s insurance. After the fire, we were told to make up a list of what we had lost. Upon checking with the insurance company, we discovered that the boss had indeed turned our list of lost items over to the insurance company. But the list had changed ownership. Now our loss was the boss’s “loss.” It had also changed in value because our things had somehow gained twenty to fifty percent in value. Giving the boss a chance to make good, I asked him when we’d be getting our money from the insurance settlement, and he informed me that the insurance company “wasn’t covering the contents” like “they” had promised. I really wanted to quit on the spot, but the wife and I liked where we were. It was a beautiful ranch, great neighbors, and for nearly nine months out of the year, the boss wasn’t there. Two other things kept us from just packing up and walking out. The first was that one of the “benefits” of being a cowboy is housing. This means that being unemployed is synonymous with being homeless. The second benefit is my-off-the-wall way of looking at a job. I don’t think of myself as working for the owners; I think of myself as working for the cows who just happen to pay me through the owners. As such, I can’t bring myself to quit the cows in the middle of calving or in the middle of a wreck. Because we had a month left before the cows would be finished calving, and the calving schedule meant I wasn’t going to have much time to be job hunting, I gave six weeks notice. Besides, in six weeks time, maybe the boss would think about what we had lost and maybe even think about the job I had done, in spite of spending a Montana winter without heat, and would do something about compensating us for our losses (and maybe even throw in a little extra). Calving finished fairly smoothly, except for good old number thirteen. This was a cow that really deserved to take a break . . . as the entree of a fast-food chain. The boss liked her because she would raise a four hundred fifty pound calf every year. Of course he wasn’t there when she was trying to grind me into the snow when I was trying to tag her calf. He wasn’t the one getting run over by her when she was checking to see if the calf I was doctoring was hers or not. He also wasn’t the one she was joining on the feed wagon as I was trying to feed her. I found her during the midnight check, and it was obvious which cow it was even before I got close enough to read her tag. Now this outfit had done me no favors, and I wasn’t about to go fighting a mad black cow on a pitch-black night just to tag her calf. I’d even decided that rather than fight her, I was going to train her. The next morning, I saddled up and rode to within about forty feet of her, which was as close as I could get on a horse without her charging. On about the third or fourth try, I managed to rope her by a front foot and started loping circles around her. Once I had several wraps around her back legs I pulled everything tight and dropped her like a quarter in a slot machine. I let her lie there while I tagged her calf, then tied her other front foot up over the top of her head, got back on my horse and loosened the rope. Even with her foot tied up over her head, she still charged my horse. Now the games began. After breakfast, I saddled Lucinda’s horse, and we rode out for our first lesson. We split up and started approaching the old witch from both ends. The plan was to get her to chase Lucinda, and I’d heel her before she turned off. As the old witch took off after Lucinda, I hollered a high- pitched “yi-yi-yi” in back of her as I heeled her and jerked her down. I held her down for a few minutes, let her up and did it again. After the third time, she was still as bad as the first, so we left her alone . . . for an hour. We repeated the procedure every hour on the hour all day long. When we went out at five that evening, she ducked out at my “yi’ing” so I heeled and dropped her one last time. For the rest of our stay she behaved herself. I did leave my replacement a note in the house telling him how to handle her without getting killed before Lucinda and I left for more misadventures.    Bob Kinford can be contacted via e-mail.