Snippets - Milk and Cows

By SK Virtue as told by my dad. My Dad was born in 1938. This snippet took place around 1948. Dad and Lupe were about a year apart in age. 

When I was about 8 years old, we lived on a farm just outside of Ballantine Montana. My dad farmed acreage he rented from Claude Pierson. Some of it was on north 28 above the tracks and some of it was down by the river. We had ten milk cows at the time. they were Holstein /Angus cross.  My brother Lupe, and I milked the cows in the morning than we would walk them down from the farm on the hill to the river acreage which was about 3 miles away. 

The cows calved each year, and we would take them to sale. One year we kept one of the calves. It was a bull. Lupe and I raised it. Lupe wrestled and played with that bull. And he began to ride it like a horse. You know when we took the cows down by the river Lupe would ride that big bull and people driving along the road would stop and stare. That bull was a big bull, close to 2000 pounds. But Lupe wasn't afraid of him. We were kind of sad when Dad sold him, but he went to a good place. The Goggins Ranch bought that bull and used him for quite a while for breeding.

My mom used to separate the milk and cream with a cream separator she turned with her hands. She would pour the cream into those metal cream cans with the lids and the skim milk would go to the pigs we were raising. Once the cream cans were full, Mom would put then out on the ditch bank by the road and the truck from the Worden creamery would drive by and pick them up. The next day they would leave them in the same spot with the money; they paid my mom; stuck in one of the cans. This happened about twice a week. 

Lupe used to get so mad at the cows when we milked because they were always swatting flies with their tails. And of course, the tail end would swish on our heads. One day Lupe decided to be smart and shave one of the cow's tails. I guess he figured that if the tail was gone the cow wouldn't swat flies. But he was wrong. The moment Lupe sat down to milk, that cow swished her tail stub and damn near knocked Lupe out. He had a bump on his head the size of a baseball for days. And you know what, I didn't have to milk that cow until her tail hair grew back. Dad said since Lupe shaved the tail, he would have to milk the cow until its tail hair grew back. Was I ever grateful!