ND rancher carries 32 calves from flooded barn

In his golden years, Chad Skretteberg plans to tell his grandchildren about the night he carried 32 heavy calves on his shoulders, one by one, through ice-cold, waist-high floodwaters to safety. It's a tale that amazes even him. "I don't know how I had the stamina," says Skretteberg, who at 40 is a wiry 5-foot-10 and 185 pounds. "If I tried to attempt that just any day of the week, I would probably just quit, it's so much work. But in those circumstances, your adrenaline kicks in." On this day, the skies are sunny, the air pleasantly crisp and the Heart River flows peacefully by the south central North Dakota farmstead, where pregnant cows mill about in a pen full of freshly fallen snow with frozen mud peeking through. But the scene was not so peaceful late Sunday night and early Monday morning, when floodwaters from the swollen Heart began rising at his dad's farmstead, where Skretteberg's calving barn sits on a hill. In no time, it seemed, the water was a foot deep right outside the barn. Loren Skretteberg, Chad's father, first tried to back an all-terrain vehicle with a cargo bed up to the barn to carry the calves, but the pooling water killed the engine. "At that point, I started carrying them," Chad Skretteberg said...AP