Back in the spring of 1980, Peach and I were newly married and ranching without too many bells and whistles. We were nearly done calving, but still feeding hay. One morning we were making the rounds with a feedsled pulled by four Belgian geldings. A black baldy cow had a calf about three weeks old, but she chose that morning to have a complete uterine prolapse. Why she did it then instead of right after she calved remains a mystery to this day. She was standing by the windmill in pretty gentle lethargic fashion, so we hurriedly pitched off the rest of our hay and took the team back to the barn about a mile away. They were pretty broncy and apt to tear up stuff, so we took the little extra time to unharness. Then we got a bucket of hot water, some towels, a sewing kit, and I put on a sleeveless shirt since we didn't use plastic gloves in those days. Our plan was to just take the pickup back to the cow, rope her, tie her to the grille guard on the pickup, put in the prolapse, and sew her up.
Plans sometimes go astray. She was still gentle acting and lethargic, and we drove pretty close to where she stood. I quietly opened the door and got out, with rope in hand. It wasn't difficult to make an easy cast and throw the rope around her head. The moment the rope touched her neck is when she forgot she was gentle and lethargic. She spooked, bucked, and took off running. She swung wide, and the prolapse which was hanging in the dirt flung straight out with centrifugal force. It hung up on a barbed wire gate, pulled off completely, and fell onto the sand. My immediate thought was that we had just killed a cow. She took off running fast, being quite unencumbered by then. We followed for about a quarter of a mile, to where she galloped up over a hill and then fell down from the shock of the situation. At this point, it wasn't hard to drive up on the rope with the tire of the pickup. Even though there wasn't much hanging out of her rear end, I pushed what there was back in and sewed her up. Taking the rope off, we figured she'd be dead in a few minutes. We drove away and watched from a distance. Soon she got up and wandered back to where the other cows were eating hay.
The next morning she was still alive and well. She survived the summer, gave plenty of milk, and weaned a nice big steer calf in the fall. By then she was in good flesh, darn sure open, and quite saleable. She went to town.
