The Enduring Cowboy

There are two things that Wes Miner hopes not to see when he wakes early each morning and saddles up to survey the cattle left in his care. He does not wish to see a big black bird. Miner has nothing against crows or buzzards per se. But to view them wheeling solemnly across the sky, or scattering from the brush at his approach, is to feel his stomach tighten as he reckons with the knowledge that one or more of the animals entrusted to him have been killed.

Some of them are freak deaths. Four years ago, Miner worked on a ranch in Idaho where a spectacular electrical storm had erupted and toppled a dozen head of cattle huddled under a tree. Their bleached bones remained arrayed on the pasture for years as a testament to ill fortune. On the ranch he now tends in southwestern Montana, wolves devour a calf in the dark of night and leave no trace of the carnage. A cow gets stuck in a bog, breaks her leg, and Miner is forced to shoot her on the spot. A yearling munches on the blossoms of poisonous larkspur and drops dead within four hours. Nature gives and snatches away on a whim, but Wes Miner can handle that.

"What gets to me," says the 28-year-old somber-eyed cowboy, "is if we lose a bunch of sick ones. Because that's something I should control better." Men in Wes Miner's trade love the riding, the roping, and the stark romanticism of a cow camp. But there is a bottom line, and it comes at the end of October, when the 4,100 head he is paid to tend are herded into corrals, and the cattle owners roll up in their dusty pickups to count and inspect their property.

In high country like the Snowline Ranch where Miner works, temperatures can seesaw from 80 to 8 in a single day, and so pneumonia is a constant threat. It occupies Miner's attention as he rides through the cattle. If some of them get caught in a downpour during cold weather, he's fatally behind the curve. He must seize upon the earliest symptom: that lone calf amid the lurching sea of fur and fat with a single drooping ear, at which point Miner's horse separates the calf from the others and the cowboy swings his long rope. Catch the calf with the first loop, reach for the meds in the saddlebag, inject the Nuflor. Done right, the calf barely notices, returns to the herd, and by the end of October is 600 pounds and received by his owner with an approving half smile—which to Wes Miner is a tiny miracle, at least compared with the sickly vision of the big black birds dining off his failures.

It's a proud feeling, knowing he has staved off tragedy and been rewarded with the gratitude of owners who wave goodbye as they cart off their fattened commodities. The satisfaction lasts an evening. The next morning comes, and with it Wes Miner faces the second spectacle that he would rather not see. It's the sight of a pasture with no cattle grazing on it. And this, too, feels like a sort of death. "We go so hard those last two or three weeks—every day, go, go, GO . . . and then you look on the hills, and there's nothing but those saddle horses. It's an empty feeling."