“Never let a good crisis go to waste”- Winston Churchill
It was hard. All of it. I'll spare you those details. You've got your own.
But, a year on from that weekend, my oxen are in much better shape than they were last march. As a driver, so am I. Not a little better in either case. Twice as good. Enough so that I am a little embarrassed about how bad we were then- and I would have said we were pretty good at that time.
We still have our bad days, but dragging the pasture last night with Brutus back from a foot injury, they were good enough that it felt like cheating. I wasn't driving them, just working alongside them. In the state that Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi calls "flow."
Churchill may have been on to something. What's your story?
I love cattle, and when I moved back to the land my family settled in Arkansas in 1833 before Arkansas became a state I decided to train a pair of my steers to pull, but I didn't know anyone who had steers that worked, so I got up a couple of weened steers and started taming them down.
ReplyDeleteI eventually met 4 more old men that all had trained steers and we got to be friends and I found that training steers like you train horses or dogs is not necessarily the best way to train steers. I did get them broken and working pretty good but as the next set of steers came along I started with bottle babies and that worked better for me.
And time passed and eventually I got old and my friends with working steers all died before me, so I am the last one standing at 74 years of age.
There is never time enough to do everything you want to do, but I have done most of my bucket list and I just sent my last working steer to a petting zoo where he will be able to live out his life with good care and attention. Red is the MAN!