My idol in the cattle business was Henry Miller. At one time in the 19th century, Miller controlled 14 million acres all over the West and it was said that he could ride in his buckboard from Baja California to British Colombia and sleep in a Miller and Lux bunkhouse and eat his own beef every night. Although I have reservations about that claim. I don’t doubt he could sleep in a Miller and Lux bunkhouse every night, but I do doubt he ate his own beef every night. Having heard all the stories about Henry’s stingy nature there’s no way he’d eat his own beef... it would be that of his neighbors!

We’re talking about a man who fired a cook because his potato peelings were too thick and a carpenter who used new lumber to make a wire gate. Being a suboptimal spender myself, you can see how I stand in awe of Henry Miller. After all, I’m guilty of recycling deformed paper clips, making change out of the plate in church and using toilet paper that was previously hanging from trees the day after Halloween.

Hoping to follow in Henry’s frugal footsteps, I tried to eliminate any expense. One of the costs that gnawed at me every year was paying the vet to preg-check my cows, even though my vet had never been wrong and was so good he could tell me the sex of the unborn calf about 50 percent of the time. Still, I tried to come up with a cheaper option. I could have gone to a school to learn how to preg-check but then I’d be stuck with a hotel bill, plane ticket and the cost of the school. So, I started researching other ways to find out if a cow was infected with progeny. An old cowpoke once told me about “bumping” a cow. At what you think would be the fifth or sixth month of pregnancy you’re supposed to lay your hand on a cow’s flank and jab her in an inward and upward trajectory. If the cow is pregnant, you should feel the fetus rebounding back against your hand. I experimented with a cow I knew was in the family way and all I felt was a quick kick in the knee.

Next, I read that if you take a little milk from a cow who just weaned her calf and put that milk in a glass of water you could tell her pregnancy status. If the drop of milk goes all the way to the bottom of the glass and does not diffuse, the cow is definitely pregnant. If the molecules of milk go their separate ways, the cow is open. Once again, I experimented with a cow who’d just weaned her calf but not only was she dry as a bone I got another nasty kick, this time in the groin.

In a spark of genius I applied a more scientific approach and came up with a theory that the cows who stayed around the weaning pen the longest bawling for their calves were the best mothers and therefore were also my best fertile Myrtles. So, I wrote down the ear tags of all the cows, figuring that the cows only bawled for a day or two and then left to go graze were bound to be open. This made a lot of sense to me, but I had not tested my thesis and therefore I had to pay the vet to preg-check once again which caused great discomfort in the wallet area.

You can imagine my surprise when the ear tag numbers did not correlate with the vet’s pregnancy prophecy. In fact, the vet came up with exactly opposite results and the old toothless cows that stayed around the weaning pen bawling for seven days were open. As were some shelly old cows that looked like they’d been on Ozempic®. I refused to admit that my theory was wrong and to prove it I kept those cows the vet called open and eventually I had to admit that either they were 15 months pregnant or my theory was no good.

Asking myself what Henry Miller would do in a similar situation, I decided to fire the crazy fool who came up with the idiotic theory in the first place.