Cattle Drive Installment No. 4

For a Once-in-a-Life Experience – Part IV
By Mark Brickman

Where was Sam? You may remember from our last installment that we had stopped for the night where the tents were set up and the chuck wagon was parked. It was pitch dark except for the light of the truck illuminating the open expanse. I was ecstatic that Sam had made it back to the campsite safely, but where the heck was he for two hours? The word to stop for the day did not filter into Sam’s ears for some reason, and he kept on riding with the cows. It wasn’t much farther, but just beyond our campsite was an amazingly steep drop-off, and just beyond that was a corral.

To hear Sam tell the story – and I really believe he believes this – he got back to camp around midnight. It was probably 9:00, but it was late enough. Sam told me he held on for dear life, couldn’t see a thing, leaned over and prayed that his horse could keep his footing. When a wrangler spotted Sam at the corral, he offered he and his horse a ride back to camp in a truck. Sam happily accepted the ride. The horse had no opinion.

When we left our campsite at about 6:00 the next morning, it was only ten minutes till we reached the cows, who had spent the night penned up. As they were released so that we could start our day’s journey, I couldn’t believe the slope of the hill that Sam had come down the night before. He wasn’t kidding about how steep it was.

It wasn’t long before I settled into the monotony of a cattle drive. Cows aren’t smart animals. I know that’s a shock. But they can walk in a straight line, and some are faster walkers than others. As the day wears on, the single file line can stretch for several miles. Oddly enough, occasionally a cow will freak out for no reason and take off, literally run for his life. I don’t have the slightest clue why, but I witnessed this happen several times.

The first time I saw it, thank goodness I wasn’t the closest rider. I watched as the poor rider who was closest chase the cow as it ran away, and quickly learned that riding on horseback behind the cow doesn’t bring back the cow. You must gallop faster, circle around the cow and cut her off at the pass. Several days after this episode, I got my chance. It was my finest moment of the trip. I had the opportunity to run my horse, get past the speeding cow and get myself, my horse and the cow back to the line in one piece. In a very short amount of time, I had become a rather skilled horseback rider, and I was proud of myself.

Now, if you remember my horse, Tank, this fabulous riding experience wasn’t on him any longer. On day three, Tank was mercifully taken away from me, and I can’t say that I was sad to see him go. But the circumstance of his departure left me kind of melancholy. In the early morning hours of day two, one of the New Yorkers on our trip, a very experienced horseback rider, did something that we were instructed not to do; he attempted to get on his horse in the morning when the horse was agitated, thinking he could calm him down.

Well, that was a mistake…his horse somehow threw him off and stepped on him for good measure, and the result was a painful ride in the chuck wagon truck to the hospital in Susanville. We all learned a sad lesson that morning, and there was a pall that hung over us as we prayed that his injuries weren’t too severe. This would also break this particular cattle drive company’s apparent perfect no-injury record.

So on day three, as we were breaking for lunch, a truck pulled up, and out popped the injured rider’s wife, who had accompanied him to the hospital. She reported that he had needed some kind of surgery, but would recover within the next several days, and she wished to continue with the cattle drive. There was only one problem…she didn’t have a horse. Just then, a wonderful thing happened. One of the wranglers asked if anyone was willing to give up his horse for the day so that this woman could ride. I was only too willing to let Tank go, but she couldn’t ride Tank; he was the size of a house, so one of the other New Yorkers gave up his horse to her and he took Tank. I wished him good luck – well, both he and Tank good luck, and I awaited my truck ride to the spot where we’d end our day.

It’s amazing that the truck ride was only about a half an hour, and there was actually a fountain at our stopping spot. It was here that I witnessed for the only time the tents being put up and the dinner being cooked by the two cooks (who were both taking time off from their regular jobs as cooks in a Lake Tahoe Italian restaurant), and I also, for the only time in nine days, got to wash my hair and change my clothes. It was truly a blessing and a gift that I felt was well deserved. That night I was assigned my new horse, Star, and he and I would spend the rest of the trip in relative blissful harmony.

Tank, on the other hand, wandered all over the place every night, and I was so thrilled that it wasn’t me that had to go rescue him. Remember, he couldn’t be tied up to anything, and one night he was dragging a tree behind him that was like twenty feet long. It was pretty hilarious.

As I touched on last time, there were about six people from New York on our trip. They were unique in that they had traveled the farthest, were Orthodox Jews and kept very kosher. This dietary restriction is hard enough in New York, I’m sure, but in the wilds of Nevada, it would seem nearly impossible. But they had a workable solution…they brought their own food. No kidding! And the cooks literally created a separate fire and cooked their meat separate from the rest of us. It was incredible.

These people from New York brought a very special flair to the cattle drive. On one hand, they were expert riders, which was impressive, and they were eccentric to the extreme and as fun as anything. They also brought a suitcase full of booze, and although I don’t drink an ounce of alcohol in my real life, I partook every night at the campfire and it helped to keep me warm inside. The temperatures were dropping each day, and most nights it was in the 20s and low 30s by bedtime.

One day, we were crossing the only highway we’d see on this whole trip, the highway between Gerlach to Cedarville, and a car would come by every ten minutes or so. The guys from New York (still, of course, one rider short because of the injury) decided to pull their neckerchiefs, as they’re called, up over their faces and stop the next car, ostensibly to scare the hell out of them and have a good laugh. Since this was a spot where we were waiting for the whole herd to arrive so that we could cross the highway as one group, I was a witness to their antics.

As the first car approached, they rode out onto the highway and attempted to stop the car, but the driver must have thought he was being robbed and took off, challenging them to get out of the way or he’d run them over. That wasn’t successful. The next car actually stopped to see what they wanted, and when they told him that they were on a cattle drive and that they were all from New York, the driver expressed total disbelief. Simultaneously, these guys whipped out their wallets and produced their American Express cards, and the driver, who probably recognized that real cowboys wouldn’t possess American Express cards, greeted them warmly and we all had a good laugh.

It was at the end of this day that the temperature had noticeably dropped. It was getting down there at night, but the days had been relatively comfortable. But this afternoon was easily in the 30s already. It was frigid. At the end of our day, we arrived at an abandoned silver mine, and the rumor was that we were awaiting something, either the keys to get into a building or who knows what? As we were waiting, out of the corner of my eye, I saw one of the wranglers, a professional cowboy, riding at incredible speed in my general direction.

As we watched this spectacle, my horse and myself, the rider was coming ever closer. His horse was out of control, and I actually didn’t know what to do. It seemed that they were determined to come right at me, and as they got within a few feet, I zigged and my horse zagged, and down I went, face down into a small prickly cactus bush. Ouch! To tell you the truth, it didn’t hurt too much, but as I lifted my head up, the reaction of everyone around me wasn’t too good. They told me I had a face full of blood, and the worst thing of all, I didn’t know where I was bleeding from. Another thing about being in the middle of nowhere is that there are no mirrors.

Fortunately, within the next several minutes, the truck with the chuck wagon arrived, and I walked over to the side mirror to check out the damage. I had a decent sized cut on my nose, but compared to what could have happened, I would live. The fall that I’d had several weeks before I left for the cattle drive was much more severe, and quite frankly, almost left me too injured to go on the cattle drive. That would have been a damn shame. Right!!

As we huddled around the campfire this night, with the temperature hovering well below freezing, I listened as one of the buckaroos (one of us), who happened to be a medical doctor in his day job, explain the perils of hypothermia to all of us, and then one of the wranglers told us that it looked like snow tomorrow. The news just keeps getting better.

As I awoke to “boots on the ground” at 4:30 the following morning, it was followed by “Merry Christmas!” I lifted the flap to my tent and couldn’t see anything but snow. Yes, it had snowed at least a half a foot overnight, and everything was white, even our horses. Don’t forget that we must tend to our horses before ourselves, and I felt so sorry for my horse. There he stood freezing, shivering, and if that wasn’t bad enough, he still had to carry me all day. I wouldn’t have been happy about that. It was a miserable morning, but it just got worse.

This day we were crossing over our highest elevation 7,200’, the elevation of Donner Summit. At one point, we crossed a bridge which was completely frozen over with ice, and I saw several cows do the splits. That was hilarious, I have to admit, but I couldn’t relax because I didn’t want my horse doing the same thing. And he was completely weighted down since I was actually wearing every stitch of clothing I had brought on this trip, except for one shirt and one pair of underwear I was saving for the ride home.

It was on this day that I witnessed hypothermia firsthand. One rider completely flipped out, the woman from New York, and took off riding at full blast into the open wilderness. One of the other wranglers took off after her, and he reported later that it took him at least a half a mile or more to get her to stop. She was completely out of it. Another rider, a man from Oakland, I remember, just completely passed out and sat slumped over on his horse. It was a day that I would like to forget, but one that is forever etched into my memory.

Sam and I somehow were surviving this cattle drive, and despite some harrowing experiences, we would live to tell the tale. By the way, on that snowy morning, one of the wranglers had gotten so drunk the night before, he was still sleeping in this sleeping bag out in the open, covered with snow and oblivious to the whole thing. On another night, two men from the BLM (Bureau of Land Management) drove up, had dinner with us and drank enough to have to stay the night. One of them didn’t feel well, had to go off to throw up, came back and announced that he was feeling a bit better. In the morning, we all realized that he had, without knowing it, thrown up all over the side of his truck. Oh, well.

If you would like to receive the first three volumes of this article to kind of catch up, please email me at markbrickman2002@yahoo.com and I’d be happy to send them to you. In the meantime, let me ask you this: What is the Little High Rock Hilton? What did I foolishly do when I saw our ending point? And lastly, was there really somebody that died? Stay tuned, because I’ll answer these questions and many more in my final installment.