West of the Missouri, where the grass gives way to the badlands and the wind never seems to rest, the rancher's year turns on calving. Through the raw weeks of late winter and early spring, the herd is watched around the clock, and the rancher's sleep is measured in the intervals between checks on the heavies — the cows closest to their time.

The Long Nights of the Cow Camp

A calf born into a blizzard has minutes, not hours, and the barn or the calving shed is often the difference between life and loss. Ranchers speak of nights spent thawing a chilled newborn by the stove, of pulling a difficult calf by lantern light, of a spring storm that arrives just as the ground fills with wobbling calves.

From the almanac's reckoning:

• The cattle range lies chiefly west of the Missouri River in the badlands country.
• Ranchers keep an around-the-clock watch on cows nearest to calving.
• A late-winter blizzard poses the gravest threat to newborn calves.

The reward comes in green-up, when the pairs are turned out onto the spring grass and the calves buck and run in the low light of evening. The almanac holds that no work on the plains asks more of a body, or gives back more to the patient hand, than the calving of the western herd.