Working Ranch April/May 2025

Because each life is a lesson, each calf a burden and a gift: hope and fear and faith intermingled in four knob by-kneed legs and soft ears. You for get for a moment about birth weight figuring or calving-window scheming. Instead, you follow the smoke of your breath to the stars and thank the Lord above for the clarity of loss and the healing balm of new life.

out towards a curious heifer. And at the flickering edge of your fading spotlight, with the bright darkness of a crescent-moon night closing in, you see his momma calling soft and low. And when they curl together in that silent night so full of the sound of the things you love, that pressing hand of guilt, of responsibility, well, it lowers just a bit.

you cross the next hill or to the next pen and find the blue heifer — calm in the dark. She’s still pregnant you see but getting pretty close now. Don’t you think? And as you walk in, you pause. You look through the sleeping, the stand ing, the contented bodies and find that one little set of eyes, wide open now after his earlier nap, nose sniffing

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