We live in a constantly changing world which seems to be out of our control on a regular basis. I feel that as I get older instead of feeling more secure I feel there is less and less that I can count on. How do we move beyond this? There is no easy answer but for me I feel we must put on our big girl pants and make something happen for ourselves.
When the economy down-turned and my husband’s thirty year career as a builder was heading south quickly and I don’t mean Florida it was time to change directions. We can all enjoy our pity party for a night or two or three but then we must get up one morning and move in a different direction in order to survive. You can sit around for the rest of your life and whine and feel sorry for yourself as you quickly go broke, and we did whine for a while but then we got on with things. Luckily we had an easy time figuring out what we wanted to do in act 2 because it was something we have talked about for a long time. Horses and ranching were a given and after several years of working and building and working and building we are finally seeing the light at the end of the tunnel. The light I said, not the money…yet, but in order to get started you must have the land, infrastructure and the animals and that is where this leads, animals and the dark side of nature.
We have two sides to our operation; our stocker operation and our cow/calf operation. The cow/calf part of the operation is the one that I love because of the babies! Waiting patiently for months for those cute, little, jet black babies running, bucking and farting across the pastures has created endless fantasies in my mind as I watch their mommas bellies growing larger by the day. Finally, as Spring begins to show its green little head with warmer weather and light breezes I watch in anticipation of the day when I notice a new, tiny little being in the field.
Suddenly my long wait is rewarded with babies the size of my dog running and scampering about bringing sheer joy to my being, until..the dark side of nature steps in. Thanks to the sloppy, don’t give a shit hunters this year leaving carcasses strewn carelessly about without disposing of them properly, their selfish actions brought in a deadly threat to my babies; gigantic, nasty, looming predators waiting to kill. I am talking about gigantic buzzards that sit in the trees waiting, thinking about death, swiftly ready to pounce as soon as a young calf is born. They smell the blood and afterbirth and swoop on the harmless baby while they are still newly emerged from their mother’s womb before they can stand and defend themselves. As small defenseless creatures with a mother that is no match for them they torpedo in and annihilate the newborn calves eyes and anus until they are dead.
Sunday morning we found two pitiful lumps in our field with their mother’s standing watch over their poor dead babies. For the safety of the other newborn calves and the ones to come I had to carry off these two poor unlucky calves. One at a time I carried the calves away blood dripping slowly down my boots, soaking into my gloves, staring at the vacuous, empty eyes. The whole episode made me horribly sad and angry. I know this is the cycle of nature but I couldn’t find any comfort in that knowledge. I hope I don’t have to witness this often. This is the hard part of farming and ranching. This is the part that you don’t really understand unless you are experiencing it yourself. You can see pictures on TV of hardships that farmers and ranchers endure whether it be floods, fires, disease or death but it is hard to really feel their pain unless you feel it yourself. I have felt it myself and I now understand what it is like.
Life goes on as always but there is a picture left in my mind as I watch my healthy, happy, live calves running and playing, the picture includes the others that are absent. My tribute to them is that I won’t forget. As in all things there is a bright side and a dark side, in order to appreciate the bright side of things you must respect the fact that there is always a dark side looming, hidden, lurking in the shadows waiting for helplessness to appear for the predator, that is how I appreciate the beauty in nature, it can be fleeting.