The Consummate Stockman

I was raised on a working, cow/calf cattle ranch in the eastern Tulare County foothills.  We always watched for the rain, and celebrated it's arrival. When it rained my dad would often joke, "Let's go in the house and let it all fall on the ground."

If the rains come in sufficient quantity, the grass grows on the hills, and the cows will have sufficient food to eat to keep their body conditions, and raise their calf.  If the rains don't come, either we had to buy hay to feed, or we had to sell cows to reduce the size of the herd so the range would support the herd.

One year, our hills had not gotten hardly any rain by the middle of January.  My dad was the consummate stockman,having been in the business all his life. One day, after we finished feeding hay to the cows in the hills, he announced that he had gotten a call from a man over in the cost range.  They had not had any rain at all, and he had to sell a number of cows.

We thought Dad had lost his marbles.  Why were you buying another two hundred cows, when we were already feeding hay to everything we owned. And now you are adding more?  That'll be another twenty bales of hay every day.

But Dad wasn't phased.  He bought the cows, and had them delivered.  Of course they had to arrive in the early afternoon, after we'd finished feeding hay to the cows we already owned.

When we went to feed hay that morning, we were a little surprised to see a solid wall of clouds off to the west.  By noon, we could see a lot of dark clouds, but no rain.  We knew better than to ignore the obvious signs that it might rain, so we all took our slickers tied on our saddles.

The first truck rolled in, and unloading began about 2:00 PM.  By 3:00 we had all 200 cows in the corral milling around.  Before the last truck rolled out the gate, somebody yelled, "Hey, I just got hit by a big drop."

We all scrambled off our horses, untied our slicker and put it on, before mounting.  We opened the gate and started driving our new cows up the road roughly a mile, as the sky opened up and soaked everything.

Not only did my dad get a good buy on the cows, but most of them were bred and due to calve in the next few weeks.  When we sold the calves that next summer, we got enough money to entirely pay off the cows. His risky purchase turned out to be an excellent business decision.

I learned not to doubt the Old Stockman, even if he seemed to have a crazy idea.  His instinct was that it would rain pretty soon. Even if we fed a little hay, it would still pay off, because he'd negotiated an excellent price for the cows,