Songs/stories Wet Sortin’

Well, here we are to the last one.

This is all totally true….. 🙂 ‘Cept for the parts Ken made up to add some punch. Ken Cook got cheated on the credits of this one, as I overlooked adding him to the credits when we printed off the packaging. Sorry Ken! I had written it as a poem and took it to his place and we worked on it. He comes up with such descriptive things, like, “Sure hope my socks can swim!”

Now, we all know socks can’t swim ( must have never learned when they was little fellers!) but it does paint a great picture.

We kept going thru’ it with Ken adding suggestions. I almost left it as a poem, but decided to add a quick tune and some tell me it is the best song on the CD…

We had trailed some pairs for a neighbor this spring and we had to travel one of the main highways to the oilfields in North Dakota, so by the time we got off the highway we sure were happy. And just as I say in the song, when we got them all thru’ the gate, man oh man did it go to blowin’, rainin’ and some small hail! When it finally eased up a bit we headed them up to a knob to pair them out and then the lightning got a lot closer, the wind picked back up and our horses wouldn’t face into it, so we sat on the downstream side of the herd, horses butt’s facing the herd and allowed pairs to go between us, side passing to get out of their way or stop one that wasn’t right. Every once in awhile a cow would grab a calf and head out, but they weren’t a pair so someone would jump out in the deepening mud and bring them back. One neighbor, Lyle, mentioned that the big boss had almost got hit by lightning twice before, but hadn’t gotten hit so he wondered if we should stay away from him or ride real close! Wildest deal I’ve ever been involved in. But… it had been dry so when we headed back to the trailers we were all grinning at the moisture.

I have never gotten so wet so fast other than jumping into a big waterhole. Water ran down my legs and filled my boots to over flowing in just a matter of minutes. Some of us were shivering by the time we got back to the outfit and we still had to go get another so as to haul everyone. Recently I posted pictures of shipping some red calves. Same bunch of cattle as in the song. We sure didn’t have to worry about getting wet when we shipped them, worse the luck!

So this concludes the songs and the stories behind them. Hope you’ve enjoyed it!