“Hold my feet to the fire, guys.” He gives a small laugh to soften the words though there is nothing funny about what he is asking, nothing amusing about the day dawning, about the job ahead, about his intent. We look down into our coffee cups though it is still too dark to see in a cabin with no electricity. We have been awake since four a.m., feeding horses in pens deep with dust, eating bacon and eggs from a cast iron skillet, drinking coffee black, no special treatment.
The cabin door makes its peculiar music as one by one we go out into the dark with headlamp, toilet paper, and shovel. Life goes on, even when it is hard. The old gelding in the corral coughs with dust pneumonia.
By the time it is light, we are saddled up, that cabin door locked behind us. When the sun sets tonight, we won’t have the luxury of roof or mattress, just blank sky above and bedrolls on the ground. We’ve been working out of this camp for several days and it’s time to take what we’ve gathered to the next pasture — minus what we ship. We are cutting deep into this herd. Or he is. After all, Gail is the boss. His eyes show the stress of that role and all that weighs heavy on him.
The month is May. The crew Gail has put together consists of Matt and John and me. Our last measurable precipitation was in August of last year when the monsoons ceased, as if a cruel hand in the heavens had turned off the spigot.
Now the land is fragile with drought. The cows’ eyes match Gail’s as they struggle with calves, born and yet to be. Holistic is a complicated word, I think, as I ride to the top of the trap, sweeping cows before me as I go. The horse between my knees, her shod hooves on the crumbling, suffering ground. Each plant, hundreds of species struggling to rise in spite of inadequate carbohydrate stores or water. The organic matter and microbes in the soil. Each cow. Each critter in this country coming closer and closer to our camps to drink. The Forest Service and their oversight. Other agencies like Arizona Game and Fish and the NRCS. The owner of the ranch who signs our paychecks and his history with Gail and his eye on the bottom line. The markets, enormous and complicated and mercurial, out of our control. The forecast and the currents of air out in the oceans, so far from our piece of desert. Ideals that are often in conflict with reality and practicality. The men I ride with. The one I sleep with, though right now our bed is as drought-stricken as the forest where we ride. Stress, an unwelcome bedfellow. The logistics of branding longears and hauling shippers to the sale barn, a nine-hour round-trip with goosenecks from the corrals where we are going today. The weight of all these pieces added up.
My cows are trying to turn back on me, back to the camp where the spring is now a mud hole, almost dry, and the windmill is unable to keep up with the demand. These girls are thirsty. I promise them a drink at Sheridan Tank. When the drive through the trap comes together, Gail leans from his horse to open the wire gate. The girls forget about the camp behind us and line out. They know how to get to Sheridan Tank. We settle into cow rhythm, and it is a single-file silent drive except for our occasional encouragement to an errant bull or weak calf.
I am always last. Gail knows I can be counted on to bring the tiniest babies and the old grandmas who sometimes stumble. An hour later, when we’re almost to the tank, my ambling peace is shattered. Gail is yelling, “Keep ‘em out of it! Keep ‘em out of it! Hold ‘em off water!” I don’t understand until I get my last cow through the gate into the water lot.
What is normally a large pond filled by rain or snow that runs from the granite boulders above is now a small puddle with a wide muddy verge. Two cows and a calf are bogged in the mud, struggling to either get out or to reach a drink of water — they don’t know which they want more.
I ride hard to keep the other seventy animals from walking into the mud. The men step down to tighten cinches and then, after remounting, shake out loops. John pulls the baby calf out while Matt and Gail get their ropes on the nearest cow, the leader of our drive this morning. The horses brace hard, pulling her free, while I continue to hold my line, driving the cows away from the water they so crave and up toward the top of the lot — over and over. The first mudbound cow and calf are freed, and they join the herd while the men struggle to get ropes on the second cow, John’s boots sinking into the mud. She’s been bogged down at least two days, if not three. She is weak, fragile, and hopeless like the land. The horses seem to understand and gently pull her free. When John steps from his horse to remove the ropes, she doesn’t move or try to rise. As full as my hands are with preventing more disaster, I find I am holding my breath, pulling hard in my heart for the little brindle cow. I can’t bear to ride away, leaving her there to die. Matt steps off to help John tail her up. When I was a little girl, my grandfather would say that a thin animal looked like “a gutted snowbird.” I have no idea what a gutted snowbird looks like but decide the description fits the young cow when she finally stumbles to her feet.
“She had her first calf a few weeks ago.” Gail turns his horse toward the gate we came through. We will leave this tank closed. We can’t risk anyone else getting stuck. I move the stumbling cow into the bunch. Her hind end wobbles and I doubt she can make the two-mile trek to the corrals. The cows are reluctant now under the morning sun. I promised them a drink, and no one regrets my broken promise more than me. I cannot promise them a drink where we are going. Cowboy Corral is watered by a trick tank, a sloping metal roof with gutters that collect run-off in a two-thousand-five-hundred-gallon storage drum, plumbed to a small drinker. Until it rains again, we have only enough water in storage for our horses and the cattle we will hold overnight before hauling to the sale barn. Once we turn these girls loose in the next pasture, a long flat mesa, their water is a three-mile hike, mostly uphill.
We string out again, single file on the trail, and it doesn’t matter that my job description is cowboy. My throat is tight with the realization that the little brindle cow’s calf probably didn’t survive that first night after his mother got stuck in the mud, his cries of loneliness and hunger answered by a coyote or a mountain lion. The biology of the situation, the practical knowledge that she is not lactating any more after her dehydration and stress, does not soothe my grief. After all, I am a mother, too.
I can’t see her ahead in the long line snaking out of sight. Did she duck off into the trees to lie down and die?
The morning goes on, as mornings do, and the cows pick up their pace as we near Jenkins Spring. They don’t know it has dried up, but I do. We go on by.
Finally, we get to Cowboy where pickups, trailers, and our camp await. The whole group walks tiredly into the dry lot. From my position in the back, I miss some of the action, but I ride up in time to see Matt bail off his horse after closing the gate behind the thin, stumbling little cow that he has cut into the small corral we where we normally put our horses. I sit quiet as he grabs an armload of alfalfa and a bucket from the trailer. He drops the hay in front of the suffering animal before toting her water, putting the bucket close to her low-hanging head as she struggles to stay on her feet. I am both shocked and overjoyed that she walked this far. Her tenacity has saved her life. She’s earned her stripes as a desert cow.
For the rest of the day, we work around her — sorting our shippers into the pen where she lies after drinking. Gail sits on his horse, looking over these cows, born on this ranch, known to him in so many ways, big and small. As he struggles to cut into this herd of good production animals, choosing who goes and who stays, he reminds us again to hold his feet to the fire.
“What about that black goat-horned cow? Do you think she’s bred?” Matt and John and I look away. Finally, Matt says, “If she is, she’s late.”
When the sort is done, we brand the longears in the dusty corrals, our mouths and eyes full of grit, our ears full of incessant bawling and pain and the roar of the propane branding pot, the only legal fire according to current Forest Service restrictions. In late afternoon we grab the beers we stashed in the water trough, cowboy-cool, while the pairs mother up. Gail decides to leave the brindle with the shippers so she can drink, eat, and rest overnight before hiking to the top of the mesa to water at Horseshoe Tank.
Beers balanced on saddle horns, we finally open the gate and start the rest on their way. The older cows, as tired as they must be, line out on the last leg of their thirsty journey. They have three miles uphill to Horseshoe Tank. We can’t help them — we just trust the old cows to show the younger ones the only way to water is to walk.
Tomorrow Matt and Gail will haul shippers, two loads each, an eighteen-hour day, while John and I move the stragglers up to the rim of the mesa, tend animals and camp, and help load out each time. We will keep our horses saddled.
Few things are as depressing as a cow camp under fire restrictions. There is nothing comforting about sitting in camp chairs around an empty space which would normally hold a friendly glow. No one is very hungry, but we heat chili from a can on the camp stove perched on the bumper of the gooseneck and splash a little whiskey into tin cups — no ice. The last thing I see as I crawl into bed is our bunch of shippers in the corral. An old horned cow butts the little rescued cow hard, knocking her down into the dirt. She just lies there, resigned. The pillow absorbs my tears.
Through the months of May and June, we continue to hold Gail’s feet to the fire, cutting our numbers in half, getting little money for good mama cows at the sale barn. Gail and I attend a Fourth of July party on a neighboring ranch. Everyone looks longingly at the horizon. The next day, as we drive home, Gail says, “Let’s count up how many of our tanks are plumb dry or closed up.” When the count gets to fifteen, I tell him the game isn’t fun and I don’t want to play anymore.
It starts raining on July 6.
•
“We’ll start jerking shoes just as soon as the barn lot dries out.” The lot is a soupy, ankle-deep mess. Gail looks out the window at the gray sky. If we don’t pull shoes now, the mud will to do it for us. That night it rains three-tenths of an inch on top of the still-melting snow.
The month is February. A pair of snow shoes sticks upright from a dirty drift by the front door. It is all about shoes. Snow shoes, horseshoes, muck boots. Shoes and fire and mud. Since January 1, we have had ten inches of rain followed by thirty inches of snow. Three of those first ten inches came within twenty hours on Valentine’s Day. A lovely gift. The gullies roared that night as we rejoiced around the wood stove, toasting the storm with chocolate and cocktails.
I share a photo of the snow shoes on Instagram, an incongruous image when paired with an Arizona hashtag. Yes, Arizona in late February. When it began raining last July, it kept raining, an adequate monsoon season that brought us up to our annual average rainfall. We have a friend who says that on his northern New Mexico ranch, his number one management tool is rain. With it, stewards of the land look like they have everything under control. Without it, nothing they can do will help. Rain is beyond anyone’s control.
So many in this country celebrated our monsoons, decided we were saved from the drought. But Gail, having witnessed many extremes in his forty years on this fifty-thousand-acre ranch, was more reserved. Around Christmas he made a quad trip down into our low country, returned home to report that we were not out of the woods yet. Soon enough, El Niño blew through from the Pacific and brought more of what we needed.
Now Gail celebrates alongside everyone who cheerfully comments about feast or famine, either too much or not enough, a cliché that resonates as we wade through mud and get the gooseneck stuck at the shipping pens and watch the filaree bloom in March. A friend asks if we regret shipping cows last spring when the next storm brings two inches of rain in two days. No, our responsibility is to the land and the animals. We can always grow this herd again, and each little heifer that hits the ground will have a leg up in this country. Her mama will teach her what to eat and how to move through these rocks and where to find hidden water in a dry spell.
Every creek is running big. We have creeks and springs where we’ve never seen streams before. The ground is saturated. When I finally get out with the dogs to hike a six-mile loop, I find trees down across the trails and I know we will find more down on fences. I am betting we don’t have a water gap left on this grazing allotment. A happy problem and job security. When I arrive at Smith Canyon, an enormous tree lies crossways to the creek, its root ball larger than a car. The grandma sycamore took smaller trees with her when she succumbed to the flood. A landmark to our days is changed. Water will do that.
The next week, we ride barefoot horses a scant mile to move some cows through the fence and into their next pasture. We laughingly say that nothing is where it belongs right now, but we can’t do anything about it with the ground so boggy and the creeks still rocking and rolling. At the salt ground we see the brindle cow we pulled from the verge of Sheridan Tank last spring.
“Look,” Gail points. “She’s springing.” Sure enough, her belly bulges with life. I hope she is carrying a heifer.
At home that night I look at the River Guardian figurine I bought myself for Christmas. She is said to be the bringer and protector of water. Gail adds a log to the fire, blackjack oak, and then turns to stand against the stove where on each side there is a butt-sized clean spot, testament to where we have stood, witnessing the weather outside the big windows. He begins to list every tank and live water and storage that is full and overflowing. He talks about how much water will be in the bottoms of the canyons and what we will see blooming. This game is fun, and I am happy to play.
But we both know there will come a day when he will ask again that we hold his feet to the fire.
•••
Amy M. Hale is doing the unthinkable. Just as ten years ago she walked out of her supporting role as ranch wife and started cowboying for a living, so now, as the author of five books, she is changing her name. Those books, two creative nonfiction, two novels, and one collection of poetry, can be found under Amy Hale Auker. Amy cowboys for the Spider Ranch in Yavapai County, AZ. She is having a love affair with rock, mountains, piñon and juniper forests, the weather, and her songwriter husband who is also foreman of the ranch.