Cowboy Water Rescue
- April 8, 2024
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- Jan Swan Wood
Posted in: Featured, Ranch Life
The spring of 2009 was a doozy. There were three blizzards in 14 days starting with the spring solstice
storm. There were feet of snow laid down and piled up by the wind. It was a mess. My cows had just started calving and due to the deep drifts and storms, we hadn’t been able to get them trailed home from winter pasture. An old, fallen down sheep shed on the winter pasture saved the cows and most of the calves born during the blizzards. Incidentally, that’s the last year I calved before the end of April.
That spring, my son was a senior in high school. He’d always worked and in high school worked after
school and on weekends for whoever needed him. I couldn’t pay him at home, though he also helped
there, so couldn’t blame him for wanting to earn some money. He’d hired on to look after a place for some people who were gone for a couple of weeks. They had some big steers they were feeding out and a bunch of longhorn cows and heifers that were going to be calving, so Colin just stayed over there to monitor the cows and do the feeding.
The people who had the place had foolishly torn down wooden corrals and replaced them with electric fences. There were two strands or so of that tape type electric wire for most of the fences. It worked okay until the snow buried them. Then it was free range over most of their land. What a mess. The only equipment on the place was a bale bed pickup. It was also fine until the drifts were six to eight feet deep. He was in a full fledged wreck.
He called me and asked me if I’d come and help him get some sorting done as he had gotten an ancient
D4 Cat running and pushed up some piles to make pens. It had died again before he got all the snow
moved that he needed to, but at least he could sort the cows and the steers into different pens. He came and got me and we went back over to get started.
It was just a snowbound disaster there. The snow, on the level was deeper than my knees, so it was
exhausting to get around. The big drifts could be walked on by the cattle and us. We finally had gotten the cows and heifers sorted off and had put them in a pen that had a wall of snow on two sides, a barn and a board fence on the other two. That left the big, fat, silly steers.
Those big oafs were three year old Longhorn steers who were just weeks from being made into steaks
and shoulder mounted horns. Not wild, just silly as fat cattle are, plus a little aggressive if cornered. They thought it great fun to buck and jump through the snow, evading our efforts to put them in a pen. I was afoot, Colin was on his really broke little mare Callie, but she was nearly belly deep in snow and the
bottomless mud under it, so she wasn’t exactly nimble on her feet.
We had all but a couple of the steers captured and the remaining ones were out in a little pasture that
had a dam in it. The dam was brim full of water, then had iced up and drifted under. Talk about a treacherous body of water!
We were easing the steers around the dam, just encouraging them toward the corrals, not pushing
them, when one of them took off bucking and playing and circled the dam. The snow drift held him. Then it didn’t. Into the water he went! Knowing he’d have to be gotten out of there before the icy water slowed him down, Colin put a bunch of coils with his loop and sailed it out about 40 feet and caught the steer around the horns. It’s fortunate that he packed 80 feet of rope! He dared not get closer as the edge of the dam wasn’t exactly visible under the snow. He got Callie where he thought the ground was the firmest, and towed the steer toward the shore. The steer was still trying at that point, but he was heavy and when his feet could touch bottom, he fought the rope. Callie was nearly bogged in the mud under the snow, but was pulling with everything she had.
I had a flag whip that I’d been using to sort with and was staying to the outside of the tracks the steer
had made on the snow, hoping fervently that it would hold me as it had held the big steer at that point. I
would slap the snow with the flag and the steer would spook away and toward where Colin was pulling
him. Callie was bellied out pulling and the steer’s head was up on the bank when I felt the snow start to
sink under my feet. I turned to lunge back toward solid ground when I was tipped backward by the caving snow being sucked under the water.
I was dressed in layers, with my bib overalls, muck boots, and all on. I let out a shout just as the back
of my head went into the water. I could feel water running into my collar and down my back as I was
sinking. I saw Colin jump off of Callie and run around the dam like an Olympic sprinter. He crab walked
out across the sinking snow and ice and could just reach my right hand. He grasped my wrist and flung
me behind him onto the solid snowbank.
It was none too quick! I was sinking fast, and between my clothing’s weight and the fact that I can’t so
much as float, much less swim, I would have been a goner in just moments.
I had had rotator cuff surgery on my right shoulder that winter and had just finished physical therapy a
few weeks before this happened. Being yanked out of a dam by that arm probably wouldn’t have been
recommended, but, there had been no other option. That my 18 year old son had had the water rescue
training that he had through his fire department work so that we both hadn’t gone under was amazing. As was the fact that he could throw me about 10 feet behind him, with me soaking wet with all those heavy clothes. There might have been some adrenalin aiding him in that.
After getting to my feet, I slogged to the house and to change out of my wet clothing. I put on layers
of Colin’s very large clothes and he came to the house to check on me. The steer was still in the dam and sulled up, probably from both cold and disposition. Callie was played out but still holding his head up on the snowbank. My phone had been in my pocket so was dripping wet, so using Colin’s phone and a phone book, I started calling the closest neighbors who might have a piece of equipment that could get that steer out in time to save him.
A guy about four miles away had just stepped in the house to grab something when his phone rang with my call. Not hesitating even a moment, he said he’d be there as fast as his big tractor could go. I waited for him while Colin went back to check on Callie. She was still holding the rope tight and the steer was still alive.
When he got to the place, he dug a trail through the big snow banks and finally got to the dam. Using
Colin’s rope, we tied off to the loader on the tractor. Lifting to get the steer’s front end over the shelf of ice and snow, the tractor had no problem slowly backing up and it skidded the steer out on the snow and away from the dam. The ungrateful steer was worn out and very angry about the whole shindig. He wouldn’t let us close enough to pull the rope off of his horns, so Colin had to get back on Callie and ride in close enough to get it off. He was huffy about it but didn’t try to poke Callie, at least.
A much more docile steer was trailed over to the pen and locked up. That good neighbor would take
nothing for his time and fuel for coming over and referred to times when my Dad had helped him out of a jam. I guess what goes around comes around.
The only fatality that day, out of all the possibilities offered, was my little flip phone. It didn’t recover.
That seemed like a small price to pay for still being alive. My shoulder was sore for a while, but no
permanent damage was done, thankfully.
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Posted in: Featured, Ranch Life
About Jan Swan Wood
Jan was raised on a ranch in far western South Dakota. She grew up horseback working all descriptions of cattle, plus sheep and horses. After leaving home she pursued a post-graduate study of cowboying and dayworking in Nebraska, New Mexico, Montana, Wyoming and South Dakota....