I truly love this creek that I grew up on. I have spent many a day on the banks of it riding horseback for just a quite trail ride or doing serious business like rounding up cattle. Either way this creek has brought lost of pleasant memories and times into my life. At the top of our creek property is a place called horseshoe bend. And I can remember as a young teen whenever I would say "well everyone is doing it" my parents would ask me "and if they jumped of horseshoe bend would you follow them?". Of course my answer was no because when you stand at the bottom of this bend in the creek and look up the tallest trees don't even reach the top of the bend. I would guess this to be a 400+ foot drop off.
We have a lot of wildlife that live along this creek from beaver to coyotes and deer to wild turkeys. There is not a day that goes by that you can't enjoy some of Gods great creatures in full view. I don't hunt but my dad and son do and they always enjoy a quite day on the creek looking for the game they are currently hunting. We work hard to make sure we leave wildlife plenty of space on our land so that we co-exist in harmony. Fact of the matter the beavers just moved back to our section of the creek a few years past and we don't allow anyone to trap them so they will be here for future generations to enjoy.
But the story I want to share with you all today is about the evening of January 30, 2015. My daughter and niece each have a Jersey dairy heifer that just turned a year old on January 8th. I went outside to start my evening chores and I noticed that the heifers were not in their pen. Now these calves are well halter broke as the two girls plan to show them in 4-H and they have never been out of their private pen except to go on walks with the girls up and down the driveway and over to the second barn yard on the farm. Well after some looking I find that one of the two is in the pen with our older Jersey milk cow but the other is missing. Now I have no idea how they got out of their pen or where the second calf could be but I start driving toward the second barn yard looking for her. At this moment I think I'm looking for my niece's calf Diva Daisy. I don't find her but upon driving to the backside of their pen I find where they got out at; a small wire broke on the back pen gate and they pushed it out. So I head around to fix the pen still wondering where Diva Daisy could be. As I'm wiring the gate back into place I hear a cry of the calf but I can't see her. Their pen runs right along the creek bank with about a 5 foot walk space before you go off the embankment. Well needless to say I'm sure you all know where I'm going with this story now. I look down over the drop off and find her pinned in a cradle of broken trees about 30 foot down.
I have no idea if she is okay or not at this point only that it is getting dark and she is stuck and crying for help. I hurry and get the hired men and my dad to help me. We realize we can't go off the embankment to get her the way she went down and that we need to wind our way around the creek and come in from the bottom to see if she is okay. James goes in ahead of me while my dad is still trying to see how we are going to lift her back up the side of the creek. Finally I follow James into the creek because I can't hear him or see him anymore. It is barely light out and down on the creek it is getting very dark. After climbing up and down the sides of the creek and falling into the water several times to walk/climb my way to her I finally can see she is about 20 feet still up the embankment tangled in a tree cradle. Now at this point I'm worried she has broke a leg, neck or her back and won't be able to be saved. James says "stay back she could fall on you". But me being a worried care giver of this animal and super attached to her I have to get closer. So I start trying to climb/crawl my way up the steep slick side of the creek. All the while I am talking to this calf trying to calm her down. She recognizes my voice and flips over and walks out the the tangle of trees to me.
She is on a small bank about 5 foot above me and I can't get to her when I realize its not my niece's calf Diva Daisy, but instead my daughter's calf Cherry. I keep talking to her to keep her calm and the other two hired men Doug and Jason show up with a wrench to try to lift her up out of the creek. They toss me down a lariat rope and ask if I can get it around her neck to help stabilize her as we lift her out by her back legs. I finally crawl up the bank and reach her pulling myself by small sapling trees. Once I put the rope around her neck she decides she is safe and that we should take a walk. So she heads down the embankment for the creek. Now I know she can't get out of the creek the way I came in because there are too many large trees fallen in the path way. So our only option is to climb up a 25 foot slippery embankment and if we make it up to the top we can walk out across a field and be picked up in a trailer to get the 3 miles back home. Keep in mind I'm only about 50 feet from her pen right now down in the bottom of the creek.
Well this is one determined calf and she starts up the embankment with me, but with 5 feet to go she falls down on her belly and can't go any farther. So me and the men rig her rope into a halter and we proceed to pull/lift her up the last 5 feet. She probably weighs in at about 700 lbs, but we got the job done. Once we had her on top the bank she just laid there exhausted. I was worried if she was hurt somewhere and couldn't get up again. However after a few minutes I decided maybe she would feel safer if I removed the rope and let her think she was free. She got up shortly after that and came right over to me ready to be lead out of the creek. Thank God my daughter and niece did a good job teaching her to be gentle and to lead. I will admit these calves are the first halter broke cattle we have had on our farm since I was 10 or so. But since they will be milk cattle in the future we felt this was an important part of raising them.
My dad met us at the gate to the field with a trailer and she loaded right up and was brought back around to the house. Where I found that by a miracle she didn't have any injuries and was just fine. She joined Diva Daisy and their pen mate Delta for her evening routine of oats. The next day she was a bit stiff but by Sunday she was back to her normal self.
Now I will admit this was a very unusual thing that happened to our family here on Deer Creek but it was not the first time a animal was trapped on the creek and needed help getting out. We have had beef cattle get stuck in the mud. We had a horse once picked up in a tornado and set back down in what appeared to be a log cabin by the way the trees fell during the storm. And she was also un-injured and we had to use a chainsaw to get her out of the trees and back home. Another time I was riding with a friend Nick Mead chasing cattle when he and is horse just disappeared on the other side of the creek from me. Only to ride over and find them both okay but in a cave out that suddenly dropped them down into a 10 foot hole. Mother nature takes her own course here on Deer Creek and we as the caretakers must work with her for the benefit of our livestock and ourselves.
Thank you for joining me on another short day as "the farmer's daughter from deer creek". I have enjoyed sharing some more of my life story with you and I hope you will continue to follow me as I share more of my life next time.
Sincerely yours,
Andrea Sayer
Proud to be an American Farmer
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