A lesson in cattle, balance, life and death

August, and we are on the backside of summer. The grass is still green with little patches of yellow appearing. Day long sunburn and nighttime mosquitoes encourages you to go indoors after sunset. Packs of coyote pups yelp and howl announcing their finding food during the night. Continual traveling and entertaining this summer exhausts us. And our cows are out of control.

Driving to town to pick up or drop off another visiting relative in Reno, or maybe it was even while driving ourselves to the airport, one more time, the husband admits our cows are finally out of control. This is really hard to admit. Easy to say to a family member but hard to go public with. A rancher wants to be in control of his animals, watching their health, breeding, food, water, and supplements. How do the animal's feet look, any foot rot, swelling, limping? Are coats clean and shiny? Are pests bad? Pinkeye set in or worms taking their toll?

A rancher does not want to loose control. The health of the herd is very important. Luckily ours even though out of our control with their breeding are on the whole doing well. Only one heifer calved way too early in July. We tried to keep it healthy with antibiotics, supplements and drenches of liquids, but we had to be out of town, again for a few days. When we came back the calf we left standing and nursing by his mother is completely missing. Not even a carcass can be found. You feel you have lost control.

Feeling bad, you imagine you could have done more with more time, changed appointments with schools, switched plane reservations. You did not want this situation, but it happened. We choose the private tour of MIT and the invitation to lectures at Harvard on superconductivity and mapping the human genome by professors who are leading research in those areas. We cruised the inland passage of Alaska with relatives celebrating 50 years of marriage who did not want to travel alone since Sept. 11, 2001. We made choices and accepted the consequences.

The calf paid a price for our choices. His mother didn't seem to care what had happened to her calf. She was showing no signs of concern like walking the pasture looking for it. Not calling out trying to find it. She had hid it the first few times we treated it, but we could find it when we walked the field. This time we walked the field, checked the ditches, looked in surrounding fields. No calf. Maybe coyotes, maybe mountain lions, maybe bears took it away. We weren't there so we don't know.

A bull breeding a heifer early is not real bad news, a heifer calving early can be coped with, a cow loosing a calf is regrettable, it happens even under the best of care. Knowing this happened because there was not enough of you to go around makes you feel you have lost control. We made our choices, learned a great deal and had incredible experiences. But I am just talking cattle raising here and enriching our children's lives.

A price is paid. It's tragic when a government creates a situation then loses control, innocents die and no one's life has been enriched by any of it.

n Marie Johnson is a Fredericksburg, Calif., rancher and is married to Kent Neddenriep.

They have two sons, Kyle, and Bradley. Her column appears once a month.