$14.95 / Perfectbound
ISBN: 9781608449446
228 pages
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Excerpt from the Book
Chapter Six: Branding
The wind chimes ring out. The sun rises, making its
way from Dublin, Montreal, Duluth, and Mountain
Home. Soon it will brush the willows and pine tops;
soon it will light my paper and warm my eyes: a traveling
spirit, posing as fire in the sky.
The Kurtz Ranch Brands: Spear Quarter Circle
and Two Quarter Circle
Summer 2005
When the tulips under the kitchen window
billow, it’s branding time on the ranch.
Each year in early May we gather the cows and
calves from their peaceful life on the spring meadows
and move them into the corrals behind the barn. This
gathering can be a simple matter or it can be morning
of struggle and cursing.
The bawling and protestations begin as soon as
we walk around behind the herd on horseback and
begin to drive them toward the open gate by the corrals.
At least one high-strung cow will sense trouble
immediately and high tail it in the other direction,
leaving her calf disoriented and struggling to follow
or sometimes completely abandoned. At that
moment, Pete takes off in her direction, yelling back
at me, “I’ll get that one. You stay with the others.
Just push ‘em up against the fence.” And off he goes,
spurring his horse over the irrigation ditch, headed
for the scrub oak below the road where the cow seems
to head for cover. Pete’s determination and fearlessness
on his horse always surpasses the mother cow’s.
He always wins out, usually with the help of a third
rider who closes off an open space in the meadow and
allows Pete to drive the cow back to the herd where
I’m walking them along the fence line.
With the herd gathered, we begin again to move
them down the fence line, through the gate, down the
alley-way and into the corrals. One by one, we separate
the cows from their babies, sending the cows out
into a holding area and moving the calves into a
smaller corral. When it comes to the actual branding
routine, we’ve used a number of techniques to gather
up the calves. We’ve followed in the footsteps of traditional
brandings and used a horse and rider to rope
each calf and drag it to the branding area, where
additional hands grab the calf and hold it down.
We’ve pushed the calves down our alley and into a
calf chute where they are restrained. And finally,
when we work with our calves in small groups, which
we often do, friends and family jump in and help grab
a calf by a hind leg and drag it to a working area by
the barn door where we have vaccines, ear tags, and
a branding iron ready.
It takes two hands to manage a calf. One holds
a hind leg and the other grabs the calf’s head.
Together, the two hands sit down on the ground. The
hand at the rear of the calf stretches it out pushing
the other hind leg as far forward as possible, while
the second hand sits on the neck of the calf and pulls
back a front leg. A third hand handles the vaccines
and ear tags; and a fourth hand, usually Pete, castrates
the bull calves and brands the calf. Those on
the ground hold the calf tight. A hundred pound calf
can put up a fight that gives even the strongest help
a beating as the calf’s legs kick wildly for release.
Vaccinations are administered first for common calf
diseases and pink eye. Then Pete puts the branding iron carefully on the left hip, pressing down hoping
the calf won’t move. The searing iron burns through
the hair, crackling and smoking on its way to the
skin. The pungent smell of burnt hair quickly permeates
all one’s clothing and senses and is not easily
escaped nor forgotten.
If the calf moves, the branding iron may slip and
distort the image. Pete strives for a clean brand each
time just as a graphic artist strives for clarity in a
commercial design. A brand indicates ownership and
when the day comes to sell the calf, the identity of the
brand needs to be clear for the brand inspector to
read it. So, if the brand is clean, a small celebration
follows, “Hey, good one.” Or, a satisfying, “That’ll do.”
If the help on the ground gets yanked by a large calf
and Pete slips with the branding iron, there’s immediate
cursing in the branding banter. A hand on the
ground shouts out “Holy crap! That’s a rowdy one.
Get back here you little shit.” And as Pete steps back
to get out of the way, “Damn it, not again. Hold on
now, I gotta get this right.”
In the middle of such a long-held ranching tradition
every spring, Pete and I never fail to feel as
though there were a more humane way to brand cattle.
Our ambivalence never finds a satisfying alternative.
The branding of cattle in the state of
Colorado is state law, so we must carry on with our
chore each year.
So, one by one we work our way through the
herd of young calves. When we’re finished, we push
the calves out to the holding area where their
mother’s eagerly await, having never given up bawling
for their babies return. Once mothers and
babies are together, we push them back onto the
meadows by horseback, the return drive to open
spaces orderly and quiet. Our branding day ends with a sense of satisfaction; the physical labor, the
coordinated work of many hands, and the eventual
reuniting of mothers and their babies at the end of
the day sounds out a deep reminder of a natural
rhythm to the world.
We won’t think much about our Two Quarter
Circle brand until late fall when we get ready to sell
our calves. Sometime in November Pete will give a
local livestock shipper, Neil Chew, a call and ask him
when he can take a load to the Centennial Livestock
Auction in Fort Collins. Each spring, Neil’s family
brings their sheep and cattle into North Routt
County to graze in the high country and return them
come late November to their home place in eastern
Utah near Jensen. They’ve completed this migration
to and fro for over fifty years.
Once Neil is scheduled to back his semi into our
loading chute, Pete calls Daren Clever, our brand
inspector and friend whom we see with the cycles of
the season. Daren wears comfortable western mule
shoes and carries a pink livestock cane when he
comes to our place to inspect our shipment of calves.
He once said he used the pink cane just because he
could. Pete’s comfortable with Daren. I think they
speak the same language about the minds of horses
and their own. The conversation rolls quickly into
roping horses and plans for summer training.
Brand inspectors like Daren are important fixtures
in the animal industry. Part law enforcers, part
gatekeepers, they inspect each animal before it’s
transported and the ownership is officially transferred.
When Daren checks each brand at our ranch,
the cattle move across the corral while his eyes
search for the correct brand as though he’d turned on
a personal x-ray. After he certifies what he saw and
writes up the paperwork on the hood of his white truck, he and Pete talk about who bought what roping
horse from whom and how they plan to winter
over.
Two character brands, like ours, the Spear
Quarter Circle and Two Quarter Circle, reach back
to an earlier time. The tradition of branding animals
to claim ownership goes back thousands of years to
the Chinese who branded their farm animals. The
Greeks, unimaginably, branded their slaves. In the
American West, large herds of cattle grazed vast
open ranges. When gathered in the fall for market,
the ranchers needed a method to identify their own
cattle. So in the spring round-ups, all the calves
were branded. Hot branding irons waited in open
fires to claim each one. The brand might be an initial,
or if two men had the same initial, it became an
initial with a bar or wings or a running symbol.
Brands are registered for county recording purposes
and today can be researched in state brand books.
As the West grew and cattle herds increased, ranchers
ran out of unique two character brands and a
third character was added. Here, a long-time ranch
to the south used the S Bar S brand for five generations.
Once a practical necessity, a brand today is often
elevated to a sign of a special connection to the past, to
a fraternal bond with the ideals of America’s West. A
number of developments in our county claim both a
name and a brand. For example, the Storm Mountain
Ranch development’s brand is a running river over an
image of a mountain range. Alpine Mountain Ranch’s
brand is the letter “A” without the cross bar over the
letter “M” all enclosed in a circle. Neither development
raises cattle nor has a need for a brand, but I recently
noticed a woman in the produce section of the grocery
store with the name of her home development and brand embroidered on her canvas handbag. Perhaps
hers served as a kind of New West coat of arms?
John Clayton in Writers on the Range believes
we should be thankful for those who clamor for a connection
to the history of the American West, just as
this woman in the produce section, for it is they who
help keep the memory and traditions alive. Where
the newcomers and old-timers meet, there’s opportunity
for “a vibrant culture.” I hope it’s so. I hope those
who wear their brands on their ball caps and handbags
come to know the long history of branding possessions
and the true role branding plays in the cattle
industry. And I hope where ego meets true history,
the energy of the ego will turn to devoted advocate, a
new loyal westerner. What a rich meeting there
would be between Daren, our brand inspector with
his pink staff, and the woman whose home in the
Alpine Development was once also home to cattle
Daren inspected years ago, before they were loaded
onto a semi headed to market for the last time.
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