Time to leave the shelter of Calgary and face the open road and whatever the weather would throw at us now that we were dried out and fuelled to go. First stop was Head-Smashed-In Buffalo Jump - a UNESCO World Heritage site where the ancient method of hunting buffalo by herding them for miles and then funneling them driving them over very specific cliffs areas. The Blackfoot first nations people (the Plains Indians of this area) hunted this way for nearly 6000 years. The exhibit centre is pretty cool describing the pre-hunt ceremony, the herding process and the jump with interesting archeological evidence. There are also walks around the area of the cliffs and the kill site, though nothing much to see now apart from cliffs that once were originally 20m high are now, after thousands of years of buffalo bone deposits, only 10m high.
Our end destination of the day was a somewhat surprise/short-notice landing on friends of Rob’s who own a ranch in south-east Alberta. Jim and Lauren and their two kids Sophie and Mattias, made us feel super welcome at their family ranch known as Antelope Butte Ranch. Unfortunately, it snowed that night (thankfully we were inside by a nice wood burning stove) which meant there was no harvesting of crop to be done the next morning. But a ranch is a ranch… and there’s always work to be done! Well, the first job of the day was milking Hazel their family cow, of course, for the family fridge. I was pretty excited as I have never milked a cow before despite many school visits ‘to the farm’ when I was a kid in England. Anyway, it was not as difficult as I had imagined although my aim was a bit dubious. It’s an interesting technique requiring one to grip the hand around the teet and squeeze with the fingers in quick succession starting from the index to the pinkie allowing milk to collect then squirt out. Collect, squirt, collect, squirt etc. Who would have dreamt that we would be milking a cow on our trip!
Second job of the day (after Martin helped Sophie build a snowman, of course) was to bring a renegade bull home. City slickers eat your heart out… I have been on a horse probably twice in my life, but Jim was not perturbed (which meant that he could probably do the job single handedly). Anyway, once I got a quick lesson on how to ride a horse, we went in search of the Bull. The ranch is at least 9,000 acres, but Jim knew where to start looking. As we slowly made our way we saw a bald eagle, a golden eagle, and in the distance, a coyote. We eventually found the bull in a field (probably doing his job), but with the neighbours cows who had got out of their own field and onto the more juicier plains of Antelope Butte. So not only did we have to bring the bull home, we had to get the girls back into their own field. By the three of us manouvering in a line towards the herd constantly moving our horses back and forth so that the herd would move towards the gate we were able to get them back in to the correct field! Using the same process we were able to separate the bull from the cows, and with Jim, Martin and I always in constant eye contact with the bull from the rear side we ‘walked’ the bull home and herded him into the corral. The whole experience was amazing and every minute we had to keep reminding ourselves that we were actually doing this. Holy Cow! *Mush
To see more photos, click on this link
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