Never Mind the Bullocks, Here's the Cowboys.

(For those of you who enjoy reading chronologically, you should read the post directly below this one first. I have a bit of a backlog because of bad internet and the lack of time as described below)

I need to find some other way to describe how my days are going because everyday is seeming to be more crazy than the last, and I can’t keep saying “Today was the craziest day of my life.”

AND YET

I got up at 6AM and was tagging, drafting, counting and mustering cattle until well past midnight. This made the last muster look like we were putzing around twiddling our thumbs. I spent the first part of the day as the designated ear tagger.

In addition to a big colored ear tag that designates whether the cattle is a steer or heifer, or is from Dnieper or Delmore; there is a smaller button shaped tag that goes on the other ear that has a particular code on it. Several years ago some of the (quote) “stupid f___ing backpackers” put tags with the wrong code on all the young cattle. Now several years later the cattle are huge, ready to sell and need to be retagged. So it was my job to reach into the cows ears check the tag number, and if it was wrong or just didn’t have one to cut off the old one and tag the ear. Luckily there is a big clamping device that holds the cow in place by the neck so I could do my work and Rasmus could get a tag on the tail. (He got the crap job) My job was made harder though by the face that the cow could still move vertically in the clamp, and though they couldn’t break out they could sure thrash about and with a knife in one hand and my arm shoved between the head and the metal fencing I could stand to lose a finger or break my arm very easily. But I got the hang of tagging pretty quickly and the other guys did very well on their second day in the yards, Don said we all did an excellent job, which is a big compliment from him.

My new hat is definitely well broken in by now. When Don releases the clamp on the cow, I have to put my hat in front of its face so it won’t charge out when we don’t want it to. And more than once the cow shoved its nose right in my hat and blew a bunch of slime in there in addition to the blood that was on it from the horns we were cutting off. Cutting the horns off, does something to affect the growth of the cow at a certain age, I’m not totally sure about the reason though.

The first part of the day we processed 200 of the “truckers” that I drafted out the other day. Which went from early in the morning to three or four when the road trains showed up.

All is normal in the Delmore yards, save for the mooing of the cattle in the pens and the occasional “WALK UP WALK UP!” Suddenly a grave hush falls over the cattle, cockatoos stop squawking, the dog growls slightly. One worker notices pebbles on the ground start to bounce and shake. The workers take off their hats and look to the south where a billowing thundercloud of dust can be seen growing in the distance behind a dull groan. As the cloud grows huge in the foreground birds take flight and cattle on the road outside flee in terror as what was before an ambient noise grows into a huge chest rumbling growl of 15 electric guitars cranked up to 11. The train powers off and silence returns once again. A faint whistling can be heard in the distance as the dust clears to reveal the opening door of the cabin. 

ENTER THE COWBOY.

I had no idea they still existed. I thought ok so the cattlemen drive around in utes and yeah mustering is crazy but when the truck arrives we just load them up and they drive them to wherever, end of story. Nope. This guy was the real deal. With a cigarette in one hand, a bullwhip in the other and no hint of hesitation he jumped right in with the craziest of cattle by himself. At one point the cattle were bunched up tight and he jumped up on their backs AND WALKED OVER THE GROUP OF 15 COWS.

Now they didn’t have cars in 1877 so what sort of truck does a 21^st century cowboy drive? He drives a ROAD TRAIN.

Yes the road train. It is exactly what it sounds like. Imagine a normal eighteen-wheeler. Now make it a double decker. Now, make it THREE TRAILERS LONG. We have pictures of our land cruisers far in the distance and the road train right next to them doesn’t even fit all the way in the picture. Just massive. And by the way, there were two.

We were finishing up in late afternoon when the trains arrived and Don decided we had time to do some more mustering before the sun went down. Now I have maybe described before what mustering IS but not exactly what that entails. Mustering is where we go out to the paddocks where the cattle live most of the time and we go “collect” them. This involves using three or more guys on motorbikes and two utes driving going absolutely apes#&T in the bush, flushing out the cattle and herding them in this case into some portable yards to load onto a road train. I of course took my usual position on the back of Don’s ute. I thought that driving around the yards was crazy, HAHAHAHAHA. How naive I was. When Don is mustering in a ute it’s as if he is running through the bush on foot, completely disregarding the fact that he is driving a car completely in predator mode. Zoom forwards into a grove of trees BEEP BEEP BEEP! Lurch to a stop. Reverse at high speeds zoom forwards again. Cattle running on all sides and motorbikes swarming around and poor Esben and I holding on for dear life in the back of the ute. All of this is completely off road, trees be damned we don’t have the bull bars on the front of the utes for nothing. I managed to capture a bit of it on my ipod before it just got too crazy to keep filming. Half of the video you can just hear “TREE TREE TREE!”  “WATCH THAT…. OH S*#T DUCK!” It’s a bit long but I will do my best to upload it to facebook.

But we (and by we i mean the cowboys) managed to get most of the cattle into the train (which I can’t imagine driving that road train out into the bush like that but he did it) except for a few that managed to jump a fence (yes cattle can jump very high especially if you chase them with a Toyota) Then it was back to the yards, by now well after dark, for a night shift of loading the nearly 300 cattle and finishing up the tagging of the crazy fat angry ones that I knew so well from the other day. And thus the night went until almost one in the morning. By the end of it I had worked 17 hours with only small breaks in between for lunch and dinner. And when I say worked I don’t mean I clicked away on the computer for 8 hours, And I feel exhausted (still a day later) but great. It is a good feeling to both do such hard work and have such excitement. I definitely have one of the coolest jobs around no question. I much prefer the exhilarated but wiped out feeling of having run around working my butt off all day, to the boring lazy back-aching wrist-cramping eyeball-frying computer work of a desk job.

When compared with yesterday, today was a very strange and quiet day. We all definitely got off to a late start having gone to bed around two fifteen and we all felt like we had a hangover. Later on, Kathleen and the painters showed up and did a good set of paintings and then Don came and took me over to the yards where he shot two sick cattle and we dragged them out of the yards with the ute. I had to bury just the heads of the cows because they had big infections on them and Don didn’t want the living ones to get sick. Then it was back to the yards where he and I drafted and watered some cattle then Tom showed up and he and I checked some tanks. All in all it was a pretty boring day. (When compared to yesterday of course)