My First Cattle Drive
The Only Way Out Is Through
Last year I went to my first cattle branding, out with Lyman Livestock.
It was top five best experiences in my life, but I wasn’t a participant-I was just there to learn and document.
This year…this year was different.
When I left at the end of the first one, one Kevin Lyman casually said, “we’ll put choo on a horse next year!”
I laughed, and saw that he didn’t and then he walked away.
So for the past year I’ve wondered, am I actually getting on a horse? I should have taken lessons in the ensuing 365 days but I brushed it off cause he had to be joking, right? They’re not going to put a greenhorn art nerd on a horse to push cattle.
Hard cut to a year later, where the greenhorn art nerd was on the back of a buckskin trying keep its head up to keep it from from full sprint running across a pasture.
Yeah. They weren’t kidding.
Keep it’s head up, check and set.
Those were the in-depth lessons I got for my second time in the saddle. Outside of that I was told to just listen, pay attention and go where I was told to. Assuming I could get the horse to agree.
The young horse I was on wanted to work, and run. I was up for the work part, but running was a bit outside of my comfort zone as STAYING ON and casually going left and right were my main priorities.
It was a learning experience in many ways, and also made me thankful for having been raised by a cowboy. I was already accustomed to minimal upfront information and context, and to “figure it out.”
It took a couple of hours, but we did.
After the initial WTF and wondering how I was going to survive this ordeal, suddenly the horse and I plugged in and we were doing it. We were moving cattle with the rest of the outfit. I wasn’t the top hand by any measurement, heck I wasn’t really a hand period. I was just a body on a horse helping to make a wall to push cattle forward.
But it was real.
There I was, sitting atop a horse looking up at misty Utah mountains with a group of cowboys pushing a herd of cattle.
The art nerd, who was the sick little boy from Ohio, now a man on a horse doing work.
Never, in a million years would I have ever thought this was possible a short while ago, yet here we are.
