Ranch Hands

Sweat stings my eyes, and my breath comes hard at 4,100 feet, but damned if I’ll quit sawing. Muscle burn in my arm and shoulder confirms the toughness of the foot-thick cedar crushing the barbed wire fence that we’re here to fix.

“You want a break?” calls Jim from upslope, where he and his wife, Peg, are grappling with a tangle of wire. Behind them, the fence line threads to the horizon. After this section is repaired and restretched, we’ll follow it up there and for another mile beyond in the couple of days we have left.

“Nope,” I manage to say. “I’ve almost got it.” This is my first day back at Lone Indian Ranch, and I’m ready for this. Backhanding the sweat, I’m satisfied by the stain it puts on the purple leather of the work glove. My cousin Kathy knows I always forget gloves, always has some for me to use. But this trip, she’s gotten me a brand new pair. They are too stiff, and I don’t like how the color seems like something only a dude would wear.

The metal teeth of the saw can only chew so much wood at a time, so it’s useless to press down. I imagine my arm is a piston moving back and forth, powered by the steady two-stroke punch of my raspy breath, in, out. At last, the big tree yields. While Jim and Peg climb down to me, I raise the other glove to my forehead, sweat-stain it too, and smile.

It takes the three of us to heave the cedar tree over the crushed fence line, out of the way. Uphill, from the shade of the pickup truck, the four dogs sit up to watch the commotion for a moment, then lie back, panting, against the cooler earth.

This parched hillside is nothing like the greener pastures of the bottomland where, earlier this morning, Kathy, Peg, and I walked out to Lower Sweetgrass Road. It’s three-quarters of a mile from the ranch house to the mailbox, and 17 miles on gravel road from there to the town of Big Timber. All of this is worlds away from my softer life several hours by plane east of here. I’m easily lured back to Montana, been out here many times to help with such tasks as lambing, cattle branding, irrigating. This trip, it’s fencing.

I’m new to this essential ranching chore. Fencing altered the West, tamed it. I understand the need for a bit of order, even here on the open range. The ranchers I’ve met—as independent as they can be—are oddly reassured by the straightness of a good fence line, grateful for it when the time comes to funnel livestock down from summer grazing to the barnyard.

This short section of fence line was restretched yesterday, before I arrived, but the five strands of barbed wire still need to be clipped to the posts. My tutorial was brief, typical: “Hold the pliers like this and bend the clip under like this,” Kathy said. Using her fencing pliers like a conductor’s baton, she had smoothly wrapped the clip around the green metal post. Looked simple enough. She hadn’t waited around to see if I got it.

Grabbing a shiny new V-shaped clip, I had turned to the fence. Clips are made of stiff heavy-gauge wire, beefier than a clothes hanger, designed to fit the green, triangular posts that ranchers use now instead of excavating cedar post holes in this unforgiving ground. Done right, a clip hooks the barbed wire so that it effectively hugs the post. It shouldn’t have been hard.

What is hard, actually, is the day-in, day-out life Kathy has led here for decades with her rancher husband, Lyle. In winter, there’s the cold trek to the lambing and calving sheds every two hours, day and night. In summer, there’s the manual repositioning of crop irrigation pipes several times a day, at least until the Sweetgrass River runs...