Anyways, I have watched him deliver calves on several occasions—I being his most trusted assistant and also the only one on the ranch who will stay up all night with him in a drafty shed—and I know the procedure fairly well.
It’s called “pulling a calf” and it’s done with two pieces of equipment: a small-gauge chain with a loop on each end (it’s called an “O.B. chain”) and a device called a “calf-puller.” Shall we run through the procedure? Might as well.
Okay, here’s the deal. When the heifer has been straining for several hours and hasn’t shelled out the calf, Dr. Slim throws his rope over the heifer’s horns and snubs her up to a post. The reason for this is that young cow mothers don’t always appreciate having a cowboy doctor in the pen with them and will sometimes try to run him out of the operating room.
With the heifer tied to the snubbing post, Dr. Slim loops the ends of the chain around the baby calf’s front feet, then hooks the chain into the calf-puller, which has a cranking device that pulls the calf out. He ratchets the lever while the heifer strains, and after a minute or two the calf pops out and lands on the ground.
Pretty slick, huh? And it’s pretty impressive that a dog would know so much about medical science, but knowing such things is just part of my job as Head of Ranch Security.
I had watched Slim pull dozens of calves, but this time I noticed that something was different. For one thing, the heifer was already lying on the ground when we got there, and Dr. Slim decided he wouldn’t need to snub her to the post. Bad idea.
For another thing, Slim had left his calf-pullers up at the machine shed. Was that smart? No, it was unsmart and also very careless of him. If he had a pregnant heifer in the corrals, why had he left the calf-pullers in the machine shed? I have no idea, but I sure wouldn’t have done it that way.
Anyways, the heifer was laid out on the ground and was trying to squeeze out her calf. Dr. Slim sized up the situation, chewed his lip for five seconds, and came up with a plan.
Here’s what he said, word for word. He said, “Welp, she’s down so I don’t need to snub her, and I ain’t got time to go chuggin’ up to the machine shed for the calf-pullers, so we’ll pull this little feller the cowboy way.”
And then he gave me a wink. Why did he wink at me? I already knew that he’d just made the dumbest decision of the week and that this was going to turn into a train wreck. He should have saved his wink or given it to someone else who didn’t know what was coming.
I heaved a sigh, rolled my eyes towards heaven, and waited for the ineffible to happen.
Uneffible.
Interebbible.
Do you have any idea what it means to pull a calf “the cowboy way?” It’s a special technique cowboys use when they are out in the pasture with no calf-pulling equipment at hand, or when they’re too lazy to gather up the proper equipment, or when their lives have gotten so dull that they need some excitement.
You guess which one applied to Slim.
Here’s what he did. He looped one end of his O.B. chain around the calf’s front feet and then he looped the other end of the chain around his right wrist.
Do you see what’s coming? I did. I could have told him . . . in fact, I tried to tell him. I barked three times, hoping to bark some sense into his thick skull, but did he listen? Oh no. I was just a dumb dog and he was Mister Expert on Pulling Calves and Just About Everything Else, and so naturally he didn’t listen to the Voice of Reason.
He sat down on the ground, braced his feet against the heifer’s hips, and began tugging on the chain. Oh, and he said, “This won’t take but a minute.”
Ha.
If you were a young cow mother, lying on the ground and trying to deliver a calf, and some guy started pushing on your hips with his boots and pulling on you with a chain, would you just lie there and be sweet about it? I wouldn’t have, and neither did that heifer.
One second she was lying on the ground, and the next second she was on her feet—snorting, bellering, blowing smoke, and throwing her horns.
Well, I saw the wreck coming and I knew that it was up to me to save Slim from his bonehead behavior. I sprang into action with a burst of barking, then dived in front of the heifer and bit her on the nose. At the time it seemed a good strategy. See, if she came after me, she couldn’t possibly harm Dr. Bonehead with her horns, right?
But all at once Slim was squalling. “Hank, don’t get her stirred up! Leave her alone!”
HUH?
Okay, I hadn’t considered that once she began chasing me around the corral, Slim would be . . . don’t forget that he’d looped that chain around his wrist, and don’t forget that I’d had nothing to do with that decision. I never would have done such a crazy thing.
Well, she came after me, sure enough, and let me tell you about heifers in labor. They’re in a real bad mood to start with, and then you add one cowboy doctor and one barking dog and . . .
She was real unhappy about the whole situation and she let me know right away that she had every intention of harming someone. What was I supposed to do, sit there and get myself run over by a train with horns? Forget that. I ran, fellers.
We made several laps around the corral. The good news was that I managed to stay a step ahead of her deadly horns and thus saved the ranch the price of a funeral. The bad news was that . . . well, old Slim was attached to her by a chain and as we lapped the corral, he sure moved a lot of dirt. And fresh manure. He looked like a propeller tied to the cow’s tail, is how he looked.
It was on our third lap around the pen when he got wrapped around the snubbing post. That tightened the chain and, bingo, a cute little black baldface calf made his entrance into the world. The heifer must have noticed that something was different. She stopped, sniffed the air, bawled, and looked back towards her calf.
And Slim. He undid the chain, got up on his hands and knees, and let out a groan. Maybe the heifer thought she’d given birth to a cowboy instead of a calf. Anyways she went over and gave him a sniffing. He looked pretty strange, I must admit. He’d bulldozed so much dirt with his face that it had turned brown. Oh, and the back of his white shirt had a big green splotch on it, the exact color of recycled grass.
That snubbing post had knocked the wind out of him and he wasn’t in the mood to be sniffed, I suppose. He waved a hat in front of her face and said, “Get out of here, you old bat.” Another bad idea. The heifer decided that whoever that guy was on the ground, he had no business lurking around her new calf. She dropped her head, shook her horns, bellered, and started pawing up dirt.
Slim got to his feet and made a run for it. The heifer followed and was taking aim at his back pockets when I decided to spring into action. I left my spot on the other side of the corral fence and went charging into battle. I think I could have saved him if he hadn’t . . . well, gotten his feet tangled up on . . . well, on ME, you might say.
I don’t know how it happened. Apparently Slim wasn’t paying attention to his business. I think he could have missed me if he’d . . . okay, maybe I ran between his legs, but don’t forget that it was very dark out there and I was just trying to help. And don’t forget that I was concentrating on an insane heifer with horns.
“Hank, get out of the way!”
Anyways, Slim did another dive into the dirt and all at once I found myself positioned between him and the heifer. She stopped and we glared into each other’s eyes. Her head was shaking. Her eyes were on fire and bulging out of her head. Smoke and steam and burning lava hissed out of her nostrils.
I was cornered, trapped, exposed, and all at once I realized that heroism had been thrust upon me. I decided to show her some fangs and address her in a firm term of voice: “Listen, you old hag, if you don’t . . .”