Cattle Drive

I always help our neighbors when they work cattle on their ranch, I've done it for years, I'm not much for keeping score but it must be 15 years or more now. There's been five generations of the same family on this ranch, I've been fortunate enough to have known four of those generations. The ranch started in 1911, so this is their 100th year, their brand is a Z6 on horses and cattle.

Today was the annual cattle drive to bring pregnant cows home to calve. My wife went off to work for a couple hours while I fed, caught and saddled the horses and brought them home where she met me about 9 AM. We dressed warm (it was only about 5 above by then) and drove a couple miles to the ranch, picked up the our freinds horses (they work for the ranch full time) and drove out south of Lavina about 7 miles to what we call the Bakan Meadow north of Painted Robe Crick ( so named because the Indians prized the clay along its banks for earth paint to paint their Buffalo robes). From there we rode south a mile mile and a half and started gathering the cattle for the drive north, our freinds went East and gathered the cattle under the rimrocks and we all started them north while the fourth generation rancher led them with a big round bale of hay on the pickup.

 The weather improved  all morning and must've got into the mid twenties, we rode along pushing cows and visiting. Took two hours to get to the bridge on Big Coulee Crick which the cattle hesitate to cross, it actually went pretty good this year and  about another mile and a half got us to Montana Highway 3, where we met the Sheriff's deputy who stopped traffic for us while we crossed the Musselshell River Bridge(another potentially hairy spot) and trotted the whole bunch through town up Cemetary rode where we tipped our hats to my Mom and Dad as well as the third generation rancher who we lost way to fast last summer. Aout seven miles from the Bakan Meadow we dumped em into the airport pasture about a mile from the house. We trotted the horses part way home, enoyed some homemade chicken soup and brought the horses home.

While I was resting after our cattle drive I put the finishing touches on the table lamps I talked about last week.So now I have to figure out an economical way to get the 300 miles across the state to the homeowner, they weight about 20 pounds each!