For a moment, my mind could not comprehend what I was seeing. The calf that my husband had pulled was laying wet and separated from his mother, but something else was emerging from her hind end. Something bumpy and red, altogether alien and angry. It grew as she continued to heave and shove. My husband yelled for help as he ran and pushed back on the massive lump sprawling behind the cow. 

Oh. Oh. OH! 

My ears rang, my head swam, and my stomach lurched as I realized what the angry red thing was. I fell off the four-wheeler in a pile and crawled toward the house, trying not to faint or vomit. The prolapsing cow was the last straw for me, I wanted away from that scene and place altogether. 

Those early days were the most difficult for me on the ranch, so unfamiliar with cattle and the Sandhills. Up until marriage, I had lived my whole life in Cozad, the town of about 4,000 people in Central Nebraska. Though rural, my life there was far removed from agriculture. Experiences with country living were limited to summers spent with my maternal grandparents four miles north of town. They kept chickens and had dogs and cats, but never livestock. 

I met my husband at the University of Nebraska at Kearney, and I suppose most people would say we were an unlikely pair. Jon – a rough-and-tumble ranch kid, walking around campus in his black leather bomber jacket smoking cigarettes, and me – a naive elementary education major on her way to a campus bible study. Chemistry proves opposites attract, and when it is meant to be, it hardly matters if the pairing is unlikely or not. 

We were married Feb. 22, 2003, and I moved to my husband’s ranch near Ellsworth. Although still in the same state, the Sandhills of western Nebraska seemed a foreign place to me. The flat, fertile farm ground and wide Platte River wreathed in trees was lost to endless hills of sand and grass. It was stark, desolate, windswept, and frightening. 

During this desolation, I began my first calving season on the ranch. I had never experienced an animal giving birth and suddenly I was seeing hundreds. Calves were born, wet and slimy, and mothers rose to lick them. Calves weren’t born, were not brought up and pushed out, and my husband hooked chains around their feet and pulled them out with a pulley system in the barn. Calves were born and couldn’t stand to suck, laid there and shivered and died. Calves were born and acted as if they had no will to live, refused the milk, refused their own mothers. The cruelness and reality of nature slapped me in the face. 

I was given the task of rubbing a calf with towels and gunny sacks after we wrenched it out of his mother. I rubbed gently at the warm, wet calf. “Faster,” my husband instructed, rubbing the poor thing harder and faster. I held the chains, readied the rope on the block and tackle, helped open gates, and pushed cows into the stanchion. My head spun with the furiousness of it, the intimacy of it; during calving we lived and breathed cows and calves. I was never a coffee drinker until that first calving season. 

I was so frightened by the new house, new place, and new routines, I woke with Jon for every night check and rode clinging to him through the meadows. When he left me alone, I listened to the creakings and groanings of the little house built in 1949. Outside, we had one tiny cottonwood he transplanted from a roadside ditch. Rhubarb grew on the south side – likely brought with the people who homesteaded here – and a handful of irises thrust sharp spears up from the east side of the house. I missed trees. I missed flower beds and shrubs, missed gardens filled with tomatoes and beans. 

A sad little alkali pond stunk when the wind blew from the south. The wind always seemed to blow here. Could I ever love this house and place? 

Twenty-one years later, I’m helping my husband sew up a prolapse. I’ve got warm water in a bottle with a hose to wash off the uterus, threaded the umbilical tape through the large, curved silver needle, and loaded the syringes with the correct amounts of Lidocaine and Excenel. My heart is pounding but my hands are steady. I’ve done this before and know I can do it again. 

I hold the tail of the cow in the chute while Jon sews, assisting him as best I can. He looks at me, his blue eyes intent on my face. “How are you doing?” 

“It’s the smell more than anything,” I say, trying not to think about how to describe the lumpy mass or his needle in and out of the skin or the intense smell of blood and afterbirth. Details that still make my head swim even after 20 years. 

“I’ve nearly got this done,” he says, “If you can, go wash the chains and then come get the vet box to take to the house.” He’s giving me the out and I take it. 

Away from the sights and smells of the prolapse, I breathe deeply of the crisp night air. The stars above are thick and near. It’s so quiet, so peaceful. How did I ever find this frightening, I wonder? The hills are my home, the cattle are my life; I belong here on these prairied dunes with my husband and children. 

Life on a cattle ranch in the Sandhills isn’t easy. There have been many times in the last 21 years I’ve wanted to be away from this place, maybe even be done altogether. 

But I’ve persevered. Through droughts and blizzards, through good times and bad. I’ve learned to love these sand dunes robed in grass. I’ve learned to mark the seasons with the returns and leavings of the birds, the changing of the prairie, the activity of the sky and earth. I’ve made my peace and made it my home. 

Now I write stories from the ranch, from the Sandhills, from the heart. A prairie girl with sand in my shoes.