Story Telling Time

August - September 2006

By Donna Mays

MY FIRST YEAR IN IDAHO

In early June of 1984, I leased out my ranch in Orland, California and moved to Idaho. It was the start of a very interesting and different way of life. I had to sell and downsize from two hundred and fifty Suffolk ewes to twenty of my best brood ewes. My cattle and commercial sheep were also sold before the move. You see, I had met my future husband and wanted to make sure things would work out for us before I sold my ranch. The Mays family ranch/corporation owned everything from dogs, horses, sheep, houses and all the things it takes to run a sheep and crop ranch. I was told that I could not bring any extra livestock. I told James that was not going to work for me and so we settled with the twenty ewes. I moved into my mother’s home on five acres with no barns a hundred and thirty miles from the ranch where I now live with James.

I had friends six miles away from my mother’s home who had run three thousand ewes. They had a great set up so I paid them rent for a place for my ewes and three horses. The summer went well for the ewes, which ran on irrigated fields with their cattle. When fall came in late August and it started to freeze at nights, I had to move the sheep to their corrals to feed them hay. The cattle were over stocked and were moved also.

The ewes bred up well for late February lambs. The sheds were long enough but the jugs were made for the white face commercial ewes that my friends used to have there so I had to makeshift some of the mixing pens to put my ewes in when they lambed. The snow started to fly in October and my diesel dually did not have four-wheel drive so I had to put chains on a lot. The road going from the bottom of the hill, where I was staying, up to where my sheep were was plowed only if the owners got around to it, so I used a very old snowmobile that was hard to start.

I can tell you that here in Idaho we have a lot of wind all year round. Once, in the middle of the night, when I was going to the sheds where I housed my ewes, I did not know if I was going the right way or not. It was a complete nightmare. The snow was almost as high as the post along the road and the storm turned into a blizzard. I had thought about spending nights in the barn for a couple of weeks but gave that idea up because I would probably freeze to death. Fortunately, most of the ewes lambed during the day and so I only lost a couple of lambs. The ewes were bred to milk and were excellent mothers.

I had run my ewes on pasture in California and only fed them when they were in the jugs. After their lambs were a week old, the ewes were kicked back into pasture fields with a creep for the lambs. Now I was faced with a completely different feeding program. The hay in Idaho runs between 21% to 25% protein. The ewes were hog fat and in better shape than they had been in California. I found a place a hundred miles away that would make creep grain. The lambs did great. Only feed problem was, in Idaho, green grass does not start until late April or May and the first leaves on the trees come in May.

I thought I would tell you a little about tending camps that first year. James lived on the Mays ranch and had an airplane he would fly every three days to bring supplies and give a helping hand the days he was there. In June, the sheep were still out on the Eastern Idaho Grazing Association land eighty miles from where I was staying. So tending each camp every four days through the month of June was easy.

I take salt for the sheep, oats for his horse and fill the list of groceries that he needs for the four days. The Peruvians like pork chops or chicken. A lot of rice, onions, garbanzos beans, fruit, can vegetables, eggs and bread. The list is almost the same always. I only take what they will eat as far as the meat goes. The meat starts out frozen. They will defrost and cook enough for two meals and what is left over is buried either in the ground under their wagon or under heavy blankets. There is no indoor plumbing and an ice chest is used instead of a fridge. The camp is about twelve feet long with a round roof and one window, a small wood stove used in the winter, cupboards and a good bed. During the summer if the herders are in the camp or prairie home, they use a propane stove. While on pack, a portable propane stove is used. ‘While on pack’ means that they are on the mountain and we use packhorses to take the supplies. They have a teepee tent and folding canvas beds with foam mattresses. Just like when they are in the camp, we tend to their supplies every four days with food, salt and move their tent to another spot.

We are able to move the sheep from the grazing lease to the forest July 1. At that time, we walked only one band and trucked the other herds to the forest allotments where they stay until being shipped out during the last days of August and first week of September.

Each band had an allotment that limited where they could run the ewes and lambs. There are red X’s that meant no entering or traveling across. My Spanish consisted of counting to ten so I started out drawing a lot. I learned the list of supplies that I would bring the next time in Spanish and bought a Spanish to English dictionary. I seemed to get along okay. I understand a lot of Spanish now but only if it is spoken slowly. I am still not good at speaking Spanish. The herders laugh at me sometimes because some words we use in English do not have the same meaning in Spanish.

I used my horses to pack the supplies and move the camps. My dog Bucks was a big asset to me. He would always bring me back in the dark or rain to the base camp where the herders’ wagons that were not used were parked.

One time we were driving in, pulling the gooseneck with horses. Bucks, who acted like a co-pilot with his head on the dashboard and his body on the floor, spied a couple of ewes and two lambs. We were able to catch all but one of the lambs, which made its way up the mountain. I jumped my horse out and sent Bucks, who then brought the lamb straight for me and down the hill. It went through the creek and up the other side but Bucks brought it back down again. I waited at the bottom and he brought it right to me. I missed roping it once but caught it on the second loop.

Now these ewes and lambs were a good four-hour horseback trip away from where the herd was and it would be impossible to herd them that far. We had a twelve-foot dingy boat with us so we took the gooseneck down to the dock at the lake. James unloaded the boat, we tied up the legs and carried the four ewes and two lambs to it and set them up so their heads were upright. It was about two miles across to the point where we could drop off the sheep. We passed a few boats and I can imagine what was being said. The herd was not too far from where we landed and Bucks pushed them to the herd.

Another time, Bucks rounded up six lambs on the main highway with the help of a fence that was around a home. We backed up the trailer to the fence, all but one lamb jumped in, and it went under the fence. Bucks brought the lamb right to me. We drove to where I was staying and put the lambs in my dog pen until the owner came and picked them up. The sheep man was so happy that we had caught his lambs that he brought us four horse halters with leads. One lamb escaped putting them in the back of the man's pickup. The lamb went past the truck weigh station a mile away and up the hill. Cars stopped to watch as Bucks turned the lamb and brought it straight back to us where we caught it in the parking lot of the weight station. A good dog is so helpful to move sheep with and each herder has two to four Border Collies and two to three Great Pyrenees guard dogs.

Before having guard dogs, the loss of sheep to predators was over 12%. Coyote, bear, mountain lion and dogs took their toll. With the guard dogs, we have cut the losses down to 8%. We have lost sheep two different years with the introduction of wolves and have been forced to remove the sheep from that allotment. In Peru, they have wolves. The Peruvian herders carry rifles on their horses for their protection. I could write a book on predators.

The summer went well. Shipping was a lot of hard work. We had to separate the feeder lambs that would go to a feedlot and bag the ewes to make sure they were good and kept as breeders. The culls were sent to the auction. The white face ewe lambs were hauled back to the ranch.

After all the work is done at shipping, two of the bands of good ewes will walk twenty miles through the mountains, where there are not any roads, to where the lease is. James puts me in the plane and we fly over where he was going and showed me where I will be on the second night after they left. Now this plane is flying at 150 miles per hour and everything looks different up there from on the ground. I looked for small lakes and two roads I thought I knew where I was to be to pick up the horses and two men. James told me to take the gooseneck to pick up the last of the hay, a ton of salt in bags of eighty pounds each and connect on to two sheep camps and a commissary. Then take the camps and leave them at a corral. A commissary is a wagon that holds wood, hay, grain and a place for the horse to eat out of or protection from a big storm.

I got the hay and salt loaded the day they left. I took it to where I was staying and unloaded it. Then I took the gooseneck over to the corral eighty miles away on part highway and dirt road and left it. I had been to this corral before. The next day I took the pickup, backed up to the first camp, pulled it ahead and then tried to back it up to the second camp. Now for any of you, who think they are good at backing up, remember that these camps are four-wheel with a ball joint that breaks in the middle and are crazy to back up. They are completely backwards to backing up a trailer. You must think the opposite way that you would with a trailer. Backing up was not going to be easy. I never had to back more than a few feet with one, let alone with one camp needing to be back up to another camp then the commissary. After an hour on the first camp and not getting close enough to put a pin in the hitch, I knew I was not going to be able to back two camps to the commissary. So I backed the first camp to the commissary hooked it up and hooked up the second camp and finally after four hours had two camps and one commissary and was ready to make the trip on a very crooked and steep road. Like a snake that never went straight, that swayed this way four feet and the opposite way four feet, I made it to the top and then down the other side. It seemed that everyone was going home from Labor Day camping and I cringed every time I met a pickup. Finally, I made it to the corral and dropped off the camps.

I was so glad to get that over. Now the next part should be easy. Okay. I knew that there were two forks and James had said all the roads have signs except where I turned to Commissary Ridge. Right, except… NO signs. I came to a dead end so I turned around and found the road I needed. Up the hill I went. Where did the little lakes go? No signs there either, so I turned on a road and passed a couple of pickups that were heading back down on a trail of a road. It was raining by that time and this four-wheel drive was not keeping me going straight since I was sliding sideways. I made it to where I thought Commissary Ridge was and took out my binoculars but it was too dark to see any sheep.

I got back in the pickup and started down the hill, white-fingered in the hard rain. I came upon some campers and stopped to ask if this was the way to Commissary Ridge and they said they were lost in the storm and decided to set there for the night. Thinking that James had been there and went on to the corral, I went back to where I left the camps. No herders or James. Now dark, I went back up past where I had turned and saw the road went downhill, so now I knew I had been at the right place earlier. I headed back and made it to where I was to meet the men. I did not have any sleeping bag and about froze. My dog Bucks and I cuddled together for the rest of the night. The next morning, still no herd, so I went back down looking for them. They did not make it to the corral until late that night rain soaked and tired.

By now, James’s grain harvest and haying was finished so things were going smoothly until I took James to the Idaho Wool Growers and left him for four days. All I had to do was tend two camps, move one out to the road and start him down to the Indians while James was at his meetings. A piece of cake… wrong. It had been snowing and the roads were frozen now. It was the first part of November and temperatures were below zero. I made it on the freeway to where the freeways divide. I needed to get into the left lane to go towards Blackfoot where I would turn off the freeway to go into the mountains to where the camp was. A big truck went by me and gave me a white out. I knew I had less than a mile to get over into the other lane so I put on my brakes and ended up doing three wheelies and never getting out of my lane. At that point, anyone could have hit me and it would have been said, “Dumb California drivers.” I was in four-wheel drive but had no weight on the back. There were slide-offs everywhere.

I finally made the forty miles out to where the camp was. No one had broken the eight to ten inches of snow, and I realized I was the only one out there. Meanwhile, the storm had broken but it still was cold. I knew where to turn off the road and cross sagebrush six miles to where the camp set. Only thing was, where was that spring and where did it end? A small place to go through and a wrong crossing meant being stuck. Well, I got stuck and spent three hours of digging. I put on the chains and cut a lot of sagebrush to put under the wheels. By then the storm was coming back in. I did not go to the camp, had not seen any people and thought no one would know where I was at except James. I made it back to where I lived and thought, thank you, God, for saving my life two times today.

James called close to midnight and said to come get him. The camp had to be moved because of all the snow. That night I drove to pick him up, and we moved the camp to the road. James took another pickup and went back to the meetings. I had to move that camp and the herder on horseback with sheep, down to the Indians and towards the desert on the way to the ranch. I put chains on more than off. I took some pictures that you may have seen at my pens. James got out of his meetings and helped as we got through the Indians.

We stayed for a week in one of the camps. To keep the diesel from jelling, we had to be up every two hours to start the rig and leave it running for a half hour. A ten-gallon milk can of water had to be put on the wood stove to keep it from freezing solid in the ten to twenty below zero weather in November. You get an idea what the herders go through. The herders are not back on the ranch ‘til February and then do not go out with a herd until mid- April. They really know what winter means where we live.

We use all the Suffolk rams that are not sold as studs, as terminal sires for breeding to the western Rambouillet ewes. The rams have to be hardy, meaning they have to be able to breed ewes in conditions of sage brush and down timber at a rate of two rams per hundred ewes, then survive and make it through the winter. We run 6000 ewes that are easy fleshing, good milkers and good mothers. We are lambing out 80% of the 4700 ewes in the three weeks when temperatures can be down to thirty degrees below zero.

James tells everyone that he married me for my dogs first, then my horses, which are now gone, my gooseneck trailer, equipment, and then me. I figured that if I could survive that first year in Idaho, I could survive anywhere. It is a hard place to live but the rewards are worth the time and effort.