How to run a round-up

1. Wake up at 3 AM and worry about late-announced guests for two hours.
2. Greet the volunteers with gallons of your black-tar coffee. Introduce your guests to one another and watch the donuts vanish. Eventually the bananas and yogurt will go too. Enjoy the chatter for a few minutes, then shoo everyone out to catch, saddle, bridle, and load their assigned horses. Try hard not to roll your eyes at that one DC chick who still for the love of God doesn't know knots.
3. At 6 AM, get everyone crammed into the pick-ups for a bumpy ride down to the trailhead. Worry that people not in the truck with you failed to get into the other truck. Radio for confirmation; relax infinitesimally when word comes back that they all got in.
4. Trailhead. Unload horses, riders, and gear. See everyone off into the park, then drive up to the corral five miles ahead. Worry that the volunteers will get lost or get hurt.
5. Promontory. Divvy up the riders into teams of three and send them off to beat the mesquite for your cattle. Worry that they won't find the cows. Send your dad off with a dressage rider. Worry about that.
6. Start looking for cows in your own group. Watch your border collie have the time of her furry life.
7. Two hours later, find all the cows huddled near the fence-line, penned in by your volunteers. Count the people and horses, sigh a bit with relief when the numbers match up. Start worrying about the corraling process.
8. Give a St. Crispin's Day speech to your volunteers regarding the technique and teamwork needed to get the cows into the corral's small gate. Remember Lee Stanislavsky's advice and hit an emotional peak with the line, "Cover your SHIT! Help each other!" Be surprised and pleased when this works and your volunteers get every single cow into the corral within 10 minutes, chasing down the few breakaways with maybe a little more enthusiasm than skill. Grab some water. Try to ignore the inordinate number of expensive cameras pointed in your direction. Why'd they all pick today to come see the herding? Oh right, the long weekend. Holidays are a little abstract at a time like this.
9. Pick four volunteers to help separate cows and calves. Calves stay in the little ring; cows go down the chute for fly spray. Marvel at the flexibility of a cow who manages to do a 180 in a chute the width of her body, but figure that getting sprayed backward still keeps away the bugs. Pull aside the three sick cows. Ignore the plaintive whines of the dogs, who have been locked in the truck and are not allowed to harry the calves.
10. Start roping. You're in a 40-foot pen with 22 panicky calves, a blazing hot propane stove full of branding irons, and twelve volunteers. Look cool doing a hard job: pick a calf, toss a rope around its heel, drag it so that it's going backward, let a pair of hands run down the rope and tackle the calf while you and your horse keep the rope tight, get someone to slip off the rope once the critter is down and secure, make sure that there are enough people around to keep the bigger calves from kicking free, and start looking for the next target while the team behind you works feverishly to get all the vet work done. Keep an ear out for them so you don't run them down or get them in the way of a kicking cow (this is easiest when they're working bull calves, as the effort to get both balls into the bander seems to call for a lot of yelling). Trust that the two men with the branding irons know where your horse is.
11. Admire your wife as she hops into the ring, grabs a tiny calf by the hind leg, and tugs it over to the rail for your kids to pet. You married a great woman, who will by the end of the day have lost two more nails from her manicure and still be grinning. Try not to wonder why she and the other women in the ring bust out laughing from time to time.
12. Only ten calves done? Oh hell. Some of the calves are almost 500 pounds and take a lot of work to pin, and the boys aren't used to working together yet. Your horse is tiring too, so take a break, get some lunch and a beer, and switch your saddle onto another horse. Try not to envy the kids, who have jumped into the water tank and are paddling around yeeping about the cold.
13. See step 10.
14. Finally, the last calf is done. Command that the gates be swung open, then chase the idiot calves back into the cows' pen. Over the din of the mother and child reunions, rally the troops and drive the cows back out to pasture. Leave behind the one cow who gave birth after you drove her into the corral; her calf, still a wet black bawling pile of legs, will be up on his feet by tomorrow.
15. Meet your riders at the trailhead, load the horses back up, pile the riders back into the trucks. When one rider sees you looking for places to stow gear and tells you that there's plenty of room in the back seat where she is, grin and tell her thanks but that you'd probably better just drive. Enjoy the applause for this remark.
16. Home again home again. Turn out the horses, turn out the sick cows, put away the tack, and get ready to visit the stock for the night. It's been fourteen hours since you got up. The kids' dwarf hamster's habitrail has annexed one of the bathtubs, the month-old goats get into everything, the new stray dog now has a name ("GIT down from there, Billy Hobo") and will have to be fixed so that he doesn't drive your blue heeler bitch crazy, your favorite mare refuses to drop her foal and you can't tell how long she's been pregnant, the windstorm last week reminded you that the barn needs to be reinforced, and this is the third time this year that you've had to drive that neighbor's bull off your herd. As the last of your volunteers rattles off down the drive, the wind over the mesquite blows cool and dry, the sun heads west, and the case of beer your Eastern visitors brought is still on ice. Sing as you head for the pens.