It’s been some week for my camera and for me! Every second day (literally) I had a wonderful chance to gather images of various sorts. I figure I’d better not flit about for this post, will stick to just one of the events I attended, and the other subject matter and photo outings I did will have to wait their turn.

I’d been waiting and hoping for a while to get a promised phone call from my working cowhorse contacts south of the city, letting me know that a cattle sorting was going to be happening and that I would be welcome to attend with my camera. Wednesday of last week was the designated day, and only snow or driving rain (heck, maybe even not the snow) would have prevented me from being there. Rain, yes. My camera is too valuable to me to be abused that way! In any event, it was a spectacularly beautiful fall day, with temperatures just right, so no concerns on that front.

I drove down to my contact’s ranch (Dale and Teri Clearwater) to meet up with Teri and their little son Caleb. Dale had already been at the community pasture down the road for several hours at that point. Teri kindly offered to drive me to the pasture since the road was a bit challenging for city cars, and a few minutes later we were at the scene of the sorting, where all the cattle that had summered together in large herds now had to be identified by their brands, sorted out, and eventually sent off to their owner’s places for the winter months. Since the cows have been running on this range according to their own set of rules for quite a while, they don’t take kindly to men on horses disturbing their established way of doing things, so it’s a bit of a process to get this chore done.

The cattle had been herded into a large fenced area by the time I arrived, and the slow and tedious work of figuring out which cow and calf went together, and whose brand they wore, was well underway. All of this was being done by a cadre of about six or eight mounted cowboys/girls, with a few more arriving from other parts of the property as the day went on.

The noise of the cattle is really quite astonishing. It’s loud and continuous, ranging from plaintive mooing to aggressive bellowing, with everything imaginable in between. They tend to bunch up in a huge seething mass, which slowly but continuously moves and shifts. Some horses and riders work their way quietly and slowly into the midst of the herd to do brand spotting and to work out which cattle belong together, while others form a loose line a distance away from of the herd, to keep an eye on the big picture and to turn back any cattle that try to make a run for it. They seemed to rotate positions, taking turns going in or hanging back.

Once I settled down from the excitement of just being there, I was able to observe that cattle sorting seems to involve a lot of staying in one spot and watching and waiting, moving slowly and carefully within the herd, and the occasional adrenaline rush (for rider and horse) of the fast-paced pursuit of a cow or calf that is bound and determined to break through the lines and get the heck out of there. Both horses and riders need a huge amount of stamina (this is a *long* process when there are a lot of cows to be dealt with) and patience, as despite relentless efforts on everyone’s part, nothing much seemed very different after several hours of sorting and removing cattle from the main herd, although I knew there had to be a lot less cattle in the bunch than when they started out. The cattle just seem to expand to fill the available space so it was pretty hard to tell (from my vantage point, anyway) that anything was being accomplished at all.

My first shot of today shows a scene that was replayed a few times over by several of the cowboys, which is what I think of as “the connected cowboy” taking a cell phone call in the field. How they could actually communicate over the din of the herd is more than I can understand, and many of the calls were taken by riders who were sticking up above a sea of cattle like ships on the ocean, chatting away, just another day at the office.
In shot number two, Peter, the manager of the community pasture and head man of this sorting, is working at his end of a cow that needed to be roped and laid down for some badly needed assistance. She had poked her nose into a porcupine and had a fair number of quills ringing her tender nose. Unimpressed though she was with being roped and laid out on the ground, I’m sure she was greatly relieved to have the quills removed.

Shot number three shows Dale Clearwater and his horse who were responsible for the head end of the cow. The neat thing for me in all this (in addition to getting to photograph it!) was that Peter was one of the instructors at the summer working cowboy camp (see my post “When Worlds Collide”, June 23) held at Dale’s place. I was down to do photos one of the afternoons when Peter was teaching and doing demos of how to do this exact thing–rope a cow head and heels, get it laid out on the ground so it could be doctored, and how to do it in the quickest, safest and least stressful way possible for all concerned. I’d have to say this operation went exactly by the book from what I remember of Peter’s teaching and it was satisfying to see his lessons applied in a real-life situation.

Shot number four is a cute one of young Caleb Clearwater, who seems to be able to settle in with his construction equipment just about anywhere, and one of the cowboys (whose name I didn’t get) on their lunch break just before saddling up for the afternoon’s session.

The final shot for today’s post shows Peter working the kinks out of his fresh horse before the afternoon’s work began. This horse seems to need to have a little buck before settling down to work, and indeed I seem to recall getting a few shots like this of Peter and the same horse during working cowboy camp as well. The amusing thing with these shots was they started out bucking directly away from me which wasn’t the angle I wanted, so I yelled out “Can you turn around and buck parallel to me?”and by gosh they did!! Too funny.

So all in all, I had an absolutely wonderful time and have way too many shots to prove it. Also spotted a really nice herd of black Belgians in the field across the road from the community pasture that belong to the Clearwater’s neighbours, so you’ve got to know that I’ll be making at least one trip back there before too long, I hope.

You can check out another shot of one of the young woman riders in the sea of cattle here , post of September 26 .

©Copyright 2008 by Judy Wood. See original post here.
To learn more about this artist, visit Judy Wood’s website.