There went my dignity
Cowboy Sass And Savvy

By Julie Carter

It was bound to happen. That moment in time that keeps you humble and, well, humble.

Things have gone so well with my book sales since it came out in July.

I have been accepted to Western Writers of America - qualified through feature stories about the West and the people in it and, of course, the book, Cowgirl Sass & Savvy.

The book is now on sale at two prestigious museums - the Hubbard Museum of the American West in Ruidoso Downs and the Oklahoma City National Cowboy Hall of Fame.

While my ego was not inflated, it was, let's say, encouraged. It seemed I was on my way to being an internationally known author.

I did sell books in Australia, En-gland, Belgium and Canada. That's international, right?

Nothing like a goat to take that "inflation" right out of a girl's best intentions.

First, there were four goats. After the Eastern New Mexico State Fair last week, they did their thing in the show ring and three of them were sent packing, literally, to wherever it is goats go to become whatever it is they make out of goat meat.

But the pretty little girl (nanny, to be more correct) came home to become the momma of future show goats.

Catching a ride home with the Ag teacher, she arrived late Saturday night, sometime after my son, the goat herder, and I arrived home from the fair.

Knowing that the Ag instructor had other critters aboard his trailer, I knew that they likely were all deposited at the FFA Ag Farm on the outskirts of town.

However, I had no way, close at hand, to haul her home. She would later be transported to the ranch where her "goat family" and future mate awaited.

She was happy to see a familiar face and bleated and jumped and hopped like only a goat can.

She jumped right up in the back of the pickup, nibbled on some hay stems she found in the corner by the tool box and obligingly let me tie her lead strap to the tie-down loop in the corner.

Off we went - with no way to get home but right smack through the middle of town. She quickly realized this trip was a little different from the prior ones and there were no friends of like-goatness to console her.

She began bleating continuously in somewhat of a panic, and she traveled looking out around the cab as the pickup traveled down the road.

Ears flying like a Snoopy dog, the little darling's bleating called considerable attention to us as we motored through town. Any dignity I thought I had earned as a writer, author and book promoter fell quickly to the floor of the cab.

This type of livestock relocation isn't as uncommon as one might think. Many seemingly dignified parents resort to baser means when it comes to the critters their children own during these formative livestock years.

One man I know left the fairgrounds with a lamb in the back seat of his pickup.

Exhibitor checkout time was yet four hours away, and he had to get the lamb home and catch a plane before that time. He kidnapped Bo Peep and headed for the hills.

Out of orneriness, a friend later called him on the cell phone and told him the State Police had come by looking for a green Ford pickup with a sheep in the back seat.

As I worked my way home with my little treasure, I tried to pretend my pickup was a stealth vehicle - with a loudly bleating goat tied in the back.

I was as common as any other goat herder in the world. We caught enough attention to give ample entertainment to several as they pointed and laughed.

I'm humble again. Never will I get too big in the biz, too good at anything I do, to not find the humor in the sight of such as this.


Julie would rather write cowboy stories, but every now and then she has to laugh at other things in life, like kids and goats. See Julie's Web site at julie-carter.com


It’s The Pitts: Sunday Cures

I try to respect a person's Sundays. After all, Sunday is supposed to be a day off, when a person can catch up on their laundry or a good book. It is a time for a drive in the country, a dig in the garden, a football game or a family dinner. But it's not my fault that cows don’t know that Sunday is supposed to be a day of leisure.

You expect bad things to happen on manic Monday but why do they always happen instead on sleepy Sunday when the veterinarian is teaching Sunday School? At least that's what his answering service says! It’s a well known fact that hard calving cows always calve on Sundays. Horses wait for Sunday to get colic and 99% of all prolapses occur on Sunday when your regular vet is out of town. But he always leaves the phone number of another vet who is "ON CALL." This means that your vet has arranged for a rookie, fresh out of vet school to handle all his calls for him. "On Call" also means that the rookie vet just spent a ton of money paying for vet school and he is going to try to get half of it back coming out to your place. But not me, I respect the age old tradition that money is not supposed to change hands on the sabbath.

The other problem with Sundays is that all the stores are closed including the Farm Supply. Invariably when a calf gets the scours on Sunday I go to the medicine chest, retrieve the jar of scour pills only to find it empty. If I need penicillin I will surely find three bottles of it in the door of our refrigerator but the nearest expiration date was four years ago. I would use it anyway but it has caked up harder than a brick.

So this has caused me to develop my own set of Sunday cures, many of them based on scant medical research. You may find them useful.

The first thing you need is a bicycle pump. The pump is good for treating milk fever and prolapses. When a cow has just calved and gets a case of Sunday Milk Fever and you find that you forgot to restock the calcium solution ust grab the bicycle pump and inflate her udder. (It’s like milking in reverse.) If a cow prolapses on a Sunday all you need is the bicycle pump and a balloon which you can buy at a drug store. (They still remain open on Sundays in some towns.) You shove the prolapse back into the cow, insert the balloon and then pump it up while inside the cow. This may keep the prolapse in place or the balloon might pop, scaring the cow to empty out all the rest of her guts. If the balloon trick doesn't work insert a mason jar filled with water. The bicycle pump can also be useful for a cow that doesn’t want to take an orphan graft calf. Just blow air into the reproductive tract of a fresh cow and she’ll take the calf.

Other tricks I have used as Sunday cures were given to me by a nice old lady with long hair, a pointed hat and a broom. They include placing the skull of an old ram at the entrance of the ranch to ward off diseases and sticking a pair if scissors in the woodwork. For cuts and abrasions I use a mixture of cobwebs and the blood of a bat.

There is one disease I haven't found a Sunday cure for. One Sunday I found a slobbering cow with a cough that sounded like a funeral and I knew right away it was anaplasmosis. The only cure is to transfuse some blood from a healthy animal, but I have never fully mastered the technique of hitting the vein every time so I either had to disturb the vet on his day off or lose the cow for sure. Then my wife reminded me of the real reason I am reluctant to call the vet out on Sunday. "You remember the last time you had him come all the way over here on a Sunday and it was a false alarm? You thought the horse had eaten a whole bag of grain and was acting "funny”.

I felt bad that I disturbed the vet just because I’d forgotten there wasn't any grain in the sack to begin with and my horse Gentleman always acted "funny". So now on Sundays I do all I can by myself in an effort to delay the sick animal’s death until Monday when my regular vet returns in time for the autopsy.