Bobby and Lance stayed around until noon, then they had to attend to other matters. You could negotiate them in a four-wheel drive pickup, but not with a stock trailer. Our roads became greasy with half an inch of rain. We'd gotten half an inch and it was still sizzling down. Can we get down that road to your place?" Clay and Russell should be here any time. I didn't know.Īt 4:45 Frankie called from Higgins. "Are you going to brand today?" I told him to get a cup of coffee and call me back in an hour. At 4:30 Johnny Scribner called from Perryton. We were getting a nice rain-nice unless a guy wanted to work cattle and had a crew of cowboys trying to haul trailer-loads of horses down eleven miles of muddy road. I went out on the front porch and looked out. The wind had shifted to the north and was blowing pretty hard.
The rest of the crew would meet us at the headquarters pens at daylight the next morning.Īt three o'clock in the morning I woke up. We put their horses in the corral and fed them for the night. Lance, Bobby, and Bill came the evening before and spent the night.
Spring branding is the biggest event of the year on any ranch, and no matter how many times a guy has gone over his lists, he is still nagged by the feeling that something might go wrong. On the evening of the 23rd, it appeared that I was ready, but still nervous.
You hate to drive cattle in that kind of heat. That gave me something else to stew about. The day before the branding turned out to be unusually hot, 94 degrees. I had made long lists of things to do: buy groceries for the crew buy horse feed, vaccine, and supplies gather wood for the branding fire turn on the windmill in the summer pasture trim the feet of all the saddle horses tie up the dogs so that they wouldn't cause a stampede when we brought the cattle into the pens. I had lined up a crew of 12 riders for each day, and had spent weeks repairing gates, fences, and wing fences. I had set May 24th and 25th as the dates for my spring branding.
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