Brandin'
for Love by Ron Snell
It’s a cold, drizzly day in April, in spite of the rosy forecast I
heard on my way up from Texas. I should have known better – Nebraska
can go from rosy to rotten in about the time it takes for a tumbleweed to
roll over. I should have known to bring warmer clothes. I’m courting
Tammy long distance and only get to visit once in a while, but I sure picked
the wrong weekend this time.
Tammy and her daughter, Sheila, and I are going to Tom’s brandin’.
For some reason even people who use good pronunciation everywhere else still
call it a brandin’. Like huntin’ and fishin’. Anyway,
Tom is Tammy’s brother and I want him to be my brother-in-law someday,
which is why I’m going to his brandin’ in a thin jacket and
no gloves on a raw day made for sippin’ hot chocolate and readin’
a good book. My own pronunciation is deterioratin’ as we drive.
The drive from North Platte to Wellfleet is bleak. If we just turned off
the engine and opened the doors, we could sail before the freezing blast.
Spring hasn’t sprung yet, so wildflowers are still a fantasy and the
grass is still playing dead. Rolling hills offer a nice view, but for the
most part you could paint it all in
Ron Snell's 3 books
recount an unimaginable childhood in the Amazon jungle, and his dozens of
articles are ample proof that he'll still try anything once. He is the director
of the local homeless shelter and a wannabe rancherwith fabulous corrals
and no cows.
brown, like those old time photographs.
About the only thing that’s green are the John Deere tractors. Pull
enough of them together and stand them on their backsides and you’d
have an Evergreen National Forest for the Platte Valley.
Tom’s place is in a picturesque valley surrounded by hills. As we
get closer, a bellowing, billowing noise rumbles and roars and echoes off
the slopes like a tornado in the trees. Not wanting to appear too ignorant,
I keep my question to myself until I realize that it’s cows and calves
in clamoring chorus – dozens or hundreds or maybe even thousands of
them being totally crabby all at once.
With a few exceptions, the women are in the kitchen and the men are in the
corrals as we drive up. Tammy invites me to go into the kitchen with her,
but I’m thinking that I’ll never be accepted as a real man if
I’m preparing pies instead of scorching skins. So I walk toward the
action by myself, a little boy with his hands in his pockets on his first
day of school. I’m scared.
I climb over a couple of gates and try to look confident as I walk into
the melee. I shake cold hands with Tom and his dad and brother and I make
sure to get my hands back into my pockets as quickly as possible. I’m
already freezing and I just got out of the car.
“Ever branded
before?” Tom asks just loud enough to be heard over the bellowing
cows. “Never even been to a brandin,” I answer with a smile.
“Just tell me what to do.”
After a lifetime of miscellaneous adventures around the world, I can manage
to look perfectly nonchalant when I’m about to fill my pants. There’s
a whole crowd of people helping out and they’ve got rugged coats,
neckerchiefs, battered hats, chaps and chapped lips. Several glance my way
looking like they could have a lot of fun with this kid.
“Give it a try,” Tom suggests.
“Whatever you need,” I answer without really realizing that
being asked to do the branding is a pretty high risk honor. I mean, there’s
a lot you can do wrong at a branding, but doing the branding wrong is rather
serious in a permanent sort of way.
Tom hands me a wire brush and the scorching hot brand, a long handle of
steel with a grip on one end and a stylized rocking “T” sort
of configuration on the other. A muddy extension cord connects it to an
outlet at one side of the corral, which immediately strikes me as more practical
than the nostalgic hot coals I’d been picturing. Not that I wouldn’t
give my right arm for a bed of hot coals now. I’d lay in it with the
brand.
“It goes on the right flank,” he says, assuming I
know what a flank is.
He leads me over to a calf that’s stretched out on its side between
two wrestlers, bawling and squirming.
“The wrestlers should have the calf down on its left side, but you’ll
need to double check,” he informs me.
All of a sudden, I’m a brander and a quality control expert, which
sounds pretty simple except that when cows are bellowing and calves are
kicking and jumping and horses are dragging more calves past, it’s
not that hard to mix up your lefts and rights. Why, right about now, I could
mix up a calf and a chicken.
There are enough people working on this calf to resemble a MASH unit. One
of them is sitting on its neck, another is in back holding onto its right
hind leg while pushing against its left with his right to keep from getting
a walloping kidney kick. Someone else stops by with a big syringe, plunges
the needle into the calf’s neck, squeezes and marks it with chalk.
Another plunges another needle into its thigh and leaves a different colored
chalk mark, another squeezes drops into its nose and in the middle of all
that, Tom takes the brand out of my hands and places it on the right flank
just below the hip bone.
“You want to put it right about there,” says Tom matter-of-factly.
Of course I can’t see where “there” is because the whole
earth has suddenly disappeared into a cloud of thick blue smoke that smells
for all the world like…well…burning hair. The calf bellows with
renewed vigor and the wrestlers tighten their grip and Tom keeps talking
like he’s sitting on a couch telling me how to knit.
“You want to make sure you leave a good clean mark. If there’s
a lot of hair or it’s wet, you’ll have to do it a couple times
to be sure. Kind of brush it off between times to get the burnt hair out
of the way. When you’re done the branded part should look like newly
tanned leather. Use your wire brush to clean the charred hair off of the
brand between calves. That’s about all there is to it.”
It would be really nice if they had something to practice on besides calves.
I’m thinking Tom is an idiot for letting me anywhere near his brand,
but you never call a man an idiot when he’s got a hot iron in his
hand. I know that much from reading Louis L’Amour novels.
Brand in hand, I try to look and act confident as I walk up to the next
calf. I haven’t a clue what this is going to feel like, but I’m
not backing out now. I check three times to make sure the brand is upside
down, since I’ll be looking at it from the top. I brace my left foot
against the calf, take a deep breath so I won’t have to breathe again
until I’m done, and set the brand against the shiny black hair.
The calf jumps, I jump and the wrestlers look at me with big question marks
in their eyes like I just did something wrong. Tom’s watching over
my shoulder and at least he doesn’t jump. “Remember to orient
the brand to the leg – not the back. With the leg pulled back like
that, if you orient it to the back it will be crooked when the calf is standing
up.”
“Okay,” I say, gasping for clean air.
Tom will be lucky if the brand is anywhere on the calf, much less oriented.
It goes against all my instincts to hold a hot iron on a living thing, so
I keep wanting to pull it away and do it more gently somehow. I’m
slow, but eventually I see a tanned pattern in the black hair. I look questioningly
at the wrestlers for approval, but they seem to think it’s up to me.
They’re discussing the Husker’s upcoming football season, heads
turned away from the smoke.
I back away on wobbly legs and they nod to each other and let go, shoving
the calf in the process so that it runs off in the right direction, chalked
and charred. One down; 80 to go. My fingers are already so cold they’re
going numb. I’m thinking of branding them.
I’m just setting the brand against the next one when one of the wrestlers
yells, “Bull!” Before I know it Tom is kneeling between the
calf’s legs with a very sharp knife. It’s a little hard to follow,
since I’m trying to keep the brand from sliding around on the melted
hair, but out of the corner of my eye I see Tom take a slice with the knife
and pull out tiny testicles attached to something like white rubber bands.
The little bull likes this about as much as the branding iron, so he bawls
and squirms and heaves while Tom pulls the rubber bands out a few inches
and deftly slices them clear through. By now I’ve slid the brand around
and burned hair in three different places, like a brand with shadows. I
pick the most promising spot and press down until I get a clean pattern,
then step back and breathe, expecting and hoping to get fired on the spot
so I can go help out in the warm kitchen. I don’t want to be a real
man anymore.
“You’ll get it,” Tom says patiently. “It just takes
a few times.”
Between calves I glance around to try and get the big picture. Everyone
else is pretty casual about it all. Three ropers are at work snagging the
calves. They ride their horses into the pool of waiting calves, swing the
rope around a few times like real cowboys and launch their loop at the hind
legs of a calf, hoping to get it placed right where it will make the calf
kick up a hind leg or two.
It’s as much like fishing as roping, since success depends on getting
the loop placed in just the right spot and then yanking upward to close
the loop around one or two legs at the precise moment the calf kicks.
The horses drag the calves through the corral to where the wrestlers are
waiting with outstretched arms and muddy butts. Then again, maybe it’s
not mud. They grab the calf, toss it down on its left side, sit in the dirt,
get their grip and take the rope off. Then it’s my turn again.
Most of the calves are wet from a frosty mist. The brand slides a lot on
their melting hair, sometimes scooting a half inch while I squint my eyes
against the smoke. I’m thinking that I will absolutely die if I get
one on upside down – I’ll never be allowed to marry into the
family.
There’s little time to reflect on my incompetence. Calves are sprawled
before me just as fast as I can brand them. When there is a run of heifers,
I’m the slowest one on the team. When bulls come all in a row, the
castration slows things down enough that my inexperience is less conspicuous.
It doesn’t ever quite get to be routine. The calves vary considerably
in size and temperament. Some lay there as if they’ve been waiting
all their lives to get so much attention. Others start protesting the minute
they’re roped and don’t quit until they’ve taken an enthusiastic
swing at you with their departing hooves, not quite aware yet that they’re
no longer bulls.
The rules are simple: first, once you’ve got hold of a calf, don’t
ever let go until everyone is ready. Even if the calf is dragging you through
the corral on your belly, as I witness when “What’s Her Name”
slides past. (“What’s Her Name” doesn’t like the
kitchen.) Hang on even if it hits you with an energetic plop of poop. Even
if you’re arms are getting pulled out of the sockets. Little kids
get it ingrained into them from day one: “Don’t ever let go
until we’re all ready.” Bones get broken if a calf gets a foot
free.
Second, don’t horse around until the brandin’ is over. You can
crack jokes and make rude comments and insult each other to your heart’s
content, but you’re there to work and not to play. If you get careless,
things go wrong. Too much vaccine will kill a calf. A loose calf will slow
everything down. A waving brand will instantly scorch anything it touches.
A wild needle will puncture a person as easily as a calf.
Third, if your back starts to ache, don’t tell anybody. I don’t,
in part because with my fingers about to fall off with frostbite, my back
just isn’t that big a deal. By the time I marry Tammy, I won’t
have anywhere to put the ring.
About halfway through the herd, I hear a compliment about how well I’m
doing. Tom is pleased, Tammy says. She’s come out to see how it’s
going and she smells a lot better than we do by now. I’m already resigned
to the fact that for the rest of my life, long or short, I will smell like
burnt hair. My whole self reeks of it.
Tammy is very proud of me, though probably not because of my smell. She
says that normally they only let family members do the branding, presumably
because they aren’t so inclined to kill family members who screw up.
I’m still thinking Tom had one mollygobber big old lapse in judgment
when he handed me the brand, but at least I’m glad they don’t
all hate me.
And then, suddenly, it’s over. The last calf gets dragged through,
poked, cut, burnt and pushed, and we’re done.
“Good job,”
Tom says with apparent sincerity. “Looks like I’ve got a brander
for next year.”
I’m not sure how happy I am to hear that last part, but I say “thanks”
as I try to straighten my back out. I’m at least relieved that he
probably won’t object to me marrying his sister when the time comes.
We shoosh the cows and calves back out to pasture, put away the tools and
head to the house for some lunch. Or rather for some beer and lunch. I’m
not into the beer thing, but I down three or four root beers, wondering
the whole time why I’m drinking something so cold when I’m already
an ice cube.
An indoor table is heaped with food, so we help ourselves buffet style and
find a seat somewhere. This is Tom and Jill’s huntin’ cabin,
where they let hunters stay while they hunt. Turns out that a pretty good
percentage of today’s helpers were huntin’ clients of Tom’s
from North Platte – they don’t know a whole lot more about brandin’
than I do, even if they do have hats and neckerchiefs. Someone could’ve
told me – I’d have had a lot of fun with folks like that.
NPTSummer 2004 Issue
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