It was just another day of branding little critters. It’s a dirty, smelly job. I was older at the time, in my twenties, and had come back to the ranch to work for a while. The ranch was being run a little differently, a bit more organized. Earl had gone on to join the Ghost Riders in the Sky, and Dad had taken over.
I was used to branding using a calf table, a mechanical death trap, supposedly invented to make branding easier. The new cowboys didn’t cotton to that very easily, and we went back to the old-fashioned way. And as I found out later, it was a much faster method!
A cowboy, who knew how to use a rope (definitely not me), would ride through the herd, somehow snatch a calf’s hind feet in a loop of rope, and drag it to the branding area. It always beat the hell out of me how they did that. I couldn’t hit the broad side of a barn with a rope, but they could snap two little legs out of a sea of legs with fairly good accuracy.
When the calf was dragged to the branding area, two cowkids (the young cowboys) would hold the critter down. One adult would brand the calf, and I would take care of the earmark, vaccinations, and castration of the bull calves.
The first time out with the real cowboys was rather interesting. We were branding the “calves”. In most circles they would be referred to as yearlings. I started a nasty habit of stepping over the critter when I was finished to make it easier to get back to my medicine bottles and reload. Of course, by doing this I set up the perfect opportunity for a practical joke.
The next “call” in line was a very large “yearling”, quite the monster of a bull. He definitely didn’t want to be there. He was stretched out by two horses to prevent him from getting up. While the branding was taking place, I quickly sliced a chunk out of his ear, gave him his Clostridium and Penicillin shots, and then proceeded to the real dirty work.
With hands already covered in blood, I sliced the scrotal sack off, clutched the two testicles, and lopped them off with an emasculating tool. Needless to say, Ferdinand the Bull became just plain Ferdinand and wasn’t very happy about the whole operation. The branding was over, and the show was about to begin.
I picked up the emasculators and buck knife in one hand, and the two syringes and scrotal sack (used for counting bulls branded) in the other, and then I stepped over the bull. The cowboys, with a nod and a yell, let the critter go. He came up in a flash, and I was now on his back. He was trying desperately to get me off. With nothing to hold on to, I just squeezed my legs into the critter’s sides and prayed that I could find an easy way out of my predicament.
The laughing cowboys’ yelling and hooting didn’t help a whole lot either! Finally I gave up, released my leg hold, and flew rather ungracefully into the air. I landed less gracefully in a heap of a fresh, wet, stinky cow pie. I stood up, took a bow, blushed deeply, and prepared to be the butt of the jokes for a while. I didn’t drop a tool, rather miraculously. Above all, I never stepped over a branded calf again.
I took a good ribbing from the cowboys for a while, but fortunately, Justin took the spotlight away from me soon after this when he tied a cow to a tree and forgot where the tree was.
Thank you, Justin!
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