Goofy heifer stories? Okay.
Late winter 1980. I was living with my Uncle and Aunt and working on their Ranch, about 100 pair.
It was a cold wet afternoon right about 32 degrees when I saddled my favorite pony and took a ride out through the meadows to check for newborns needing help. I found a new baby trying to nurse her mother, a first calf heifer. But Momma would have nothing to do with the calf.
I tried to drive the cow about 1/2 mile to the corrals and barn but she would have nothing to do with it. The cow kept running into willow patches and "brushing up".
I dropped a lasso over her head and got her out of the willows for the final time. Only to have her either fight the rope, or charge my horse. I was making very little headway.
Uncle was sitting at the dining room table drinking his coffee and watching the circus through his binoculars. I guess he got tired of laughing, or maybe felt sorry for the exhausted little mare I was riding. He saddled up his big old Walker/Saddlebred cross gelding and came to the recue.
I handed the lariat off to him and he tried dragging the cow with me whipping her on the butt. But she just braced all four legs and he had to drag her along.
His old gelding was quickly tiring, so he sent me up to the house for a halter and tractor. I got the halter on the cow and tied her off to the drawbar of the tractor. But she still just braced all four legs and slid along until she eventually fell over on her side.
By now, we were out of the meadows and on a gravel road. Uncle pulled the cow along on her side for a few yards, but we were leaving a trail of cow hair behind and it was obvious we would soon be through the skin.
The cow was too exhausted to stand at this point. So we unhooked her from the tractor and rolled her over onto a hay slip for the last 100 yds to the holding pen and barn. The baby calf still following along faithfully, hoping for his first meal.
We left the cow on the slip and retired to the house waiting for her to rest and regain her feet.
A couple hours later when the cow stood up, we went back down to the pen to try to put her in a stall where we could make her suckle the calf. But she was on the fight bad, and kept charging the corral fence with us on the outside.
I asked my Uncle if he could close the barn door from outside the fence if I got the cow inside. "Yeah, Sure. But how are you going to do that?"
Well, I jumped over the fence into the corral, let that nasty bitch get a good look at me and then I ran as hard as I could run into the barn and over a fence into the second stall, with that cow hot on my heels.
We got her head into a stanchion, and hobbles on her legs, and finally got the baby his first meal. But for the next three days it was the stanchion and hobbles twice a day. She absolutely refused to mother the calf. We turned her out in the pasture and bottle fed the baby until we got him grafted onto another cow.
I would have sold that cow right then or turned her into hamburger. But Uncle kept her for two more years. Her calves made great steers, but she never did raise one of them.
