For seven Montana cowboys working in Russia last winter, a one-hour shift during the peak of calving encapsulated everything they struggled with: the language barrier, the cultural clashes, the terrible weather and the challenge of teaching Russians a lifetime of cowboy knowledge in only 60 days.

Story and photography by Ryan T. Bell

Hell broke loose on schedule at Stevenson Sputnik Ranch. We called it the “witching hour,” every night between 6 and 7 p.m., when a dozen expecting cows dropped their calves at once. To deal with the onslaught, Darrell Stevenson, the boss, assigned two cowboys to ride through the cow herd searching for newborns. They would shuttle them to the calving barn where the rest of us, three Montanans and a crew of Russian villagers, bedded them down in warm hay.

This would be hard work under normal circumstances, but on the night of January 23, 2011, a raging blizzard dumped a foot of snow on top of the two-foot deep blanket already covering the Russian steppes. Any calf born that night didn’t stand a chance if we didn’t get to it fast.

6:00 P.M.

“In-coming,” Kraig Sweeney yelled, bursting through the barn door riding Tumbleweeds, one of the five horses we brought from Montana. The gelding danced and sidestepped across the concrete, scattering a group of Russian workers against the barn wall. Kraig held a rope dallied at the saddle horn that towed a calf sled behind them. The sled was occupied by a Black Angus calf, still slick with birth and teetering on the brink between soggy and frozen.

“Artur, get this calf into the hot room,” Kraig told a young Russian. Artur didn’t speak English –none of the villagers did — and he just stared at Kraig dumbfounded.

“You…calf…hot room,” Kraig said, pointing at each in turn.

Artur aggravated Kraig, and the cowboy went after the Russian relentlessly. They’d worked together on Artur’s first day as a cowboy-in-training, and Kraig had liked him at first. Artur saddled up, though he didn’t know how to ride a horse, and helped Kraig move cattle.

“This kid could make a hand,” Kraig told Darrell.

The next week, Artur’s lazy streak emerged. He was prone to stand around slack jawing with the other Russians, rather than jumping in to help.

In Russia, there is an old Communist saying, “Excellent is the enemy of good.” It meant that a worker shouldn’t aim to do an excellent job, because they might fail. And failure got millions of Russians sent to gulag work camps in Siberia during the Soviet era. It was safer to do a “good” job, and that amounted to standing around a lot.

Artur slipped in and out of the mentality, like a truck tire in a muddy rut. One day, he was a hard working cowboy, and the next, an uninspired Communist worker.

To a cowboy like Kraig, the attitude was intolerable, especially when a calf’s life hung in the balance.

“Move, damn it,” he said.

Kate Zimina, Stevenson Sputnik’s bilingual veterinarian, intervened in the standoff. She spoke to Artur in Russian, and he begrudgingly carried out Kraig’s order. In the time it took Artur to do it, Kraig could’ve dismounted, tied up Tumbleweeds and finished the chore himself. But that would’ve defeated the purpose of our being there to teach the villagers the cowboy trade.

“This ain’t gonna work if you gotta save his butt every time,” Kraig told Kate.

He pointed at Artur and warned him, “Be ready for the next one.” Then he rode Tumbleweeds back outside to search for the next calf in distress.

I sympathized with Kate because she was caught in the crosshairs of a culture clash between the cowboys and the Russians. She understood Western ranching techniques, thanks to the two months she spent in Montana last fall working the cattle through quarantine. However, the villagers dismissed her insights because they viewed her as an outsider. She hailed from St. Petersburg, Russia, some 1,000 miles north of Voronezh. Her education, authority and outspokenness offended their peasant sensibilities.

“We shouldn’t have to take orders from a woman,” a village elder complained to Sergey Effremov, Stevenson Sputnik’s property manager. Darrell came to Kate’s defense. “I have 100 percent confidence in her,” he told Effremov.

Of course, Darrell didn’t speak Russian, so Kate had to translate the message. Talk about awkward.

6:10 P.M.

Sara Stevenson came running down the barn alley and said, “Kate, I need your help.” Kate and I followed Sara to a barn stall where a sick looking cow stood.

“What do you think?” Sara said.

Kate inspected the cow and found internal bleeding in the uterus.

“This is the cow that had a stillborn calf yesterday,” she said. “She needs a blood transfusion, or she will die.”

The thought of losing the cow was unbearable to Sara.

“Let’s do whatever it takes,” she said.

Sara had a strong connection to the cows, remembering them as newborns on the home ranch in Montana. Unlike the rest of us, for whom the trip to Russia was an adventure, I sensed that Sara was conflicted about the experience. Stevenson Sputnik Ranch had put a major dent in her life.

One year earlier, Sara and Darrell’s household looked like any other ranch family in the American West. Darrell managed Stevenson Angus Ranch’s breeding operation, Sara headed the front office and together they raised their two children, C.J. (age 13) and Claire (age 9). They juggled parental duties like shuttling C.J. to middle school football practice, and Claire to 4-H, where she raised prize-winning rabbits.

Sara thought their life was hectic, but when Darrell started splitting his time 70/30 between Montana and Russia, the pace hit a new high.

The family was forced to adapt. The kids, who used to bicker for sport, matured overnight. C.J. caught rides to practice with his uncle Jake, and Claire got better at doing her homework and getting up in time for school. Sara represented their family’s interests at Stevenson Angus business meetings. And the Internet helped them all bridge the gap of Darrell’s absence at the dinner table. They communicated by email and Facebook with life updates like sports scores, county fair schedules and report cards. And through it all, Sara’s mantra was “whatever it takes.”

It was 6:14 p.m. in Voronezh, Russia. On the opposite side of the planet, it was 8:14 a.m. in Hobson, Montana. C.J. and Claire were settling in for another day of school. Sara owed it to the kids and to the sacrifice she and Darrell had made, to save the dying cow.

“Whatever it takes,” she repeated.

6:20 P.M.

In an instant, the calving barn was converted into a M.A.S.H. unit, with cowboys and veterinarians running around like Army medics. Sara sedated the cow in preparation for the procedure, Kate went for the necessary supplies, and I was sent to help another Russian veterinarian, Sasha Noritsyn, to pull six pints of blood from a healthy cow.

As Noritsyn and I scouted the cattle on hand in the barn, we walked passed two other Russian workers named Sasha. It’s such a common name, that in Russia it seems like you can throw a rock in any direction and hit a Sasha. It’s short for Alexander, like “Bill” is short for William. In order to keep our Sashas straight, we added a nickname to the nickname. There was “Big” Sasha, Darrell’s business partner Alexander Buzuleyev, “Tractor” Sasha, a man who drove a feed tractor, and “Water” Sasha, a man in charge of filling water tanks.

Noritsyn was, naturally, “Vet” Sasha, and he was the class clown of the ranch. He barely spoke English, but got along by repeating the phrase “no problems” and using Charlie Chaplin-style antics to communicate.

We found a donor cow, loaded her into the hydraulic chute and I held her head prone while Vet Sasha stabbed her in the neck with a hypodermic needle. He missed the vein on the first try. “No problems,” he said. Stab, miss, strike two. “No problems.” Finally, he scored a direct hit. “Oh yeah!” he said, using his hands to pantomime blood spurting into the air.

“You’re a goofy Russian,” I said.

“I goofeee?”

He funneled the blood into a cut-off plastic Coke bottle. When it was full, he swapped it for an empty bottle and gave me the full one to shuttle down the barn alley to Kate and Sara.

6:30 P.M.

“Two cows, coming your way,” said Matt Graveley, a cowboy from Avon, Montana. He rode the buckskin gelding Bucky to push the cattle to the stalls where their calves waited. Bucky looked like he’d been dusted in powdered sugar. His rump was covered in snow, and his chest hairs were frosted with ice where the moisture of his breathing had blown back and frozen against him.

Of all the horses, Bucky was the most traumatized by the boat ride over from America. Twenty-six days onboard a rocking boat made him distrustful of the ground beneath him. He pranced around like the Earth was shifting and he was looking for stable ground.

Matt could’ve ridden any of the other four horses, but he usually chose the buckskin gelding. He knew Bucky had it in him to be a better horse; he just needed someone to give him the chance.

As Matt rode by, I tried to see him through the eyes of the Russians. The first thing they must’ve noticed was his foreign clothing. Matt wore a Carhardt jacket, leather chinks with fringe, blue jeans tucked into calf-high laceup boots and a wool cap with the earflaps folded down. All the cowboys were dressed in some variation of this outfit.

The Russians, by contrast, favored camouflage clothing. Military service is compulsory in Russia, and they must’ve been allowed to keep their duds after discharge. One of them, a hard-working man nicknamed “Bugor” (The Hill), was a veteran of the Chechen War. He suffered Post Traumatic Stress Disorder, having survived a firefight that saw many of his buddies killed in action. He’d go days without sleeping, and when he did get some shuteye, it was because he’d drunken himself into a stupor. He labored like a devil by day to exorcise the demons that haunted him by night.

It brought to mind the book The Things They Carried by Tim O’Brien, about American soldiers in Vietnam and the items they packed for going to war. I wondered if the other cowboys put much thought into what they packed for our trip. Darrell had warned us that in Russia, we’d be poster children for all of cowboydom. Did the truth of it weigh on their minds?

The cowboys brought the requisite tools of the trade, like ropes, bits, spurs and headstalls. There was no need to haul our own saddles because Kraig Sweeney had ordered five from Cactus Saddlery and sent them over ahead of time. There were a variety of models to choose from – two Ranchers, two Ropers and a slickfork with bucking roles for Kraig (a perk for doing the ordering). It was comical to hear veteran cowboys riding creaky new saddles. It sounded like someone followed them around shuffling a deck of playing cards.

Equally interesting to the things the cowboys brought, were the items they chose to leave in Russia when they returned to America. There were DVDs (the television series “True Blood” was popular), an assortment of magazines ranging from Western Horseman to Fly Fisherman, and a collection of books. Standout titles included: True Unity by Tom Dorrance, a book that revolutionized Western horsemanship, Horse Soldiers by Doug Stanton, about U.S. Marines that used cavalry tactics to win a battle in Afghanistan, and A.J. Mangum’s Ranch Roping, a how-to book featuring Buck Branaman.

Taken together, the books reflected our curiosity about the land, and our desire to bequeath future generations of Stevenson Sputnik cowboys with good examples of our Western traditions.

6:40 P.M.

The night calvers, Dan Conn and Tim Skinner, both from Hall, Montana, arrived twenty minutes early for their shift. They were dressed for bad weather, wearing layers of sweatshirts, insulated coveralls, mittens and skullcaps.

“What did we miss,” Dan said, looking around.

“You don’t want to know,” Darrell said. “We have a sick cow at the end of the barn getting a blood transfusion, three frozen-down calves that need another hour or two in the hot room, six pairs already in stalls, and the guys are outside looking for more.”

As an after thought, Darrell asked, “How’d you sleep?”

The rapport between all the Montana cowboys was instantaneous, though many of us hadn’t met before Russia. Working cattle is the epoxy glue of friendship. When you’re thrust into a situation with animals’ lives at stake, a person’s foibles and personality quirks don’t matter. You appreciate their capacity to work hard, to hold tight their end of a rope, and to care about the livestock as much as you do.

In hiring the Russia-bound calving crew, Darrell Stevenson trusted the cowboy grapevine to spread the word and entice the best guys for the job. To his figuring, it was impossible to write a job description for the type of person he needed. They should know how to cowboy, for sure, but equally important qualifications were cultural adaptability, a patience breaker with a long fuse, and a strong threshold for tolerating the ridiculous.

The breakdown of the crew went like this: two were married, Darrell and Sara, one had worked for Stevenson Angus Ranch in Montana, Kraig, three ran together in the same circle of friends, Matt, Dan and Tim; and the last one, me, was a reporter along for the adventure.

Dan and Tim drew the unsavory task of night calving, a job that took all of our daytime miseries like weather, infrastructure breakdowns and livestock complications, and multiplied them by a factor of what-the-hell. The hardest part, I guessed, was that they lived without ever seeing the sun. Stevenson Sputnik is located at 51 degrees north, the same as Calgary, Alberta, and the number of daylight hours are few. Consequently, the sun rose and set while Dan and Tim were asleep. On shift, they carried around searchlights like they were miners in the depths of a hole.

After work, we all needed to blow off steam. The day crew would return to the bunkhouse in the evenings to eat dinner, drink whiskey (oddly, the village gas station carried Jim Beam and Johnny Walker) and play cards. The night calvers did the same at the end of their shift, and on the occasions they stayed up “late,” we’d return for lunch at noon to find them in a jovial mood. Drunk night calvers are the perfect entertainment to go with a bowl of borscht soup.

When the Montanans weren’t besieged with blizzards and calving onslaughts, they were at the center of an international media blitz. European and American television crews staged shoots of the cowboys roping cattle in the snow. In one of the more compelling episodes, they followed the cowboys on a visit to the nearby village of Shestakovo, where our Russian co-workers were from. They stopped by an elementary school classroom and showed the students a Western saddle and brought a Black Angus calf for the children to pet. It was a feel good moment, in the midst of an otherwise challenging experience.

6:50

“Ryan, problems!” Vet Sasha yelled from the opposite end of the barn.

His current Coke bottle was brimming with blood and he needed the empty I carried in hand. I raced the length of the barn to deliver it, and then relayed the full bottle back to Kate. She flushed the IV line with saline solution, and then poured the blood into the IV reservoir. The combination of gravity and the cow’s own heartbeat pumped the color red down the IV line and into her body, delivering her with a chance at life.

“Watch out behind you,” Darrell said.

I turned around and saw a foot-bound Darrell and Viktor Korovkin, our most promising Russian cowboy-in-training, towing a calf sled occupied by two soggy calves.

Watching Viktor work side by side with Darrell, I realized how far he’d come in the month since I’d arrived. Viktor was a lowly night security guard. When night calving began in late December, he would stop by the barn during his rounds to see if we needed help. He was willing to do anything: feed and water the animals; fix a hydraulic line on the squeeze chute; siphon gasoline out of a vehicle gas tank when we ran out. Most telling about his potential as a cowboy, Viktor had an affinity and a kindness towards the animals.

When Sergey Effremov selected the villagers to train with the cowboys, Kate nominated Viktor. The next day, he and three others were assigned to our duty. Viktor had earned his spot through good-old American ambition.

Darrell’s philosophy for training them was that they needed to learn cattle from the ground, before working them on horseback. They learned to herd the cattle on foot, to break ice on the frozen waterers, to identify a cow in labor and to know when a calf did or did not need pulled.

During the in-between hours of calving, we taught them Western horsemanship. The Russians joked (I think) that in the village they raised horses for sausage, not for riding. They needed to be taught everything: haltering, leading, hoof handling, grooming and saddling. With the basics in place, we put them on horseback and saw a rare site – Russians smiling. At first they rode straight legged, stiff backed and clutching the saddle horn. Then they eased into their saddles, dropped their right arms to their sides like they saw us doing, and kicked their horses into a jog and then a lope.

The Russians strived to keep their identity, while also emulating our work habits and mannerisms. For example, when they first started herding cattle, they used profanity that would insult a Mafia hit man. Viktor, however, noticed that the words we used to work cattle had a gentling affect. He asked Kate for an explanation.

“The cowboys talk sweet to the cattle,” she said.

On Viktor’s next outing to herd cattle, I heard him say, “Kmon, baybeez.” They were his first words in English. The phrase stuck, and soon the other workers were using it too. It was a small victory that symbolized the hope that someday the Russians would truly become cowboys.

Outside, the blizzard wouldn’t let up and we weren’t sure if all the newborn calves were brought indoors. We couldn’t leave Dan and Tim hanging like this, so the day crew rallied a full-on assault of the calving pens, sweeping every possible corner. Meanwhile, Kate and Sara transfused the sick cow with a final liter of blood. Now it was a waiting game, and we’d find out tomorrow how the cow fared.

Down the barn, I saw Kraig burst in riding Tumbleweeds, both of them powdered-sugared in snow.

“Artur, here’s another one,” he said.

The young Russian stepped forward, lifted the calf and carried it to a bed of warm hay where the calf waited for the other cowboys to bring in its mother.

I looked at my watch; it was 7:05 p.m.