A Second Chance

There are some memories in life that stick with a person. I don’t know if it was because of the impossible odds or the miracle itself, but it sticks with me. Years ago when we we relatively new to the beef cow business there was an episode, an episode that will be with me till the end of this time on earth, and maybe beyond.

It was in the spring of 1995, late March and it was calving time on the farm. I had some old cross bred cows that I had bought a couple years before and an old black baldie cow had a nice baldie heifer calf. Uneventful as can be, all was well. In a few days I noticed that the calf was scouring and needed a bit of medical help. I did my duty giving her the pills and kept an eye on her. As the next few days went by, no matter what I did to treat her she kept going down hill.  After a time she couldn’t even gather the power needed to go suck her mama for some fresh milk. So putting the cow in the headgate I attempted to milk the old girl and soon discovered she had no milk to speak of. Now I was in a pickle.

The next step was to feed the calf milk replacer. The calf kept going down hill more and more and soon wouldn’t even suck on the bottle that I was trying to feed her with. So reluctantly I decided to go the next step and use a stomach tube to feed her in order to somehow keep her alive until she could start getting her strength up to suck again. This went on for days and days until the calf was almost dead. Her eyes were always closed, basically in a coma. Her breathing was raspy and I could hear gurgling in her lungs. This didn’t look good but after all the work already put into her I just had to keep going. I moved her out of the cow barn pen that she was in, to the hog nursery a little ways away and laid her in a pile of dry straw. I’d pile straw on top of her to keep her warm as she laid there in a coma day after day.

As the days went by she started to stink, she was literally starting to stink from the high fever and then started losing all of her hair. When it was time for feeding her with the stomach tube a person almost gagged from the smell of the rotting body that I had to work with. I remember three different times that I pulled her outside to throw her in the manure spreader and haul her out, all hope gone. But before I’d get around to that job I’d always have an unction, like a little voice saying, “don’t give up”. So I’d just go over to her and drag her back into the nursery and put her back into the fluffy straw.

This went on for four weeks, feeding her twice a day. A breathing, naked calf, no hair left on her body, in a coma and always that gurgling sound coming from her lungs. It would be a pain sometimes coming in from early season field work and mixing the milk replacer and feeding a calf like that, not much hope.

One night after about a month of this I was on a night check, checking the cows to see if any were calving in the middle of the night. I decided to poke my head into the hog nursery for some reason and when I turned on the lights I almost fell over in shock. There in the straw pile was a calf, no hair left on its body, just plain ugly looking standing up and looking at me. It took me a while to realize this was really happening and I walked over there and the naked calf seemed just fine! It is really hard to describe the feelings I had at the moment but they were joyful! And she never elapsed, just stayed awake and alert from that time on. Now this was one ugly calf, no hair left on its body, just like a big pink brand new baby mouse. After the days and weeks when by its hair started growing back, some black peach fuzz, but that sure was an ugly calf but it didn’t matter a hill of beans to me! It would always be there when I’d come with the milk bottle to feed it and it would suck that milk down lickidy split!

Come fall, after looking her over, well, there was no way that calf could be sold, it didn’t have calf sale ability, that’s for sure. So I decided it could live with the replacement heifers, the heifer calves born the same spring but in a whole lot better shape. These heifers would be bred the following summer. The following summer came and that ugly heifer calf did fairly good, but there was something a tad bit different about her and I knew I couldn’t really sell her, would take a beating on that, so I just left her in with the replacement heifers to get bred and let the chips fall where they may. The next spring that heifer had a calf without the slightest problem and was about the best mother in the whole durn bunch to boot!

As this spring approaches she’s still in the herd, the only one out of that nice batch of heifers from the 1995 calf crop. Since her first calf in 1997 she’s had a nice calf every single year, always in the first three weeks of calving, and last year she had the first calf of the season, eartag #1. And that was even after a couple hard and lean years of major drought in this area. Everyone here agrees, she’s not being shipped, or butchered or anything. That ugly little hairless calf that somehow survived a month long coma and after all these years turned out to be the best cow on the farm will retire and live out her life here. She’s special.

Life on the farm is different I guess. A person sees what God does, a person can understand how God operates just by how we have to operate. We see the impossible happen, not once in a while, but all the time. Its a faith building life, and I don’t see how anyone could farm without that faith in God. That stinking, rotting calf always reminds me of myself before Christ set me free. There was no hope what so ever, but He set me free! Life was a little wobbly at first and I know through the years I ain’t the prettiest in the herd. But this little farm parable shows me that being what the world considers good really doesn’t mean much in the end. God can take a stinking, rotting person and change them, change them to produce for the Lord, keep going steadily year after year and when its all over, well, its just beginning!