A Day in the Life of Modern COWBOYS in MONTANA - What it's Like!

This week on Life in the West. He's an orange cat, so he can turn on you any second. We got the old cowboy. How you doing? And he's been shot with a shotgun right here. Look at these thorns right here. Oh, that one got me. No, don't push her. Don't push her. There you go. Come on, get up there, get up there. Six pairs. Whoo. That's got to be like a record. Clover? Yeah, there's red clover and white clover and lamb's quarters and mallow and plantain and dandelion leaves. And I've got my, I've got my rest. Cause if you don't run this town, do I follow you? Well, I've got to run on, keep on running to the sun. Here I'm falling off, and there I am. Oh yeah, oh yeah, oh yeah. Well, it's time to do some cowboying. This is Calabar. And this time my two sons are coming along. So we're bringing along Summit. Heston here is going to ride Pepperoni. And we're going to stay overnight in the tent there. And tomorrow we will start pushing cows. Seven in the morning till usually 10 o'clock at night comes a ride, which is a long one. OK, come on, Pepperoni. Well, Calabar's like, what in the heck? Because usually he doesn't have anybody to go with. He's always by himself. Bring the other horse. Why did you wait until you got into the trailer? They always do. Almost every horse will get in the horse trailer and then crap. It's going to be about a two and a half hour drive. And it is right now at seven o'clock. So it's going to be a late one. I thought we were going to just go turn the light. Put us up in this nice little cabin. It's late. We're going to get up early because it's getting late. This was kind of nice to be in here instead of having to set up tents in the dark. See, my lovely wife, she makes up these. She remakes these breakfast burritos with eggs and cheese and hash browns. And it's awesome. Boy, they're handy when you're doing stuff like this, because all you have to do is just grab a pack of frozen burritos and throw them on something to warm them up. Not a bad spot to to warm up some breakfast, though. Gavin went over to catch the horses and give them some water, so. We're all saddled up this morning. It is six. What was it? Breakfast burritos are almost done. All right, let's get. I'll take one of the more of them. Burnt ones. Just about drop that on the ground. That would have been a cry in shame, and I still would have had to eat it. Oh, yeah. Yeah. He's curling his breakfast burrito. Yeah. Why? I don't know. He's 14, 13. What a weird, good old dark roasted breakfast burrito. What the heck? It's the boss man over here. Are you riding today? All right. We got the old cowboy. How are you doing? Yeah, you can call me an old cowboy. Yeah. Hey, I'm Heston. Heston? Heston. Good to meet you, Heston. I'm Dave. He got he roped the calf over here on the other side of that road. The calf went underneath your leg and got wrapped around. Yeah, it ran between me and a horse when I had my back turned on him. Then the horse took off and drug Dave by his leg across the road through a fence. Oh, my goodness. Across the bridge. All the way to here. That that that sounds like a nightmare. So do you walk a little bit stiff from that? No, that's from all my leg surgeries. And he's been shot with a shotgun. Oh, wow. Right here. Right there. Good eye. Yeah. Amazing that he's still alive from that one. Oh, pretty cool saddle there. What one are you riding? That was my grandpa's saddle. It's an old George Lortz saddle. Early 1900s. Yeah. The first thing on the agenda this morning is to round up all the cattle in the hills above us and bring them down into the corrals. After getting general instructions and helping my sons get oriented with the lay of the land, we all spread out across the meadows to head down through the thick stuff and gather the cattle. This is going to be pretty brushy in here. So you may have to get off at some point. See the elk over there? He said to leave her back. Don't take her in the corral. Hey, hey, hey, hey, hey. There's some, see, hiding up there. Hey, there they go. Now, if you see these, you got to watch out for these thorns. Look at these thorns right here. Those things will get you. So like right there, I'm going to get these out of the way. Hey, cows. Hup, hup, hup, hup. Hey, cows, hey, cows, hey, cows, hey. Watch out for the thorns there. Yeah, they'll rip your shirt. Hup, hup, hup, hup, hup. Oh, no. Hey bull, hey bull, hey bull. Oh, oh, oh, oh, that one got me. Oh, yeah. I don't know. You don't have to, Heston, but I'm going to. I'm going. I got stuck by a thorn in the face. Yeah, those are pretty rough. Hey, cow. Come on, bud. Hey. Hup, hup, hup, hup, hup. Hey. OK, we just have to pull our way through here. Kind of got hooked up on a tree there. No, don't push her. Don't push her. Don't push her into me. Let me turn her around. Hup, hup, hup. Hup, hup, hup, hup, hup. When you have a cow doing that, she's usually convinced that her calf is back there. Oh, don't chase him. Stay with these. Stay with these. Watch these. OK. Hup, hup, hup. No, no, no, no, no. Where are you going? You had the calves, so I turned away. Everyone's first inclination is just to chase these calves that squirt out of the herd. But you want to wait just a second until they stop and look at the herd. Then you can chase them right back into the herd with no problem. Oh, right there. Hup, hup, hup, hup, hup. It was one calf that was in the wrong field, so I had to get around it very carefully. This can be a really tricky situation or this calf could be gone or through the fence. The last thing you want to do is really chase the calf. So you've got to get way around because they won't move off you. Normally. And then all of a sudden, when you don't want them to go anywhere, they'll take off when they see you. So you can see him right here. So I'm just going to go way around him. Nice and easy. My horse thinks we're not going to go nice and easy. There you go, buddy. Keep going. Keep going. Keep going. Go to the left. If you keep moving. Keep him moving here so he can't look around too much. There we go. Whoa, whoa. OK, so we're going to try to take these bulls out. Keep going. Keep going. There you go. Keep going. Keep going. There you go. Stay right on his butt. Right on his butt. Up here. There you go. That's why you got to stay on his butt. You were back too far. So what Heston did wrong was, and he doesn't know, he's just young. I'm trying to teach him. But he was right up next to the bulls hind end, which keeps it going. And then he slowed down. And then when I told him to get up, then he had to speed up and he sped up just as that bull decided to stop because there was nobody behind him anymore and ended up pulling up beside him and getting his knee kicked. Luckily, I have so much sympathy for this kind of stuff. Backed off and then he was able to turn around and kick you. Kick you in the leg. So you had to run up on it. You got to watch him. OK, no, no, no, shoot. Get out of the way. Get out of the way, Heston. You're right behind where he needs to go. So you start out moving these things slow. You try to. And then at some point you just have to take her by the reins and force this sucker through the gate. No, I need somebody to ride the fence. Come on, get up here, get up here. Whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa. But not too far ahead. There you go. Like stay on his hip. Unless he goes and tries to outrun you. Stay back, back, back, back, back up. I mean, you, Heston. There you go. When he's turning away like that, then see their turn. He's trying to turn that way. That means you're too far forward. Get up closer. There you go. Stop, stop. Whoa, whoa, not too far. Right on this corner, quarter is where you want to be. Unless he runs away, then you want to be on his shoulder. It's a lot of crap, yeah. Yes, there you go. Back, stop, stop. Too far, too far, Heston, too far, too far. There you go. See, he turned and then I stopped. I didn't go forward anymore. You got to kind of this is a nice bull though. He's going to see the gate and go, yep, there's the gate. The other one was a little worse. So that's it for the bulls. It's got to be it for the bulls. So right now what we're doing is we're finding a baby with this mom. Yeah. And then we're putting them out through the gate. OK, we're going to go real slow when you get up here. OK, slow, slow. That's a baby with her mom right there. Take him through the gate, Heston. Push him up there. Finding the one with his mom. Sometimes you have to look a little bit. There's a pair right there. We're going to back her up until she turns, hopefully towards the fence. There we go. Take her right out the gate. Nice and slow. There you go. Good girl. We have to keep finding pairs until we get 187 of them out of this gate. Heston and Gavin and I decided to speed this up by doing groups of pairs. A pair is a cow and her calf. The trick is knowing which calf belongs to the cow by reading the animal's body language and then trying to sort just that cow and her calf off of the rest. Baldi, no, the black one and the black one here. I'm just trying to let that. Let the Baldi go if you can. There you go. I'm going to push this cow out of here and hopefully just her calf follows her. That's all right. We got him. We got him. There we go. Just like that. We have really screwed ourselves now because we're doing three at a time, three pairs at a time. And I don't think we can keep that up. But how many you got? Three pairs. Oh, I'll leave you for later then. These two pairs here, I'll leave for later. We don't want that pair, but take it easy. Take it easy. Pull them up a second. Hang on. Yeah, she does. And the one in front, right there, perfect. Oh, right there, right. Take that other one. Take the other one. There you go. Four. Whoo. We were doing three pairs at a time and we got a little extravagantly, maybe greedy and went to four pairs at a time. Apparently we had a pair. I see. We were just walking super slow and she goes, full scatter. That's funny. Now we got to go five. OK, now we got to go five at a time. I don't know about that. See those those pairs are sorting themselves off right there at the front. See them? They're coming out on right on the bank. Yeah. So if we can take these orange pairs back this to this corner. There's a brown. There's that brown pair. Yeah, the brown pair and the one right beside him. Yeah. And behind him. Yeah, that's what I mean. There's a bunch right behind him right there. So let's let's go. Let them go. Let's go that way. OK, let's try to take them slow so we don't get them. That's a pair right there, too. Well, I'm looking to see if it is. Is it a pair? Yes. OK, right here. Yep. Oh, oh, hey, hey, hey, hey. Hey, cows, up, up, up, up, cows. Hey, hey, cows, hey, cows, hey, cows. Hey, cows, up, up, up, up. Hey, hey, hey, hey. Hey, cows, up, up, up, up, up, up, up, up. How many is that? Six pairs. Whoo. That's got to be like a record. Yeah. At least it's our record. Yeah, we jump. We jump from four to ten to ten. We figured, you know, no more messing around. Yeah, exactly right. We've created an unrealistic expectation. Yeah, we did. We did. All right. So we got done sorting, but one there's one cow that she's got her calf already in there. This is 1717. So we need to take her cow. We just need to take the cow over there by herself. Just the cow. Because her calf went in with some other pairs. So, Gavin, come here, quick. So if they close the gate on me, go get the gate for me, would you? He's got to open the gate and then she's going to try to leave. But I think we can get her. Hey, hey, hey. Hey, there we go. There you go. Right there. Whoa, you missed the gate. Whoa, whoa. Good job. Is that 1717? 1717. Now that we have the pairs and everything sorted out of this corral, all the rest of the cattle in the corral need to be moved up to the top of the next mountain over. Hey, cattle, up, up, up, up. I was waking up this morning, waking up before it's killing nine. Kind of heavy on my shoulders, tracking down some moments back in time. I can swore that I was in it down to every minute. Some of this stuff is, especially this time of year in the spring when these mountains are nice and green. It's amazing. Beautiful, isn't it? Done with the first half of the day. We're going to go eat some lunch. We're going to unshaddle these horses and get some lunch and then start with the second half. Yeah, which one is he? There's two cows, right? Yep. Huh? I mean, it might be perfect. Whoa, whoa, whoa. Oh, and then she's lucky. Your scent is on again, so look at that. Thanks. Looks good. Yeah, I see some clover. Yeah, there's red clover and white clover and lambsquarters and mallow and plantain and dandelion leaves and just all kinds of things. Yeah. Well, it looks amazing. Yeah. This is all from picked around the ranch here. So did an old Indian chief teach you that? Yeah. Look at that. And I suppose the cranberries probably aren't from here. Is this recipe a family secret or? No. Something in your family? No, it's not a family secret. It's not a family secret? No. Hey, I've gotten much better. Yeah, it's probably better now. I'm pretty sure Trinity remembers that I was. Oh, yeah. Yeah, he was really picky. I took goat's milk to school with me in one of them jars with the lid on it. I looked like the poor kid, but. Oh, you did? Bologna sandwiches. When Scott would come with his Doritos, we thought, man, he's wealthy. He's got Doritos. And he would crunch them all up. Crunch them all up in the corner. Eat them all like the powder. Yep. I remember that. This is what we're calling pasture salad, OK? OK, pasture salad. Because he picked this all on the ranch. Clover and what's that? Lamb's what is that? Lamb's quarter. I've known. I've tried that before. And dandelions? Dandelions, strawberry leaves, two different kinds of clover. It's really good. Yeah, I ate it really fast. These little things are. These clover flowers are actually very good. We did see one of the bulls that Scott was missing this morning when we went up. We're going to see if he maybe, he was in a really bad spot where you can't even ride through that. Where the bull was, we saw him. There he is. There he is right there. Almost immediately. Right? Look at that. Goes right to the brush. Well, he just went down a tunnel. If you want to drive this back around, I'll stay on following him on foot. OK. So thick in there. So thick. Log. Yep. Right there. Oh, there he is. Came back out. Did he help? Is the dog helping or? Sort of. She's only eating on soles. Yeah. And she can run through the bushes a lot faster than this. Basically, all I have to do is kind of harass them until they come out somewhere. They like going into that brush because they know somebody else can't really get in there with them. I mean, you're going to have people watch that and be like, oh, you've got to do that with a horse. You can't ride through that. You can't ride through it. It's not fast enough to keep those down. It doesn't do you any good. No. So you have to get a dog anyway. And he's trying to go back and forth and back and forth. He's just trying to go somewhere where we can't go. I just keep him out here where I can. Yes. Right back to the brush. He's trying anyway. But if you can keep him out here. I don't know what to do with the views, though. They're pretty bad. They are. Around here. Yeah. It's pretty rough to have to follow a bull down the hill and that, you know. Yeah. Montana is just a cesspool of ugliness. Isn't it? Yeah. Yep. Stay. I think we're doing such a bad job. We need some more people from out of state to come tell us how all their stuff is run. Stick to skylines that, you know. Exactly. Absolutely. Yes. On the fence. He may have a chance to keep him out of this brush over here. But. To a point. It's possible. But not extremely likely. Because all he has to do is get by us and he disappears into that stuff. OK. He'll have to take the road back to the fall now. Because this is about as far as he can go. Oh, I can't go here? No, you can't go any further. Oh, OK. He's going to have to just try to stay on foot, hopefully. I can try to sneak in there and get this gate. See if he'll. Uh-oh. There. Oh, he's going to miss it. Found again. Get around back to where he's going. Because he came down off that hill over there. So he's got to be right down in here now. Sounds good. I'll keep my eye open. So he lost him in this thick stuff over here. He's got to be in there somewhere. But we'll just kind of go parallel with him. He's going to go down with the dog through the brush. And see if he can get him to come out. I can see 10 feet. That's it. So I can't see anything. There he is. You see him, Scott? He's ahead of you up the hill a little bit, though. You can see him right under there. There he is. The bull's going to come right down this road. So we want to put these calves somewhere and then put the bull in here. Yeah, you guys are in the way. It didn't go that way. Come on, come on. Come on, Calvin, get in there. Get in there. All right, bull's coming right there. Go right in there, big boy. There. One more bull down. How many are you missing now? Two more. Father? Yes, son. He's like, no, we're done. Over his head. You ready? Are you ready, Calabar? You already got ridden hard for like a few hours this morning. Now it's time to do another three hours. Now I'm actually going to get on you. Are you going to get on this time? There you go. Oh, she's like, whoa. Did you get burned? I gotta go get my sweatshirt. There's a cow right there. Oh. Where'd that one come from? Where's your raincoat? Go get it. Go get your raincoats. It might rain on us. Tie them behind your saddle. I just gotta go get my sweatshirt and stuff. Hey, Scott. Yo. There's a cow right there. Oh, OK. So you knew she was there. I do know she's there. Gotcha. If you guys don't know me at all, you'd have to not know me at all to know that I tend to leave things places and then not be able to find them. And that's not, anybody that knows me is laughing right now. Because they know that's exactly true. What I tend to do is be thinking about four different things steps ahead of this one. And so what I do is I set something somewhere without knowing that I actually set it there. But when I set it there, I think, oh, I gotta remember that. And then think about 40 other things and never think of that again. So, it just happens. Luckily, it's still there. And we're gonna head up through the rain, up to the high country. How many miles is it? About four. It's gonna start raining enough. We probably should put what rain gear we have on. It's just a little hot is what the problem is. I'm done. Are they supposed to be coming out of that gate? The cows are getting through the gate back into here, which they're not supposed to be. So I gotta get my shirt on and go help them. Yell at them. Yell at them, Heston. Come on. I better start helping. My saddle is wet right there. You guys are gonna have to run them this way. You're gonna have to keep them in? I'm gonna have to keep them in. Heston, come with me. It's gonna be hard because they're all gonna want to make a break for it out of this gate. Hup, hup, hup. Hey, hey. Hey. Get out of here. Hup. Hup, hup, hup. Hup. Let me get a horse so I can... Come on, hup. Hup, hup. Yeah. Hup. These ones are not going in the right place. Hey, hey, hey. Hey, hey. Get back there. Hup, hup. Hup, hup, hup, hup, hup. Yeah, clip all in and get your butt busy. There you go. There we go. There you go, cows. Hup. Hey, cattle. Hup. There, that's much better. That's where we started from. We might have been a little early, but if we wouldn't have been... If we would have been any later, all of these would have been out there. Yeah, everything would have been back out there. Yeah. So now, now we got to wait for somebody to go around on the road and open the gate. And then we'll push them out of here. Looks like it's probably going to rain on us the whole time. Hopefully, we're going to put one machine out front just to close gates and open gates and stuff like that. And there will be a machine behind us with water. Like I'm talking ATVs. Behind us with water and things like that. And then somebody will drive the horse trailer up so that we don't have to ride all the way back five miles. Hey, Jason. You guys... Where are we at, I guess? What? No. Where? No! Well, Calabar is biting her in the butt for some reason. She's like... I'm just going to walk over there and bite her for some stupid reason. I don't know. Okay. Test it. Go that direction. Yep. Hey. Hey, Cal. That's how you get them started. Hey. Yo. Come on. Come on, girls. Hop in there. Yep. Come on. Yep. Okay. Hop up there. Push him in. Yep. Hey. Yep. Hey. So if they will mosey without being pushed too hard and they won't start to stop on you, then the best idea is to kind of hang back and let them move at their own pace. You move faster that way. But if they start stopping and stuff, then we'll have to push them a little bit. Sometimes... So what you really want to do is not push cow. You want to have them... You want to get them started and then just kind of let them go. But that doesn't work in the heat. So if it's really hot, they will try to jump underneath your bush and in every crick and go through every fence. Otherwise, like this, if we can just let them kind of roll down the road like this, this will go really nicely and smoothly. So if we try to push them, we'll bunch up the back. When you bunch up the back into a bunch, then they start trying to squirt off on the side. I mean, everything's good right now. So those cars... This is always an interesting experience for cars because they have to kind of push their way through the herd. And sometimes the herd will just stay... Some of them will just stay right in front of the car. I mean, just like right in front of them and think that they're being pushed. What'd she do? Oh! Wow! She's a contortionist, huh? A couple people went up in the middle of the herd to try to keep them moving a little more. Okay. Everything went great until the cows took a left and went across the crick, which is nowhere near where they're supposed to be. And they did not want to come back onto that road. There we go. I think I got them. I think we got them. We have to hold them right here for a long time. See all these cows? There's a whole pile of cows with no calves. They gotta go find their babies. There's a good cow. She found her calf right away. See that? That's her calf. There's another good one up on the bank. The life of a cowboy is definitely still alive. It's being lived all of the time in the West. There really isn't better ways to do this. And I'm not even sure if we're going to get better ways to do this. This is what's required for a healthy land. Because those cows are enormously beneficial to the land that they graze. They are essential as the top grazer. Just as the buffalo were in the old days. This will have to be a cowboy's job for a long time. Unless we put them all out of business and we have to buy our beef from a third world country. Unless we want our future to include that unfortunate outcome. The cowboy and the rancher will have to be here. Look at this. Listen. We've been here a half an hour and they're almost paired up. That's like unheard of. Well, we're loading up. It's not dark yet, but they actually paired up really nicely. That she hates humans? That's probably... She does not like humans. That is the most affection she has ever allowed. They're telling me that I'm watching you work with her. I'm like, I don't know. No, she'll be tied up and then you go to try and pet her. That's the most she's ever allowed to do in her life. What are you doing? Did you? Oh, I see. Why don't you... You can hop in. Yeah, go ahead. We'll sit in the back. I think the youngest should get in the middle. Just so you know. So luckily, and very nicely, Scott brought his trailer up behind us, so at 10 o'clock at night we don't have to actually trailer. Oh, actually it's not 10 o'clock at night. It's 9.30. And we were able to get in the pickup and drive back instead of having to ride all the way down. Heston had a long day yesterday, didn't you? Longest day of your riding career, I'm sure. Yeah, probably. Are you a little sore? A little bit, yeah. So last night he said he was waking up pretending like he was moving reins. With Gavin's sleeve. He had a hold of Gavin's sleeve and he was turning it around. Oh, yeah? Yep. That's the one that was underneath the horse share that scared me. Orange cats are my favorite cats. Oh, meow? Oh, really? Meow? Yeah? He's like, you can pet me. You can't trust him because he's an orange cat so he can turn on you any second.