On the coldest of mornings, calves come into the world

By Virginia S. Hutchins

The Times-News

BUHL, Idaho (AP)--A pickup of respectable age, frosty but warming and already loaded with hay, idled beside the old rock barn when I arrived at Larry Shark's pastures.

Moments later, another pickup brought Larry, 65, from somewhere beyond the haystacks, bouncing over rigid ruts.

"We've got an east wind this morning. It's pretty raw," Larry said that early-January morning, already a month into his calving season. "It's really been a wet winter, and today is the first day it froze back up."

Calving in December and January is tough work.

In the coldest weather, Larry follows his 11 p.m. check of the pregnant cattle and new calves with more rounds at 2 a.m. and 5 a.m. Inside the weathered, pigeon-populated rock barn--a milking barn in earlier days--heat lamps hang over pens of particle board and straw to take the chill from calves born under open sky at night.

But this season of birth, a couple of months earlier than on many ranches, allows Larry to brand the calves before his cattle mingle with the herds of other Salmon River Cattlemen's Association members. Larry's cattle, pastured just south of Buhl during winter, return to the range in the Berger area in early March, then are trucked to the association's shared acres in northern Nevada at the first of May.

So calving is cold.

The morning I visited Larry's Buhl place with photographer Meagan Thompson, the heat lamps were dark, the newborn pens empty and all the calves back in pastures with their mothers, save one. A calf a couple of weeks old, rejected by its mother, waited in the old barn for Larry to bring a bottle.

While water heated in a microwave, Larry apologized for the barn's clutter and described the three births he had assisted so far this season.

Among this year's 50 replacement heifers--first-time mothers--one carried a calf big enough to need a tug from Larry. But only one. With just six or seven pregnant heifers yet to calve (and only three open, or unbred, among the 50), Larry was ready to dub this an "excellent bunch of heifers." They "calved easy."

About 275 other head are calving on the Shark place, too. In two cases, the first tiny hooves emerged upside down in the birth canal, so Larry pulled a long sleeve over his arm to investigate. Both times, Larry felt a tail instead of a turned-back head, indicating the upside-down calf was arriving back feet first, too. They needed his help, but they had a chance.

Larry saved one and lost one. Too much fluid ran out of the latter's lungs, and it lived only a minute or two.

"But that's part of the deal, too," Larry said.

He emptied the warm water into an oversized bottle and ladled powdered milk from a bag on the floor. The motherless calf banged against the gate of its pen.

"He's getting kind of aggressive now."

The youngster made quick, slobbery work of the bottle and gave a wheelbarrow handle a try.

One pregnant heifer, dilated and starting to "bag up" with milk, shared the barn that morning. Most heifers calve in the loafing shed, but if Larry spots an imminent birth in time, he brings the heifer to the barn where old milking stanchions can hold it still if he needs to help, and straw keeps things cleaner.

Meagan and I climbed into the cab of the empty pickup, and Larry backed it through ruts of frozen mud to the haystack. A lariat was coiled around the gearshift. Larry's leather bag of pills and injections was stashed behind the seat. And gloves--in a quantity that surprised me--littered the seat, the floor, the dashboard.

Some of the gloves are comfortable models, some more practical for handling wet calves. Snowy hay bales can soak a pair of gloves in minutes, and Larry dries them on the truck's heat vents. Once in a while he gathers up the whole lot and takes it to his wife, Janet, for washing.

Janet Shark helps with all the other work, too, at this 160-acre beef operation and at the couple's 160-acre row-crop farm, where they live, not far away. Best thing he ever did was marry that lovely wife of his, Larry told us as we headed for a pasture with a full load of bales. He repeated it for emphasis.

We bounced into a frozen pasture occupied by a few dozen heifers and their calves, and Larry honked the pickup horn to announce the meal.

"They're not used to coming yet," he said.

They'll learn. Larry put the pickup into low gear, hopped out and let the truck have its head. Driverless, it crawled across the ruts, and Larry walked behind--pulling off bales, cutting the twine and gathering each string in one hand. Twine is nasty in the bowels of a calf.

After a few minutes, heifers ran to the line of hay Larry had left behind. Calves followed--some to nurse, some to nibble.

"They're starting to figure it out now," he said.

More modern folks use tractors and feed wagons, Larry explained. He's "old-fashioned," still feeding from a pickup and binding hay in bales small enough for him to handle.

The second pickup--also outfitted with lariat, medicine and array of gloves--carried its hay to a pasture of cows. Those savvy animals, "second calvers" and older, took note as soon as Larry opened the gate. They snatched bites off the moving truck as Larry pulled down bales and watched out front for calves.

"I've never run over one yet," he said.

He didn't that morning, either. But for a few moments I was sure the unmanned pickup was headed for a rock pile.

I was wrong. Larry apparently knows the path of a pickup in low gear. (Not that he's a stranger to mishaps. Once a pickup slipped into a higher gear during feeding, ran over his foot and ended up at the bottom of a pasture. Another time, the doors locked while he fed yearlings, and the truck rolled through barbed wire and came to a stop in a ditch on the far side of a road, wheels still turning.)

Meagan and I rode along as Larry circled several pastures in the pickup, pointing out a couple of calves only a day old. He separates his cattle into small groups during calving to keep a close eye on their health.

A dry, tight udder? Someone's going hungry. A calf with droopy ears and lowered head? Larry might have some doctoring to do.

That morning, he spotted a calf lying apart from the others.

"His ears are up," Larry said as we drove closer. Good sign. But he got out anyway, put his fingers in the calf's mouth to check for warmth and concluded it was fine.

All well for another day. Cows merely bunched up against the wind and regarded us with little apparent interest.

"East wind," Larry said, "is always colder than west wind in this country."

Date: 2/23/06