The Drought Left Me One Choice: Drive 400 Cattle 120 Miles With an 80-Year-Old Uncle, a City Kid and a Dog

It hadn’t rained in fourteen months.

My name is Garrett Sutter. I’m 53 years old, and I run cattle on a ranch outside Dalhart, in the Texas Panhandle.

That summer, the drought turned my pastures into dust. The stock ponds dried up into cracked mud. I was buying hay at three times the normal price and losing money every single day.

I’m divorced. No kids. My ex-wife married a dentist in Amarillo. I hear he’s very nice. The ladies at the diner in Dalhart like to tell me I’m “the most handsome lost cause in Hartley County.” I tip them extra to stop.

My choices were simple. Sell the whole herd at the bottom of the market, or find grass.

A rancher I knew in New Mexico had good rain that year. He offered me a lease on his pasture for six months, through the winter. Good grass, live water, a fair price.

It was a hundred and twenty miles away.

Hauling four hundred cows by truck would cost more than I had. My crop insurance had paid something on the pasture losses, but not enough. My banker had already refinanced my operating loan twice.

So I did something nobody in the Panhandle had done in fifty years.

I decided to drive them there. On horseback.

The problem was the crew.

My hired men had quit for oil field jobs. I had exactly two people willing to come.

My uncle Boyd, who is 80 years old, who drove cattle up the old trails as a teenager and who announced he’d “rather die on a horse than in a recliner.”

And my nephew Tanner, 17, from Dallas, who had been sent to spend the summer with me by my sister because he’d been “spending too much time on his phone.”

Tanner had never been on a horse in his life.