Got a Question? Ask A COWBOY POET!
may 2024
Tipping over horses, caving in the sides of pickups, and charging to kill. While most range cows get ornery every once in a while, some of them become legendary for their temper. This month, the cowboy poets recount the cantankerous cows they’ve worked with.
What’s a story about the most ornery cow you ever came across?
~ Cowpoke
yvonne hollenbeck:
We called her “Bandit.”
She was a black, brockle-faced old biddy with white around her eyes that resembled a mask. There was no one on this ranch brave enough to attempt to tag her calf. Before she went to the sale barn, she managed to tear a rearview mirror off and cave the side in on a ranch pickup.
bill lowman:
Boy—you hit home with that one. Which one do you want to hear about? There’s at least a dozen damned sure “killers” I could write a book on, but I’ll try to cut it to four or three by ear tag numbers.
611 was a very quick, athletic Black Angus that if you rode up within 500 feet of her and her newborn she’d come charging meaning to kill. A lot of cows are touchy when they calf, but you never wanted to get outta the feeding pickup in the dead of winter without keeping some other cows between. She was dangerous year-around. In fact, all of these were.
811 was a high-headed, fluffy-eared, tall black, but at least you could spot her easy in a sort with these features. She always stayed clear of you in open country.
796 would tip a horse over if you made a mistake and got your mount in a bad way. She always had that dead, dull, killer stare that you could recognize before reading her tag number. I’ve known a couple people that way too.
But here’s the story you're after. I guess it was in 2000 because her tag number was 023. We keep our first calf two-year-olds in a close-up pasture at spring calving time and corral yard them every night. We run a 2.5 to 3-hour check on them around the clock. As we were about half done calving the 82 head bunch, we were so proud that this year's bunch were the most gentle, friendly, and docile heifers we’d ever worked with in our lifetime. Our son Lusk and family live across the yard. He’d always stay up late and do a routine check at 11pm. I’d hit the sack early, and then take over the 2am and 4am checks. That pitch black night (a yard light is unheard of), as I shuffled up the creek to the calving pen, I could hear that nice soft mothering sound of a heifer encouraging her newborn to get up and nurse for a first time. It’s always music to our ears, meaning she calved on her own without needing help and all was well.
As I entered the pen, I did my routine check. I then walked over to get an admiring look with a powerful, handheld spotlight. She let out a bloodcurdling “bellow” with her head swinging side to side, low to the ground, and came straight at me. Having a “drag leg” from a bull injury to my knee ACL, I slowly backed out of the pen holding that floodlight in her face as she kept coming in search. If it would have been moonlight on that given night, she would have killed me for sure. I forgot to tell Lusk and his helper Greg about her as they went to feed them at daylight. As Lusk went to tag her calf, he soon learned that the routine bluff wasn’t a bluff. She charged him to kill. At six foot two inches and very athletic, Lusk spun and made a record dash to a large eight by sixteen foot, extra tall, heavy pipe-and-plank bale feeder that he built in high school shop class that holds four 1500-pound round bales. It sat 60 feet away. Greg had previously climbed to safety as Lusk was grabbing a corner upright pipe to make each turn, but on the straight-aways 023 caught him again, blowing snot in his hip pockets. It took a full round and a half before he got enough space to scramble up to safety.
She raised 11 more calves for us. We just left her alone and gave her all the room she desired. Coyotes were never an issue of safety to her newborns and she kept the “environmentalists” out of our pastures. In a lifetime of cowboy'n and ranch'n, I've had two broken ribs, two head concussions, a punctured lung, an ACL transplant, and a total shoulder joint replacement, all from bull and "mad cow disease" maulings.
dw groethe:
Every outfit has more than one of these critters, so there are lotsa stories about them. I'll just do one. Back in the early 2000s, we were sorting out pairs of first-calf heifers to put them out in a larger pasture. Things were going fine, till we got to 236 (you never forget their number) and she blew up like a bomb charging everything and everybody. She flew out and past the trailer gate and headed for the hills, left her calf behind and never came back for it.
Now, if this was just one incident you could forget it, but whenever we had to pen the heifers up again for shots or whatever she was the one always on the fight. You had to grow a third eye in the back of your head when working around her because she'd come after anything with two legs. Finally, come fall, we were preg checking them and I had to get her and a few others in the alley so the vet could get to them.
I was watching her and she was watching me. It was pretty much a standoff till I turned to see how the alley was filling and she saw an opening and went for it. I heard her coming and clambered up the railings to dodge the darn thing. And while I was up there, I looked, saw the boss, and hollered, "Here's that hot one." She fought all the way down the alley and even in the squeeze chute. We lucked out. She was open and headed to the ring for somebody else to dodge and run from.
Thanks for asking.
d dub
annie mackenzie:
Just the other day I got my brother's "nicest cow in the herd" in to sell to his team roping partner. She was good until it was time to enter the lead up to the chute. She decided she was against the entire process and vented her frustration on my horse. I gave her a minute to collect her thoughts and then asked her again to venture through the lead up. Again she declined my request and attempted to go through the gate via my horse's chest.
At that point, I decided to remove my horse from the equation and attempted to persuade her afoot, giving me the opportunity to remove my person should she decide to disagree on going through the lead up. I convinced her to get up to entry again, while remaining on the fence. I thought perhaps I'd outwitted her, but she had other plans. She attempted to disassemble/climb the fence to tell me exactly what she thought. Backup arrived and we finally convinced her that up the alley was her best bet. Now this was probably not the "most" ornery cow I've ever dealt with, but she was the "most recent."
dick gibford:
I can’t remember one individual ornery cow that stands out as the most ornery. Most range cows can be fairly ornery once in a while—that’s their nature. I do have a story about a cow that became a local legend on this outfit over the years. She was a longhorn cow and she was unique because she was the toughest ol’ cow I was ever around.
Ornery cow Old Timer. Photo by Dick Gibford
She lived to be about 21 years old. She had a badly crippled hind leg that she got from an injury early on in her life. She sorta drug that hind leg with her everywhere she went, went a lotta miles, and raised about 17 calves in her brood cow career here on the Walking R. We respectfully called her the Old Timer. Even being crippled, she walked up the 12-mile trail to the high country every year along about the last of May. She had to take her time, but always got up to summer range with the rest and we weaned a lot of good calves off of her. She finally went off somewhere and layed down and died on the winter range. We never did come acrost her head. Probably some hunter found it, though. She had a huge set of longhorn antlers and a huge heart to have made it all those years. We sorta miss her.
