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So I approached as quick as I could and leaned down. The calf scrambled to its feet. Oh my gosh, yay, it could get to its feet all on its own! I was so excited I almost lost the little guy, or girl, crap, that was something else I was supposed to look for.
“Straddle ‘em,” Reece called, again stepping between me and the mom. Something Mama Red did not seem happy about at all. “And do it quick. Don’t know how long mom’s gonna be distracted over here.”
Shit! I got a leg over the baby cow who started wiggling like it wanted to bolt and grabbed its ear.
Its little head started waving back and forth but somehow I slipped the ear in between the flap on the gun. I slammed my finger on the trigger. I jolted with the impact of the piercer, but the cow didn’t flinch at all as the tag went in.
I jumped off and was about to scramble away when Reece called, “See if it’s a boy or a girl. Grab a back leg and peek under the skirt.”
Good Lord, this was no time for jokes. But I did it. Before the calf could scramble away again, I awkwardly grabbed the wet back leg and peeked underneath.
“Girl!” I called triumphantly. “It’s a girl!” I let go and then jumped back and looked at Reece. “I think, anyway. Not sure what a boy would look like.”
He laughed. “Pretty sure you’d know when you saw it.”
“Will you double check just in case?”
He laughed but did. The mother cow mooed at us, but Reece was able to confirm that it was indeed a female calf. The mother moved in and continued licking at her calf, but not for long before the calf was out of her reach, nuzzling for one of her nipples and sucking earnestly, if ineptly.
“How’d I do?” I asked, watching in pride as the little tag bounced in the calf’s ear. I handed the tagging gun back to Reece.
“Just like a pro. Next time, though,” he grinned, “the tag does go the other direction.”
“What? Oh!” I said, looking back down at the calf. Unlike all the other animals around us, the number wasn’t actually visible because I had indeed tagged her backwards.
I rolled my eyes to the sky, but Reece just laughed and patted me on the back. “It was an excellent first tag. Come on, I’ll show you how to enter the new calf in the system.”
And so I learned.
9
A week later, I was driving the ATV by myself with confidence. Tagging newborn calves still freaked me out, but at least I was putting tags on the right direction.
A couple of days ago, one of the cows who’d given birth had mastitis—I wouldn’t have even known what to call it. But her teats were gigantic and swollen. So much so the calf—#9—wasn’t able to nurse, and we’d had to take him back into the barn on the back of the ATV.
Nine would have to be a bottle calf. Which was good news for Bessie, because now she had a buddy to play with. They were herd animals, so that was important. But it had been touch and go for a bit making sure Nine would make it. So Reece had stayed on with me another couple days. But they’d gone perfectly smoothly, so today I was on my own. We were now on calf #16 and since calving season was now really cooking, I was busier than ever.
Each day it felt like I gained yet another skill that would have felt completely foreign and alien to the woman I had been only a month ago.
There wasn’t a lot of time to stop and think about it, but at the end of another long day, I slowed the ATV to a stop at the top of a hill as the sun dropped behind the western horizon. There’d been another two calves born today and I’d handled tagging and logging them all on my own, no problems.
I’d been completely terrified when I’d seen the mothers in labor earlier. My first instinct had been to drive the ATV back to home base to grab Reece from whatever project he and Jeremiah were working on, and drag him back out to… do what? Watch me tag the animal? Protect me from the mother cow?
I kept my cool and everything went fine. Reece was right, mostly the births went along fine without any help from us.
It felt great to finally be going it alone because I hated keeping Reece from his other duties when I was getting paid to do a job. It made me anxious to think I wasn’t carrying my weight. So I’d been cooking and doing anything else I could think of to make up for it while still getting trained.
