Winter Can be a Cruel Time

It’s a cruel world, especially in winter.

Late summer and autumn are times of plenty. We harvest gardens and fields. We hunt for elk, deer, and game birds, and put meat in the freezer for the winter months. The fall harvest is, truly, reaping the fat of the land.

And then it’s winter, the funnel through which wildlife must go before the renewal of spring. Food is scarce. Spillage from fall harvests has been picked up in the fall months, or been plowed under, or covered with snow. Wild animals are well-equipped to forage for food though with colder temperatures they have to spend much more time eating to take on enough calories to maintain body temperature.

Some animals don’t make it. Death is a fact of life. Of course, nothing in nature goes to waste. A winter-killed deer or pheasant will feed magpies, ravens, and coyotes, just for a start. When bears emerge from hibernation in spring their first job is to roam the mountainsides in search of winterkills for that first big helping of protein after the long winter’s fast.

If winter is a time of hardship it can also be a rude introduction.

Last year, just before Christmas, I went to an area ranch for a pheasant outing. The temperatures were hovering at just a degree or so above zero, though after a week of sub-zero weather, it didn’t feel too bad. The sun was shining and there wasn’t much wind. Flicka, my black Lab, and I dropped into a creek bottom, which had even more shelter from the elements.

We saw pheasant tracks in the snow, though tracks don’t always translate to flushing birds. Some pheasants did get up far ahead of us. On this particular day the pheasants weren’t waiting around long enough for Flicka to go on point.

We finished a circle in the creek bottom, and were heading to the truck for a lunch break when we came on a pitiful sight. Along a fenceline there was a newborn calf on one side of the fence and its mother on the other side. The calf could have been a model for Charlie Russell’s drawing, “Last of the 10,000.” Its feet were caked in ice and the poor little guy could barely move. I helped the calf get through the fence where, hopefully, Mama could mother him up a bit. The cow and calf were on the same side of the fence now, but it was clear the calf needed to get warm if it was going to have a chance at survival.

When I got back to the truck I drove up to the house and told the landowner’s son, home for the holidays, about the calf and where it was.

That evening, the landowner phoned to thank me for alerting them about the calf. The calf spent the afternoon in the kitchen gradually warming up. By evening he was up on his feet and nursing on Mama. It looked like he was going to make it.

I was back at the ranch for a New Year’s Eve day hunt, and after a trek through the willows and cattails, where we put up some pheasants and Huns, I stopped at the house to thank my friends for the opportunity to hunt on the ranch, and then asked how the my calf was doing.

The calf had some residual frostbite damage on his back feet but otherwise was doing fairly well. The calf, it turned out, was a little heifer and they had named it Paula after me. A rare honor.

This fall, I asked, “How is Paula, my calf, doing?” After a long pause, he said, “I’m afraid not too well. That frostbite damage was too severe. She couldn’t get hooves to stay on her feet. We finally had to put her down.”

If winter is a test of survival, it’s truly a rude entry into the world for babies leaving the warm, wet tropical world of a mother’s womb for a frozen, windswept prairie. Some stories, unfortunately, don’t have happy endings.

This week another baby, the year 2010, will arrive. Let’s hope he finds a more hospitable welcome than Paula.

Happy New Year!