Julia Barrett's World

So what’s a nice Jewish girl from California doing up here in the cold among tough, competent, confident, no-nonsense men and women who don’t wear seat belts and carry loaded rifles in their vehicles? Visiting a very dear family member. My face is wind burnt, my lips chapped, my fingernails split and shredded, but who cares? I’m with people who can do anything, fix anything, brave anything, save anything…or shoot ‘em if they can’t save ‘em. The weather is hellacious and glorious at the same time. The cows are half-wild but the babies are cute and I got to bottle feed an orphaned calf today. These people take damn good care of their cows and horses and dogs. The animals’ needs come first. So what if you don’t eat from six in the morning until ten at night? There are cows calving in a blizzard and babies to get out of the cold. There are steers to be counted and tagged, heifers to be weighed, bulls to be fed, horses to be tended to. The winds were so bad last night that at 3 a.m., the rancher found a newborn calf and had to stash him, along with his mother, inside the rolled and stacked hay bales to keep the baby alive until this afternoon. I helped retrieve the little guy.

In little more than one day, I’ve seen sandhill cranes, golden eagles, red-tailed hawks, geese, ducks, tiny birds of all description, a pair of muskrats, a coyote, and a skunk - up close and personal.

So anyway, I’m tired, I’m dirty, my hair is a mess, my lips are stinging and I’m very happy. Night…

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I find myself on a cattle ranch in the Crazies in Montana.

It’s early May. I’m snug in the guest bedroom this night while a blizzard rages outside. We headed out earlier to check on the cows. They’re dropping their calves. When we rode out, it was windy and spitting rain. By the time we returned to the ranch house, it had begun to snow and within fifteen minutes, the snow became a howling blizzard. Now the rancher I’m staying with has to go out again. Two more calves were born this evening and he’ll probably have to bring them in, along with any other calf he finds that has been born in the past couple hours. This country is rugged, harsh, beautiful. Here, life is pared down to two simple facts, life and death. I saw the death pile earlier - the cows who died giving birth, the smallest calf of a set of triplets that died before the rancher could get to it. Their dark carcasses are piled in a small ravine. Scavengers will take care of them eventually.

It’s serendiptous that Siren recently contracted for Anytime Darlin’, a romance-suspense involving a cattle rancher up here in the Crazies. One of the pivotal scenes is set here during calving season - in a late spring blizzard.

I know the Crazies because we’ve been coming here for five years to spend time on a neighboring cattle ranch. I’m not the best at driving cattle. I merely do what I’m told and stay out of the way of the people who know what they’re doing. Last year I was surprised when the owner, who happens to be a woman, told me to round up the stragglers and get them beyond the last fence, all by myself. I was even more surprised that I managed it without incident.

Tomorrow, we’ll be up at 6 a.m. Weather permitting, I’ll borrow a horse and we’ll ride out to cut some heifers and a couple dozen steers that have been sold. We have to bring them down out of the foothills to the pens near the hay barn. It will just be four of us. This oughta be interesting…

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