Branding smoke….a fragrance that isn’t likely to be bottled and marketed by Dior or AirWick anytime soon, but nontheless a smell that evokes strong memories, pulling me into a reminiscent state of mind. I started helping brand calves when I was five years old, back when getting to go along for daily ranch work alongside my dad and siblings was what I lived for. Considering that a normal five year old would probably recoil at the sight of what goes on at a branding, I admit my abnormality of looking forward to branding days when I was a kid.
Dad’s cows calved on a round cornfield out in the Nebraska Sandhills. He was the only one who grew corn in that area back in the 80’s. We kids would go out horseback every afternoon and bring in the pairs…that is, find a mother cow and her calf, and drive them up to a smaller pen by the barn where they would be looked after more closely. This task of bringing in pairs was a great exercise for children and green horses. It was how I started breaking colts, riding them at a slow pace to gently herd a mother and baby across a quarter mile….there’s nothing better for kids and horses than cattle work.
So then when we had about eighty mother cows with babies in that pen, it was time to brand them and move them a few miles away to another cornfield where they would live until the spring grass was up and they could be put out to pasture. Often it would be planned for a Saturday, and we’d be up early, bringing in the horses and saddling up. A quick ride out to gather the herd, and then our corral was full of bawling mamas and bewildered babies. One of the most fun parts was sorting the cows from the calves. We did this on foot, armed with sorting sticks, and it involved holding the herd in one corner, and Dad would walk into the herd and cut out a few cows, who would run down the alley into another corral. Once the other cows saw those leaving, they would figure it was the way to go, and they’d want to go, too. All we kids had to do was keep the calves from following, which was a challenge sometimes. We made mistakes, got yelled at once in awhile (“quit playing in the dirt and keep your eyes on the cattle!” was something we heard often), but we learned a lot and had so much fun as a family, that branding day remains in my memories as one of our top favorite pastimes.
Last week I got to re-live those emotions a little bit, as branding smoke curled up from the iron I was holding, putting our own brand on the calves that were born this spring at our place. We don’t live in a brand inspection state, but our cows travel out to a reservation in South Dakota for summer grazing every year, and they have to be branded and papered to cross state lines back and forth. So my husband and his brother have their own brands, and we have a branding day of our own. We do it a little easier than when I was a kid. Each calf goes through the chute and gets its vaccinations (and made into steers if they’re bull calves), and then one person grabs their head, one holds a hind leg as they are ushered out of the chute, and the calf is laid on the ground and branded. It is a stinky, repulsive job, but it is necessary, and our vet said that after the initial pain of the brand, the nerves are deadened and it does not continue to hurt the calf.
Then a few days later the cows and calves were loaded up into trucks and trailers and moved five hours west for summer grazing. It is interesting how the cows remember the trucking experience, and are actually eager to climb up the ramped chute into the back of the semi trailer, even though it is clattering and noisy and a very unnatural experience for a cow. They know that their days of grubbing around a corn field for one last kernel of corn, or waiting for a musty hay bale from last year to be unrolled, are almost over….when they get off the truck there will be grass! Green, luscious, lovely grass. And they know it, and they climb right up that ramp without any trouble at all. The calves are more hesitant, because they’ve never seen a truck before, and are scared by all the noise. But those cows know exactly what is going on!
So our cows are out to summer pasture, and last of the branding smoke has wafted away for another year.
