Free Badluck Way: A Year on the Ragged Edge of the West by Bryce Andrews Page B

I filled a couple of gas cans, strapped them to a four-wheeler, and buzzed uphill along the paired wheel ruts that followed Moose Creek toward the mountains. On the way up, I drove past each stock tank, checking to make sure the floats worked and the water was high. Mobs of steers scattered before me, and I scanned the herd for signs of lameness or trouble. When I saw a suspicious limp or swelling, I recorded it in a little red stock book thatJeremy had given me. The books came free from a company that sold feed supplements. Mine was small enough to fit in a breast pocket and said “Vigortone” on the cover. It was wonderfully organized, with dated, boxed-out spaces for describing ailments, animals, and treatments. Jeremy probably filled them in correctly, but I just picked a random page, scrawled something like “Black Baldy with foot rot on left hind,” and finished with a barely legible notation of the tag number.
    I puttered uphill, roughly following our water line until I reached the top of the pasture and a massive, circular cistern. Although it had been painted brown to match the grass, the tank looked rude and industrial against the foothills. Not far from its base, a generator and a wellhead sat inside a small fenced enclosure. I boosted one of the cans across the fence, leaped over, and began to tinker with the generator.
    We had two of these setups, one on either side of Moose Creek. The wells were capable of bringing up nine or ten gallons per minute, the tanks held fifty-seven hundred gallons each, and pipes led downhill to more than a dozen stock tanks.
    The average cow on good pasture drinks ten to twelve gallons each day, which meant our steers sucked around 8,160 gallons from the ground seven days a week. The heifer herd required even more, totaling approximately 9,480 daily gallons. Keeping pace with these demands meant running the generators for up to fourteen hours a day during the grazing season.
    It would have been simpler to water our herds from the creek. We could have fenced our pastures so the creek ran right through the middle of them, dumped in a load of cattle, and called it good. That’s the easy way, and the old way. The stock gets its own water,and nobody has to set tanks or run pipe or bounce across a washboard road to stoke a generator. But cattle are hell on creeks and the ground around them. They loiter by the banks and foul the water. If left to their own devices and not rotated through pastures quickly enough, they chew the riparian grass to nothing. Naked banks slump into the water, and soon the creek is destroyed, gone, replaced by a barren, deeply incised gully. We fought against this process all over the ranch, adding off-stream water sources to the most heavily used fields. In other, more remote pastures, we used a combination of temporary electric fence and vigorous herding to keep the cattle on the move and away from the most fragile areas.
    Our system of tanks, pipe, and pumps was built to take the pressure off natural water sources and it worked pretty well. The only real problem was the amount of gasoline and maintenance required to keep it going. Fourteen hours a day is a lot to ask of an old motor, especially when it’s kept outside and chilled below freezing every night.
    I fussed with the generator, adding oil and picking grass seeds from the air filter. After filling the empty gas tank to the brim and adjusting the choke to its sweet spot, I reached down and pulled on the starter cord for all I was worth. The generator rattled, coughed, and died. I yanked the cord frantically, until the skin of my palm started to burn. When the generator kicked over, I stood beside it panting. I ran a hand across my forehead to clear off the day’s first sweat.
    I almost always started mornings like that: up along the cold, roiling creek, then north across a bumpy stretch of sagebrush to the mouth of Bad Luck Canyon. We had a spring box there, built to siphon water out of Bad Luck