A Christmas Miracle

In the winter of 2000, when Kurt Hubler lived over by Alder, a deep freeze of -15 settled over the area. With it came five inches of snow. Hubler was calving out his 70 cows and helping a dear friend with his. They fed hay during the mornings and took care of the cows and newborn calves the rest of the day.

The cows all knew one another since they had grazed together the previous summer, but they had been separated so Hubler and his friend could better track which calf belonged to which cow. Two fences with closed gates and a distance of three or so miles, separated the two herds.

One of Hubler’s herd, a yellow cow, gave birth to a cute but sickly white calf. Despite his best efforts, after a month of doctoring to heal it from a variety of illnesses, the calf died. Hubler knew he had only a five day window to graft another calf on to the mother cow or her milk would dry up. Grafting a calf to a cow means making the mother accept a different calf than the one she had birthed. One way of doing this is to take the hide from that mother’s dead calf and tie it on to an orphaned calf. After a week or so the hide falls off. Once that happens, Hubler said there’s about a 50/50 chance that the cow will feed and protect the new calf as if its her own.

He said that the problem is, when a cow gets older it gets harder to trick them like that. The yellow cow knew her calf intimately. She recognized it by look, smell, sound and by how it moved. The yellow was a range cow, quite wild. If she caught on that a different calf was trying to steal or drink her milk, she could kick it or bunt it with her head, perhaps kill it.

While Hubler worked with his cow, three miles away, one of his friend’s cows, Number 36, got caught in a frozen ditch, broke through the ice and died. She orphaned a month-old black calf. Though the two men tried to catch the calf, they couldn’t. He was wild and without a mom to follow, he was impossible to handle. Too young to survive on his own, he needed a mother or he would die. So, Hubler and his friend decided to try the impossible: catch the calf and put him together with the yellow and make the two in to a nice, happy family. To accomplish that, they planned to put both animals into a stall in the barn, where they could be watched. Maybe after a week or two, they would accept each other.

Towards the fifth day after the yellow cow’s calf had died, Hubler decided the way to go at it would be to catch the cow first. Then the calf. So he went to find his cow.

He checked and rechecked the feeding grounds. When he finally found her, she was standing next to a gate at the back of the pasture. Not another cow in sight. Wondering why she was alone, he hurried toward her. Then he noticed a dark spot on other side of the fence. Stopped. Took a second, then third look. Whistled in amazement. Standing by himself in the cold and the snow was Number 36's orphaned calf, about five feet from Hubler’s yellow cow.

In his desperation to find a new mom, the calf traveled more than three miles, breaking through two fences. Hubler opened the gate and the calf ran over to the Yellow and started suckling. The Yellow never balked, didn’t kick. Maybe she even smiled with content.

The calf drank and suckled and drank, his tail wiggling from side to side. Milk foamed and dripped from his mouth.

Hubler said he wouldn’t believe the story if he hadn’t lived it. He offers it up as a gift to you, a gift of a true Montana Christmas-miracle.