Big Sky Equine Marketing Services

The Abel Ranch to the North of us has been in the family for over 100 years. Every spring they brand several times throughout the spring. My favorite time to come and lend a hand is when we go all out, old style. We meet in the brightness of the noon sun, saddle our horses and load up two wagons, a chuck wagon and all of our gear in the next. We head out trailing behind the wagons in fresh anticipation, following wagon tracks having etched out thier story on the land over time.

The other day I was reading an article about a young girl who had competed and won Nationally on her Quarter Horse in barrel racing. This alone might not impress a lot of folks but the fact that this horse took care of his epilectic rider brought tears to my eyes. It went on to tell of her having a seizure underneath his feet and how he stood calmly as her body violently flailed beneath him, never moving an inch. It read of how after getting this horse how her spirits and conditions had amazingly turned for the better.

We headed out with on our horses into the crisp November twilight to gather cow/calf pairs from the stubble fields we had moved them to for a week before weaning and shipping. I was directed to ride alone along the Yellowstone and bring anything back up into the fields. We border the Yellowstone river with cliff outcroppings dropping a thousand feet or more down to the river. My mare and I moved out trotting along the top and traveling down into the drainages and back up looking for cows. About a mile down the drainages do not go down to the river but out onto the cliffs.

The crisp November air bit at my cheeks as I dropped off my daughter at the neighbors and headed for the barn. We saddled the horses by light from the barn and loaded them into the trailer. We headed off down the road into the just waking sun. We had seven riders including myself and 14 sections to gather (its about 640 acres per section). The country is suited well for summer pasture for our cow/calf pairs with tanks spread throughout and forested hilly terrain with cliffs and outcroppings.

My grandfather-in-law has a beautiful blue Brabant draft team which he grades the driveway, feeds round bales throughout the winter, plows, uses for parades, just about everything. This year he planted ten acres of oats with his team. We arrived early yesterday morning and harnessed up the team and fired up the old McCormick thrashing machine with belts moving every which way. We traveled from shock to shock with pitchforks loading the wagon. Once the wagon was full we hitched a ride on the back of the wagon to the thrashing machine to unload.