It’s that time of year again. The wind sweeps in off the Bay, the land withers and hunkers down for six months of hard frost. And I must say goodbye to Willy and Waylon, the two Black Angus steers I’ve been feeding for the last year.
This is the hard part. I’ve done this for forty years now and I still make friends with them and give them names and brush them every day and feed them with treats until they come trotting up to me in the pasture like dogs. There was Bert and Ernie, Will deBeast and Mikey, Pancho and Lefty and many, many more. Always just two except for that short stretch when I tried to be a cow-calf guy and kept a small herd of Belted Galloways.
That was a disaster. There are three rules about cattle: if it moves, they run away from it. If it doesn’t move, they knock it over. And if they can’t knock it over, they poop on it. After two years with the Galloway herd the barnyard and the pasture looked like it had been bombed from the air.
These guys have knocked me over a few times, but it was from enthusiasm, not out of malice. I’m still carrying a bruise below the knee from last summer when Waylon aimed a kick at his brother and got me instead.
It’s really hard when I put an apple in my pocket and they follow me through the barn alleyway and onto the trailer. The young trucker looks mystified as he watches the old guy climb into the little trailer ahead of two 1200 pound animals and squeeze between them to get back out again. The same thing happens when we get up to Scotty’s abattoir and his son watches me stand in the dank corral for ten minutes with them scratching their withers and telling them it’s just for one night and everything will be okay.
And then I go into a funk. My wife always says, “Just go out and get two more calves and the gloom will lift. You gotta bring home more cows.”
This is the only explanation for the cattle business. I like the smell of them. All cattlemen have some complicated accounting system to explain why a man would pay $3,800 for a 400 pound calf when the finished animal is selling for $4,000. Of course, the real reason is he requires methane in his oxygen to breathe properly.
But this year I can’t follow the herd and bring home more cows because I am facing a surgery to put a new valve in my heart and tighten up an aneurysm. I have to clear the decks, not lift anything over five pounds and leave the barn empty for three months. So the place feels colder and lonelier than ever. At the pre-op appointment the 12 year old who is performing the operation asked what kind of a valve I would like.
“I’m a writer!” I exclaimed. “Why would you ask me?” It turned out to be a choice between one made of tissue and a mechanical one.
“What kind of tissue?” I asked. “Is it a pig?”
“No, it’s from a cow.”
That felt right. I may not be much of a cattleman but I have formed strong bonds with a lot of cows and I think my name must stand for something in their world by now.
Their pictures are all around me as I write. If they could be consulted, they would all say, “We had a really good year with Danny. It was a lot of fun. We just had one bad day...”
The young surgeon looked up from my file at one point. “I see you’ve had fifteen general anesthetics and most of them are for trauma. You say you are a writer?”
“It can be dangerous work,” I replied. “Paper cuts, falling filing cabinets…”
It’s hard work trying to amuse a doctor. They are trained from birth not to burst out laughing. But I did get a wintry smile out of him and he volunteered that a man who has cut split and piled three bush cords of wood on the veranda should probably sail through this procedure. He promises me that I will be back in the cattle business by the spring.
I will give you a full report.